Becoming Elon Musk, Part One
Added 2025-03-17 10:30:04 +0000 UTCIf there's ever been a Know Your Enemy subject worthy of two episodes, it is Elon Musk—currently the world's richest man, CEO and leader of several pathbreaking companies, ringleader of the Department of Government Efficiency, and (for now) Donald Trump's co-president. In other words, to understand what's happening in the United States during the second Trump administration, it's essential to understand Musk: what shaped him, his enduring preoccupations and personality traits, how he made his vast fortune, and why, in unprecedented ways, he decided to go all in on Trump.
To explore the life and times of Musk, Matt and Sam read several biographies, along with the best reporting on him and his activities (especially of late) In this first episode, they offer a close reading of Musk's childhood in South Africa and the people, and traumas, that influenced him; his discovery of science fiction and teenage fixations on computers, video games, and space exploration; his escape to Canada to attend college and eventual arrival in the United States; and his early years in Silicon Valley and the businesses that first made him very rich.
As mentioned: Join Matt and Sam and Jamelle Bouie at Dissent magazine’s fundraiser on April 8 in New York!
Sources:
Kate Conger & Ryan Mac, Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (2024)
Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023)
Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015)
Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection (2024)
Joshua Benton, "Musk’s Anti-Semitic, Apartheid-Loving Grandfather," The Atlantic, Sept 30, 2023
Henry Farrell, "Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions," Bloomberg, Feb 21, 2025
Kase Wickhman, "Elon Musk Has Yet Another Child, According to the Mother of That Baby," Vanity Fair, Feb 18, 2025
Favour Adegoke, "Elon Musk's Trans Daughter Rips Dad For Allegedly Using Sex-Selective IVF For Her: 'I Was Going Against The Product'," Yahoo News, March 11, 2024
Jesse's podcast: Tech Talk.
Comments
Same, I’m quite confused too! I would really like to hear what they mean by describing Amber Heard as chaotic especially since she’s been painted by mainstream media as “manipulative” during her trial against her abuser, Johnny Depp.
RH
2025-03-26 07:15:06 +0000 UTCWild to use amber as an example of Elon’s chaotic relationship/toxic relationship behavior 😬
Lucy Sakiewicz
2025-03-26 03:48:45 +0000 UTCIt’s interesting that it bewilders liberals that personalities like Trump, Vance, and Musk would ever appeal to anyone, when they’re precisely the same people who liberal society appreciated the appeal of just years prior. Liberals in 2010 were weirded out by the Cheneys and liked Elon Musk. In 2016, they loved JD Vance’s take on middle America and vilified Mike Pence as a Bible beater. And now they’re so indignant like it’s so obvious which ones are the big bad cartoon evil.
Roman Drake
2025-03-24 23:51:07 +0000 UTClongtime KYE head, livin' for the "i do NOT like GK chesterton" asides (tho "the man who was thursday" kinda rocks?). excellent work boys, cant wait for pt 2
Jack Wolfe
2025-03-21 16:29:59 +0000 UTCI don't know, guys. You don't acknowledge it, but the person you describe is not without sympathetic qualities: he likes the Hitchhiker's Guide, he's attracted to interesting women, he took that blue collar job. I'd feel better if you let the story be more complicated. To Matt in particular: God made nerds in His own image. Love the nerd. Hate his outsized power.
David Gillman
2025-03-20 14:29:51 +0000 UTCI like videogames, too. I mean, a game is just a way for people to simulate conflict and/or narrative, whether it's tag or Return of the Obra Dinn. I don't think there's anything wrong with enjoying games as adults, but there is the added burden of having some amount of media literacy and self awareness. The stereotype of the "gamer," as exemplified by Musk and even Peter Thiel, belies an unwillingness to mature and understand that the power fantasy is just that.
Leonardo Restrepo
2025-03-20 01:47:55 +0000 UTCYou’re right gaming is a power trip - but there’s huge differences between genres and games on the nature of that fantasy. There’s a reason HOI and EU4 communities have a reputation (roleplay as the nazis or colonialism!) I say this as someone who plays a lot of games too, and think many of them to be beautiful art. We need more actual video game journalism imo
greyscale
2025-03-19 21:45:23 +0000 UTCLook
Philip Schaeffer
2025-03-19 21:06:53 +0000 UTC“Steeping in the gestalt of Musk” is an appropriately horrific description for the predicament we are all in- my sympathies to Sam and Matt for the research required to compose this episode
Adam Blood
2025-03-19 14:10:12 +0000 UTCOne other interesting bit of history: Peter Theil lived in a part of South Africa inhabited by some unrepentant Nazi sympathizers after WW2. Any surprise he gave up on democracy pretty early on?
Chad Bailey
2025-03-19 12:30:25 +0000 UTCX:Musk::Barron:Trump
DC
2025-03-19 03:11:50 +0000 UTCOh my goodness, you guys knocked this one out of the park! Or maybe in Musk terms, knocked it up.
Chad Bailey
2025-03-19 00:43:31 +0000 UTCMusk doing Reacher accidentally
Kyle Reesman
2025-03-18 19:17:23 +0000 UTCThat and lord of the rings.
Kyle Reesman
2025-03-18 18:15:54 +0000 UTCThis is such a very helpful comment, Nick, thanks (Matt)
Know Your Enemy
2025-03-18 17:02:54 +0000 UTCI strongly believe that the requirement for being one of these tech bros is to have read a lot of sci-fi but actually understood absolutely none of it. All the STEM, none of the humanities. I have never heard one of these guys reference a sci-fi novel and NOT unintentionally communicate that they entirely missed the point.
Lauren Bickel
2025-03-18 16:58:32 +0000 UTCThanks for the recommendation
Garett Smith
2025-03-18 14:36:13 +0000 UTCI didn’t know Musk lost a child to SIDS. Heartbreaking to gain that context for what followed. I’m stuck on the Hitchhiker’s Guide stuff, and your comment that he missed the point of the book - the way the “little guy” is trampled by larger, stupid forces. I’m the same age as Musk, so I was also irony-pilled by Hitchhiker’s (Devo also comes to mind as a teenage sci-fi/ irony influence). Douglas Adams, Devo and their ilk were hippies at heart, a point that I certainly missed at that age (I resonated more with the classic adolescent “everyone’s stupid but me” side of it). I’m guessing Musk saw (sees?) himself more as Ford Prefect than Arthur Dent; the cool guy standing on the side while all the crazy fools make a mess. I would bet he views Trump pretty much the same way you’d hear him described on a Chapo episode - a comical grotesque who Musk is smarter than. Throw in the Ketamine and I’m sure it’s all one big hilarious cosmic joke.
Aaron Lee
2025-03-18 14:18:23 +0000 UTCYou make me think of the Zizek riff about how a guy playing Grand Theft Auto, who gets to indulge all his primal impulses, experiences the game as more real than the day to day non-reality of obeying the Big Other. Now combine that mentality with what is surely the complete detachment from reality of being the wealthiest man alive… yikes
Aaron Lee
2025-03-18 14:01:09 +0000 UTCJill Lepore did a podcast, the Evening Rocket, about how Musk's fantasies come from his near illiterate understanding of a narrow band of science fiction.
Matt Gately
2025-03-18 10:49:41 +0000 UTCThis episode felt like a personal horror movie for democracy but also for every woman who dated an evil gamer…the psychological profile y’all described is reoccurring across the nation.
Karter Elisabeth
2025-03-18 02:54:22 +0000 UTCSidenote putting the 1991 internship with the Canadian Bank (Peter John Nicholson / Bank of Nova Scotia), has now put on my radar how Musk sees Brady Bonds, which were created for Paul Volcker created a ticking timing bond with interest rates that impacted foreign policy … for you just increased other countries borrowing cost if they are considered less stable than the US thus Musk at 19 was tasked to understand the new 1989 Brady Bonds as his intern job. He then in turn saw this as naked corruption / self dealing, and foreign policy USAID that the US did with other countries but not South Africa and how these Brady Bonds have a similar structure to Climate Change Credits, CAFE standards, etc where the big thing in the 1980s and 1990s in Economic thought was to use these credits to reduce the cost of pollution change for industry for it encourages companies like Tesla to pursue clean tech and companies like Ford or GM to pay “sin taxes” to their competitor until they transition their own fleets. And this is self dealing and I can understand the ideal Econ brain seeing this as a good thing, but what happens if you get a person who can say one thing but believes another ? What if this two face person who says one things yet believes another, are now talking about a magic number fourteen and say there are this magic number of computers creating money while he hires his own 19 year olds to run DOGE ? ( I feel icky talking about this last paragraph for I can not prove it even if he magically said that word, it is a dog whistle that I may or may not be mishearing. So I trust others to tell me if I am doing a false positive, since I can not prove it merely suspect. )
Matthew Theisen
2025-03-18 02:02:56 +0000 UTClol true
Know Your Enemy
2025-03-18 01:18:15 +0000 UTCWoah Saskatchewan mentioned on KYE lol
Joel
2025-03-17 23:49:44 +0000 UTCThe narrator of Our Dope Future is somehow the least redeemable character in a collection that also features an incel and a sadist
Tim Combes
2025-03-17 21:21:50 +0000 UTCI always think about the gamer as a perfect encapsulation of the modern man: a wounded human that can only experience the world as a simulation under layers of abstraction. Whether a simulated world, spreadsheets of data, or the terse logic of hard coded systems, the virtual world of games and computer science simultaneously feels emancipatory and safe. The ultimate power fantasy.
Leonardo Restrepo
2025-03-17 20:52:59 +0000 UTCOne, ordinary person personal horror, I have and been working through is I really got into Westworld Season 1 in October 2016, during that time of horror and dread. I really got into that sci fi sjow with its place of stories and escape… to get my head out of how I already felt things were bad in October 2016 even if Hillary Clinton would have won for this new style of new right politics has arrived and will never go away. Well Westworld made me feel better for a time. Well the horror part is realizing how much the Jimmi Simpson character maps onto Elon Musk, and how Jimmi Simpson meets a robot / host in the 2nd episode played by Talulah Jane Riley-Milburn (they would have been married while filming season 1, but their 2nd divorce should be finalized by airtime.) Even the concept the Jimmi Simpson character struggles with, false beliefs, are how Elon acts it is so close it is spooky. To borrow a latin word deludere "to play the game wrongly; to mock, deceive," from de- "down, to one's detriment" (see de-) + ludere "to play" (see ludicrous) and from this word we get delusions … delusions of a grand nature, delusions of grandeur and splendor 😬 from the 2nd episode, the character introduction key moment • Talulah Riley: “You want to ask, so ask.” • Jimmi Simpson: “Are you real?” • Talulah Riley: “Well, if you can't tell, … (emphasis) … does it matter?” the man who sometimes says he wonders if we live in a simulation, and he calls other people NPCs and Bots, who bonded with Grimes over a hypothetical where a future AI can spin up digital memories of people and torture them in AI hell if one was bad in a way the AI judges. Spooky!
Matthew Theisen
2025-03-17 20:36:35 +0000 UTCPut JD Vance where? 😂
Kate R
2025-03-17 20:24:33 +0000 UTClol
Know Your Enemy
2025-03-17 19:59:33 +0000 UTCKnow Your Enemy: #1 podcast for lovers of the word “odious”
Alex Alvarez
2025-03-17 18:07:48 +0000 UTCThis reading of what I'm gonna call the genius-idiot dialectic into Musk's relationship with his father and peers makes a lot of sense. I'd chalked up that aspect of him pretty exclusively to the rationalists as it lines up so neatly with the chutzpah of assuming you can do things better than the experts and solve the problems that have stumped them purely by the power of rationality. I expect some variant of that personal history (if not so severe, at least one would hope) is a big part of the draw of rationalism. I won't say I don't enjoy them, but roguelike games and hard magic systems in SFF like by poster boy Brandon Sanderson cater to a fantasy of being on top of just such a dialectic.
genrepunk
2025-03-17 15:39:08 +0000 UTCI used to be shy about my books but now I like to keep them out and engage with people on it. Use it like honey to bring in the other side and start a conversation. Plus they are usually impressed you’re engaging with “their” sides material.
Ann
2025-03-17 15:35:20 +0000 UTCThat was a big debunking for me too.
Ann
2025-03-17 15:31:35 +0000 UTCLoved this episode. Hopefully I can send this episode to my non-political brother who is a big time Elon fan and get him to see the light.
Garett Smith
2025-03-17 15:00:15 +0000 UTCIt’s something of an indictment of our culture that the Democrats have felt the need to try to brand Musk a “nepo baby.” The problem is the culture that rewards him for what he actually does, and struggles to find vocabulary beyond that of unearned privilege to express disapproval.
Nicholas Haggerty
2025-03-17 14:45:05 +0000 UTCYay! Was getting worried about you guys. Been too long since the last episode
Kyle Mitchell
2025-03-17 11:59:52 +0000 UTCIn elementary school we learned how to make book covers out of brown paper bags. I do that for books I want to read in public but don't want people to engage with me about (randomly in public). It's easier with hardcover books for sure, but useful nonetheless.
desdinova
2025-03-17 11:21:44 +0000 UTC
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