Episode 16: What is Elon Musk? With Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff

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[instrumental music] Welcome back to Dreaming Against The Machine. I'm your host, Adam Becker. This week's guests are Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian. Now, Quinn and Ben wrote a book called Muskism, and I know that just saying the name of that book has at least half, probably more like three quarters or 90% of you, like, retching and making various weird sounds. I feel the same way, don't worry. But I think that unfortunately, we do need to take a closer look at Elon Musk. This is a guy who has way too much power, way too much money, and if we want to get him out of that position, and make it so that he does not have as much effect on our world, we need to understand how he got there and the way that he operates. And, you know, there's a part of me that feels like talking about Muskism is kind of like talking about Trumpism. There isn't, like, a coherent, well-plotted out plan that Musk has, I think, any more than Trump does. He's just sort of operating on instinct and naked self-interest and some vague ideas that he has about what he likes that don't bear a lot of relationship to reality. But the fact that he's been able to rise to power says something about the business and financial and governmental systems that we have in place. And in order to make the changes to those systems that we wanna make, both to take the power away from Musk and prevent this from happening again, we gotta understand how this happened, and that means talking with Quinn and Ben. So, here they are. [instrumental music] Quinn, Ben, welcome to Dreaming Against the Machine.

Good to be here.

Thanks for having us.

Actually, can I ask you two to introduce yourselves? I, I know who you are, but I don't... I fear that if I tried to explain who you were, I would get it wrong.

I'm Ben Tarnoff. I'm a writer from Massachusetts. Co-author with Quinn of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

And my name's Quinn Slobodian. I am a professor of international history at Boston University, and I've written a few books, mostly about the history of neoliberalism, and happy to have just written this one with Ben Tarnoff about Musk.

Well, thank you again for being here.

Our pleasure.

So, I met you guys, uh, at [chuckles] a public event for your recent book, Muskism, in downtown Oakland. What, I guess it was-

[chuckles]

... last month? Something like that.

Wasn't that May 1st?

Yeah, it was May 1st.

Oh, yeah. It was May 1st.

It was May 1st.

Yeah. Okay. So it was-

How could we forget?

Yeah, of course, it was May Day. Uh, no,