From a review of a new book, Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff (review by Jennifer Szalai), which I found interesting.
How ‘Muskism’ Is Changing the Way America Works
In a new book, Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue that Elon Musk’s disruptive approach to business is transforming both politics and the economy.
The ensuing cycle is virtuous for Musk and vicious for almost everyone else. If your self-reliance requires a Tesla charger or Starlink access, you have to plug into infrastructures that Musk owns. Other tech billionaires may want consumers to become entirely reliant on their products, but Musk has been operating on a different scale, helping to sell the idea that the public good is so degraded that consumers can count only on him. Slobodian, a historian, and Tarnoff, a technology writer, note that one of Muskism’s defining traits is this paradox of autonomy and dependency...
He settled in North America but, the authors write, “apartheid South Africa came along like a spore in his luggage.”...
A striking turn in “Muskism” takes place right here, at the part of the book where the authors discuss Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. They show how bothered he was by Twitter’s track record of galvanizing egalitarian social movements. Hashtags like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter took off on the platform. “Muskism had always been committed to a vigorous defense of hierarchy,” Slobodian and Tarnoff write. Musk, who gave himself the title of Technoking at Tesla, turned Twitter, now X, into a platform “that would reaffirm the power of the boss.”
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/books/review/muskism-quinn-slobodian-ben-tarnoff.html