Pushkin. The COVID nineteen pandemic was a boom time for the world's billionaires, who gained nearly two trillion dollars of wealth in twenty twenty alone. As CNBC reported at the height of the pandemic, one of those billionaires was fast climbing the list of the world's richest people.
Ewon Musk just past Bill Gates become the second richest man in the world, with a fortune of over one hundred and twenty eight billion dollars.
For a while, he jockeyed for the top place with other tech giants.
Altogether, the worth of those on the list is thirteen point one trillion dollars, up from eight trillion last year, the rise occurring as most the world was shut down during the pandemic.
By the end of that year, Elon Musk had become the richest man in the world. It was also during the pandemic that Musk underwent a political conversion, moving to the right. By twenty twenty four, he'd become one of Donald Trump's closest advisors.
Take Over Elaid, Yes, take Elon Musk is taking over with an Act to government spending in a newly created Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, which is also the name of a cryptocurrency inspired by a dog meme.
Doge the Department of Government Efficiency, staffed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and engineers hoping to make use of artificial intelligence to reinvent American government. Welcome to x Men. The Elon Musk origin Story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian professor at Harvard. This episode is the fifth in a series I've been hosting about a new kind of capitalism called Muskism. Extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, a form of capitalism influenced
by fantasies that come from science fiction. It's all bound up with a tech bro vibe, comic books and superheroes, fantasy and video games. The tech overlords as the Lords of the Rings. This episode is called The Doge Father. Elon Musk, Money, cryptocurrency, and the rise of techno Libertarianism. As Donald Trump took office in twenty seventeen, Elon Musk had achieved phenomenal really almost unbelievable success, especially with Tesla
and SpaceX, both of which were headquartered in California. He was then a darling of the press it seemed as though anytime Musk did anything at all, even just tweeting, newsroom phones lit up. He was a golden boy with super fans who adored him as a real life Tony
Stark iron Man. Then came COVID the coronavirus. Panic is dumb, Musk tweeted on March sixth, twenty Twenty days later, the governor of California announced that the state would shut down, that we direct a statewide order for people to stay at home. Musk was furious, and we are confident that the people of the state of California will abide by it.
They'll do the right thing. Musk vowed to keep his Tesla factory open, tweeting Free America Now, Elon Musk is escalating his fight with a California county, restarting a Tesla factory in Fremont despite a stay at home order there. Then, in protest of California's strict regulations, Musk announced that he was moving to lightly regulated Texas and had decided to
build Tesla's gigafactory there too. We approached both Tesla and SpaceX for a response on several points in the series, but at the time of the recording, we had not received a reply, one way or another. Musk had become a culture warrior, tweeting and tweeting and getting richer and richer. Meanwhile, during the pandemic, the contrast between the suffering of the masses and the vasting increase of wealth among a very
few provoked a backlash. In the US, Senator Bernard Sanders proposed the Make Billionaires Pay Act, a one time tax on American billionaires to help cover the out of pocket medical expenses of ordinary Americans for one year. Musk then got into a Twitter war with Sanders. Sanders claimed Musk's wealth had been made possible by billions of dollars in government subsidies for his corporations. Musk suggested that Sanders should
leave him alone because Tesla is saving the planet. Musk may not have been saving the planet, but his influence, especially on markets, kept growing. Like a lot of people, during the pandemic, Musk spent more time than ever online. The number of his Twitter followers skyrocketed. As CNBC reported in twenty twenty one, markets seem to hang on his every word.
One thing we've learned lately is that when Elon Musk tweets. The news cycle follows him, and in fact he does have a series of tweets in the past few minutes says I'm selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house, says Tesla. Stock price is too high im in my opinion, and now give people back their freedom. It's going to get attention. Stock now down almost seven percent.
This became a signature feature of Muskism long before a Musk bought Twitter. A single tweet by a single person, not an announcement from a central bank, could drive a stock price or hobble a currency market. In January twenty twenty one, after the insurrection at the US capital Twitter band Trump with Trump Gone, Musk became the loudest voice in the room. The Love Hate Twitter account to follow. He started tweeting about cryptocurrency Bitcoin and a joke coin
called dogecoin. If Trump's tweets destabilized American politics, Musk's tweets seemed to be destabilizing financial markets. A lot of headlines had to do with the fictive quality of money. After all, all forms of currency are acts of imagination. As Douglas Adams pointed out so well in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
In fact, there are three freely convertible currencies in the universe, but the Alterian dollar has recently collapsed, the Flanian pobble bead is only exchangeable for other Flanian pobble beads, and the trigantic pew doesn't really count as money. Its exchange rate of six ningyas to one pew is simple, but since a ninga is a triangular rubber coin eight hundred miles long each side, no one has ever collected enough
to own one pew. Ning is a not negotiable currency because the galactic banks refuse to deal in fiddling small change. From this basic premise, it's very simple to prove that the Galectic banks are also the products of a deranged imagination.
I've spent a lot of time in this investigation of Musk with Hitchhiker's Guide, because Musk read it as a kid growing up in South Africa, and he cites it all the time. But Hitchhiker's Guide is a strange influence for Muscuism, partly because Adams was so brutally gut wrenchingly funny about the arbitrariness of money and the follies of financial schemers and assorted idiot executives.
If we could, for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy.
School policy, How can you have money if none of you actually produce anything?
It doesn't grow on tree?
And Adams was particularly devastating on the subject of the damage done to the natural world by advanced extractive capitalism.
Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt leaves as legal tender, we have, of course, or become immensely rich. We have also run into a small instation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that I gather the current going rate has something like three major deciduous forests buying one ship's peanuts. So in order to obviate this problem and defectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on an extensive defiliation campaign
and burn down all the forests. I think that's a sensible movie economic time.
If you've been following the story of cryptocurrency, this scene from Hitchhiker's Guide might sound a little too on the nose. In twenty twenty one, Musk announced that Tesla was buying millions of dollars of bitcoin and that you could buy a Tesla with bitcoin, until he changed his mind, citing the sort of environmental concerns that I looked into in an earlier episode of this series. It turns out that
mining bitcoin really is burning down the forests. But you can buy Tesla merchandise with doge coin, and maybe you can sway a presidential election. In the twenty twenty four US presidential election, nearly half of all corporate spending came from the cryptocurrency industry. Some of that money went to Democrats, but most of it went to Republicans. Among the billionaires celebrating the announcement of doge that Apartment of government efficiency
was the CEO of the cryptocurrency company Coinbase. Cryptocurrency is essentially money without government, a libertarian's dream. Doge's mandate is to reduce government spending and to eliminate government regulations. The second of these is a lot easier than the first. What dismantling regulations might mean for money is a story, though that goes back to the beginning of those regulations. The kerfuffle over bitcoin really dates to eighteen forty eight
and the discovery of gold in California. A flood of gold retavoc on the US dollar, and so as the federal government took on new powers, it adopted a gold standard, which set a rate for the price of paper currency. Europe then did the same thing. This ushered in a new era of global trade, and not incidentally, the grotesque economic inequality of the Gilded Age. Farmers and factory workers argued for a silver standard, but the US formally established
the gold standard in the year nineteen hundred. That same year, a science fiction writer named Garrett P. Servis imagined a different outcome in a novel called Moon Metal, in which gold is discovered at the South Pole, setting off a second gold rush.
Gold is going to be as plentiful as ire. If there were not such a flood of it, we might manage. But when they begin to make trouser buttons out of the same metal that is now locked and guarded in steel vaults wound, where will be our standard of worth? My dear fellow, I would as willingly face the end of the world as this that's coming.
Just then, a sinister scientist discovers a mysterious new metal on the Moon which he can beam to Earth by way of a particle ray and introduces a new and more precious form of currency.
I can produce it in the pure form abundantly enough to replace gold, giving the same relative value and the gold possessed when it was the universal stand.
But that will make you the richest man who ever lived. Undoubtedly, why you will become the financial dictator of the whole earth.
Undoubtedly, currency is always a worry. Its value is so contrived, so imaginary, but also so important. After the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine, people took their money out of the banks and turned in their paper dollars for gold. In the nineteen thirties, the US abandoned the gold standard, at least for the duration of the depression, and prohibited
the private ownership of gold. If you've been listening to x Men for the last few episodes, you'll remember that it was during this era that in Canada, Elon Musk's grandfather joined and became a leader of the technocracy movement, founded on the belief that engineers could solve all political, social and economic problems. Technocrats did not believe in price.
By price system is not meant merely the capitalistic system, which is only one variety of the species. It means the collapse and complete obsolescence of the entire method of distributing goods and services by means of a price.
Technocrats didn't believe in prices because they didn't believe in any system not run by engineers. They wanted to get rid of both governments and banks.
There will be no place for politics or politicians, finance or financiers. Rackets are racketeers.
In place of prices and money. Technocrats wanted to reimagine the entire economic system with a new currency, a unit of energy, an erg whose stability would eradicate the volatility of finance.
A dollar may be worth in buying power so much today and moral less tomorrow, but a unit of work or heat is the same in nineteen hundred, nineteen twenty nine, nineteen thirty three, all the year two thousand.
The URG never did replace the dollar, and the US formally abandoned the gold standard in nineteen seventy six, But starting in two thousand and nine, people who want to trade in units other than dollars can buy bitcoins. Bitcoin a cryptocurrency isn't based on anything of value, Although not unlike the URG, it has some relationship to energy, the
energy it takes to produce it. After Trump's election in twenty sixteen, the price of bitcoin skyrocketed higher than it had ever been before, and Trump withdrew the US from the Paris Climate Accords. But bitcoin's value, like the value of other money, only exists if you believe it exists. JP Morgan once suggested that bitcoin was poised to become the new gold standard.
Cryptocurrencies were designed to make payments without a trusted third party, such as a government or a financial institution involved.
Ishuar Prasad is an economist at Cornell University and a fellow at the Brookings Institute. He believes cryptocurrency has set off a revolution, a foundational change in finance, but that bitcoin itself has not met its objectives.
Bitcoin has really ended up failing in what it was supposed to provide, which is a cheap, trustless medium of exchange. It turns out it is not anonymous, it turns out it is not cheap, and it is not very efficient. So Bitcoin has centered up becoming a pure speculative asset.
The technology underlying cryptocurrencies, Prosad argues, well, have all kinds of effects on finance. It really is the future. But he's not persuaded that, as some advocates claim, cryptocurrencies will democratize finance.
They've made it possible for people with very low incomes, very low levels of wealth, to get relatively easy access to digital payments and also to basic banking products. The problem is that digital access is unequal and financial literacy
is unequal. So you might give people easy access to a lot of products, but if you don't teach them the risks emburied in those products, then you might end up with the relatively less well off taking on much more risks than they realize that they're taking on, and the rich ending up being able to use these technologies much more to their advantage, so they become even better off than they are right now.
Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on nothing except a meme about a dog, was started by a software engineer named Jackson Palmer as a joke. Palmer later wrote an article called my joke, Cryptocurrency hit two billion dollars and something is Very wrong, in which he said that cryptocurrency, for all its promise, had become nothing more than an unregulated penny stock market. In twenty nineteen, after people started tweeting that Musk should be the CEO of dogecoin, he said it
was his favorite cryptocurrency. Doge coin's value skyrocketed, Musk kept tweeting about it, and up when its price he started calling himself the doge Father. Musk talked about doge coin on Clubhouse, an online chat room that was briefly popular with Silicon.
Valley occasionally make jokes about dogecoin that are really just meant to be joked, but dose coin was made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies. Obviously, but fate loves irony, and as part of my says that the most ironic outcome is most likely, or I say the most entertaining outcome is often most likely and arguably the most entertaining outcome, and the most ironic outcome would be that dogecoin becomes the currency of Earth in the future.
In twenty twenty one, Musk tweeted the single word doge under a picture of a SpaceX rocket in front of the moon. Doge to the Moon became a rallying cry. On April Fool's Day that year, Musk tweeted, SpaceX is going to put a literal doge coin on the literal moon a joke, but also not a joke, Musk said that SpaceX will be accepting doge coin as payment. Was Musk a comic? The next month, Musk hosted NBC's Saturday Night Live. He appeared in nearly every sketch as the
Nintendo villain Warrio on trial for murdering Mario. He explained, I'm not evil, I'm just misunderstood. In a skit set in the Old West, he played a bandit named Leron.
What had instead of panning for gold?
We just created our own cardsy currency.
Yeah, and what the heck would it be based on? Whatever we say?
It's based on that.
Hey, how money works.
Money ain't a golden rock that we dig out of the ground. Then we hope no one kills.
Us before we train it for pieces of green paper.
It's a perfect system.
It's a weird thing about being a historian. Everything reminds you of something else. Watching Elon Musk play Leron dressed like a cowboy, he looked exactly like an old photograph of his grandfather, the technocrat, who worked as a cowboy and performed at rodeos doing rope tricks. The family likeness is uncanny. Musk is also named after that cowboy's father, his great grandfather, Elon muscism asks us to picture always the future, but I find it hard not to keep
picturing the past. Yanked back lassoed by likenesses on SNL, Musk appeared too on the show's newscast as a cryptocurrency expert who can't give a straight answer.
What is dose coin?
Well, it actually started as a joke based on an Internet meme.
Okay, but what is dose coin?
Finally he admits the truth.
I keep telling you it's a cryptocurrency you can trade for conventional money. Oh so the hustle, Yeah, that's uses.
Everybody to the.
That night, dogecoin lost a third of its value. Me I was left thinking about the ending to that old science fiction story Moon Metal from the year nineteen hundred.
The looting of the Moon brought disaster to the rubber planet. So mad were the efforts to get the precious metal that the surface of our globe was fairly showered with it. The air was filled with shining dust, until finally famine and pestilence joined hands with financial disaster to punish the grasping world.
At the end of moon, metal markets collapse until an international agreement leads to government control of currency. That is what governments do in the US through the Federal Reserve and through the Securities in Exchange Commission. The Biden administration prosecuted crypto companies for securities violations under rules that the crypto industry complained were unclear and misguided. The second Trump administration is considering freezing much of that litigation.
How much do you.
Think we can rip out of this wasted six point five trillion dollar Paris Biden budget?
Well, I think we could do at least two trillion.
Yeah.
At a Trump rally in Madison Square Garden in New York just before the election, Musk made some predictions about the Department of Government deficiency.
We're going to get the government off your back and out of your pocketbook. America's does not not It's just going to be great. America is going to reach heights that it has never seen before.
There is arguably a great deal of waste in the US federal budget, though exactly where is the subject of rather heated dispute, and many argued there's an excess of regulation. Musk says that it takes longer to fill out the paperwork to build a rocket than it takes to actually build the rocket. Excessive regulations tie up all kinds of projects, including housing and parks, projects that benefit all kinds of people. So I'd be only too happy if something great, something wonderful,
were to come out of DOGE. But it strikes me that a lot of what animates Musk in playing a role in the American federal government concerns not taxing and spending, but regulation of cryptocurrency. After all, the cryptocurrency industry helped get Trump elected, and it expected results. As CNBC reported just after the twenty twenty four election.
Bitcoin briefly surging to a new record high as investors bet that Donald Trump will deliver on his pro crypto promises.
Just before he was inaugurated, Trump launched his own cryptocurrency dollar sign Trump. By the day of the inauguration, its market value had soared to ten billion dollars. To understand all this, there's no better explainer than Mark Andreesen, a venture capitalist whose company Andresen Horowitz has described itself as the world's biggest investor in cryptocurrency. The Biden administration cracked
down on crypto scams. And Reeson says the Biden administration also put pressure on banks not to work with crypto companies in a deliberate bid to stifle the industry. Silicon Valley had long supported Democratic political candidates and in general leaned left, but Andreesen was outraged by the Biden administration's interest in regulating both cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence. As he said on his podcast The Mark and Ben Show in July twenty twenty four, it.
Has been a brutal assault in an ascent industry that I've never experienced before. I'm in total shock that has happened. It's done intensely frustrating that it's been impossible to make progress in this with the White House.
That summer, Musk announced his support for Trump, as Andreason described on another podcast called Honestly from the Free.
Press, Elon right. Then Elon stepped up and said, yep, I'm for him. That was the big moment in our industry where the most important iconic figure in tech by far, you know, did that in that moment, and so that was the real shift.
And Reason speculated that Musk's endorsement was likely partly pragmatic.
I'm not speaking for Elon, but Elon decided that he had to do this because if not, he wasn't going to be able to launch rockets.
Andreeson himself ranks pretty high on the list of the highest donors to the Trump campaign. He soon became a Trump intimate, recruiting people from Silicon Valley to work or to volunteer for the incoming administration. With Doge and within the Trump administration, Musk and Andreeson are achieving what the technocrats of the nineteen thirties could only dream of the technocracy. Andreson is also the author of an excellent distillation of Muskism.
It is called the Techno Optimist Manifesto, though it could equally have been called the Manifesto of Muscism. It consists of a list of statements, we can advance to a far superior way of living and of being. We have the tools, the systems, the ideas, we have the will. We believe this is why our descendants will live in the stars. If only we place our faith in the techno capital machine and recent promises, we will become technological superman.
We are the Apex predator. We believe in greatness. We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness, strength, and recent sites among his inspirations for this manifesto. On the list of patron Saints of Techno Optimism Filippo Tomaso Marinetti. In nineteen o nine, Marinetti wrote what he called the Futurist Manifesto. It's a list of statements. We want to sing the
love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous sleep, the slap and the blow with the fist. We want to sing the man at the wheel. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism. Standing on the World Summit, we launched once again our insolent challenge to the stars. So say Mojo, fists raised to
the stars. Ten years after Marinetti wrote the Manifesto of Futurism, he co wrote the founding document of the movement led
by Mussolini, the Manifesto of Fascism. Marc Andreesen, like any reasonable person, hates it when people call people they disagree with, fascists, But here he cited the author of a fascist manifesto as a major inspiration for his own manifesto, which is why, to me, at least, the future envisioned by techno libertarians happens to look chillingly like the very worst of the past. The twenty first century is an age of technological wonder.
It is in many ways tremendously thrilling. Tesla and SpaceX are engineering marvels, but I don't find Muskism thrilling as political theory or social engineering. In twenty twenty one, the year Elon Musk became the Doge father Time magazine made an announcement.
The person in the Year is Elon Musk. He is reshaping life on Earth and possibly life off Earth as well. And this is someone also who, in becoming the richest person in the history of the world this year, really speaks to the moment we're in.
Not mentioned in the Person of the Year announcement was that at the time, two different women who were carrying Musk's babies were in the same hospital in Texas. Musk already had seven children, but he believes that a falling birth rate is a civilizational threat and he means to solve it. He seems particularly fond of a son born in twenty twenty, during the pandemic, when Musk himself underwent
a kind of rebirth. He's often photographed carrying on his shoulders this beautiful little blonde boy, and sometimes even brings him along to press interviews. What's your name? What's your name? Actually?
You should we help President Trump?
Yeah?
Next time. On X men, the Astounding Tale of Baby x