What is Elon Musk’s formula? Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s book Muskism uncovers the world’s richest man

Love him or loathe him, Elon Musk is hard to avoid. The world’s richest man is poised to float the world’s most valuable start-up on the stock market.

Just as Henry Ford provided the template for 20th-century capitalism, known as Fordism, Mr Musk offers one for the 21st.

That is the thesis advanced by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in “Muskism”, an illuminating book that examines where Mr Musk came from and the episodes that shaped his worldview.

In many ways it is the inverse of Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography of 2023. Despite the lack of direct access to Mr Musk, the authors provide a portrait of his psyche that is arguably more revealing.

Mr Musk grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, a country that saw itself as a citadel of white civilisation on a black continent, and used technology to divide and control.

As a teenager the young Mr Musk, who had become enamoured with computers, moved to Canada to avoid military service, and then to America.

But “Apartheid South Africa came along like a spore in his luggage,” the authors write.

What they call the “fortress futurism” of his youth shaped his attitude to technology, and its symbiotic relationship with the state.

As the dotcom boom kicked off in the mid-1990s, many techies saw themselves as breaking free from state control — even though the internet had originated as a government project.

Mr Musk’s first start up, Zip2, fused business listings with existing digital maps built using GPS satellites, another government system.

Rather than escaping from the government, Mr Musk built a business using the infrastructure it had provided: what the authors call “state symbiosis”. Zip2 never made a profit, but he sold it for $307m.

After the dotcom crash Mr Musk founded SpaceX and pivoted to building rockets. Space was another area where the government had started the ball rolling, but was opening up to private firms.

George W. Bush’s administration was keen to outsource all kinds of state functions to private contractors.

Mr Musk brought tech-industry thinking to the rocket business, and pushed the government to award contracts through competitive bidding.

SpaceX took off with the help of government contracts, and ended up taking on functions — such as carrying astronauts to the space station — previously performed by the state.

Mr Musk’s other big company, Tesla, also presented itself as anti-establishment even as it grew with the help of government loans and subsidies.

Mr Musk pushed electric cars as a way to reduce both carbon emissions and dependency on oil from the Middle East.

Tesla’s solar panels and giant batteries offer resilience against power outages and high energy prices.

Its vertically integrated model (making its own batteries, for example), and establishment of a factory in China, protect it from trade shocks.

It has also benefited from what the authors call “attention alchemy” — Mr Musk’s prowess at turning social-media engagement into business value: “The first meme stock wasn’t GameStop but Tesla.”

In a warming, fragmenting, doom-scrolling world, it is by far the most valuable carmaker.

The essence of Muskism, then, is a business empire in symbiosis with the state.

Mr Musk’s firms provide crucial government services, and not just for America.

Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite-internet service, is vital to Ukraine’s war effort, granting him extraordinary political influence for a private individual.

In recent years he has intervened in politics explicitly, by buying Twitter (now called X) and shifting it rightwards, and offering support to right-wing parties around the world.

In 2025 he assumed a political post when Donald Trump put him in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to slim down the government.

The methods that served Mr Musk well in business have not transferred to politics. Mr Musk left DOGE in May 2025, having achieved little except to cripple some government departments and demoralise others.

That, the authors argue, was the point, and Mr Musk was set up to take the blame. After years of co-opting the state to achieve his ends, the roles were reversed.

He has bounced back quickly. Long a proponent of AI, Mr Musk has merged his social-media and AI firms into SpaceX, turning it into the world’s most valuable start-up.

He has promised data centres in orbit and satellite factories on the Moon. These developments came too late to be included in the book, but they fit neatly into the framework it provides.

For students of modern capitalism, the resulting book is, you might say, a Musk-read.