The Evening Rocket: Dimension X

by earnings but also by fantasies. I'm fascinated by civilcon Valley's futurism and by how in Musk's life those visions of the future will come from the same place the science fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk wants to take the rest of us with his electric cars, rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath the Earth, I decided to look at those science fiction stories and understand what he's missed about them. So blast off with me on The Evening Rocket on a journey

into the history of our future. Elon Musk is one of the richest people on the planet He intends to save the world from climate catastrophe with electric cars and solar panels and underground tunnels. He plans to colonize Mars. He's building chips to put in people's brains. He is adored by fifty million followers on Twitter. He has two x wives and six sons, including a baby named X. The bare facts of Musk's life, the way they're usually told make them sound like a fictional character, a comic

book superhero. But what's the story, the actual history behind the comic book. Welcome to The Evening Rocket. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a professor at Harvard. I'm a US political historian, and for a long time I've been studying the relationship between technological and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of the future in political discourse, in literature and science fiction,

and even comic books. This series, I'll be exploring a new kind of capitalism, call it Muscism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extra terrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven by earnings and also by fantasies. Fantasies that you can find in blockbusters superhero movies, but that come from science fiction. Some

of it a century old. The title of this series comes from old science fiction two in a pulp story from nineteen thirty eight, The Evening Rocket was the name of a newspaper of the future, also in Silicon Valley. The rocket is the go to metaphor for explosive growth. This is a rocket ship, Get on it. The CEO of Google like to tell people about his company. Cheryl Sandberg of Facebook said the same thing. It's all about fast growth. Blast off the people at Google and Facebook.

They're not doing rocket science. Elon Musk, though he really does run a rocket science company. It's called SpaceX. Musk loves the letter X. One of his first big startups,

X dot com. X is sexy as an X rated, but X is sexy because X means mysterious and X means mysterious because in sixteen thirty seven, when Renee Descartes sat down to write a treatise on geometry, he decided to use X and Z for variables, but his printer setting the type kept running out of ys and z's, but not xes because you don't use X very often in French, so he used mostly xes X. The unknown in the twentieth century, X became science fiction writer's favorite

letter of the alphabet X for extraterrestrial, as in the film The Strange World of Planet X. Be prepared for a fantastic adventure and to the future a monstrous world of terriinal chaos. By the nineteen nineties, X Men, xbox, X Files and then Elon Muskin X dot Com, SpaceX, something strange was happening to capitalism. As the gap between the rich and the poor got wider and eider, the claims of corporations got more and more grandiose. Google opened an R and D division called X, whose aim was

to solve some of the world's hardest problems. Tech companies started talking about their mission, and their mission was always magnificently inflated, transforming the future of work, connecting all of humanity, making the world a better place. Scholars kept groping for adjectives to describe these new brands of capitalism. Surveillance capitalism,

platform capitalism, identity capitalism, What about just x capitalism? Expert extreme, extravagant existential a capitalism in which companies worry very publicly and quite feverishly about planetary disaster, about the all two real catastrophe of climate change, but also about all sorts of so called existential risks to the future of the

human race, so that they can save us all. A capitalism animated by catastrophe, a capitalism driven by science fiction and driven too by the disavowal of its own origins. To recover that history, each episode of The Evening Rocket will blast off to the past. This episode is called Dimension X. Our first destination in time and space is South Africa in the nineteen seventies. Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in nineteen seventy one. His father, Errol, was

an engineer who owned a construction business. His mother was a former model. They had three kids. Elon was the oldest, and then they got divorced when he was still a boy. Errol Musk once gave an interview to South Africa's Radio seven o two about his oldest son. But there's something about Elon that's an X factor. What is that? Yeah, I would say that it's always been a very deep sea. When he was very small, for example, he would ask

me where is the whole world? The story of Velan Musk's childhood, as it's usually told, is right out of science fiction from a genre noon as the Boy Wonder story. My favorites are the Tom Swift books series that started in nineteen ten. Tom Swift and his Electric Runabout, the

speediest car on the road. Barton Swift, esteemed inventor, was drawing a complicated machine, pausing to make some intricate calculations when his young son interrupted him, I'm gonna build an electric runabout, Dad, m I don't take much stock in electric autos. Tom, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. All the electric runabouts I ever saw, while they were very nice cars, didn't seem able to go so very fast. Ah, very far, that's true, but it's because they didn't have the right

kind of battery. It seems to me that if you put the right kind of battery into an automobile, it could scoot a lung pretty lively. That Tom Swift story was published more than a century ago, But the way Errol Musk tells it, Little Elon was that same boy Wonder. When the computers came out right in the beginning, he came to me and said, the would like to have one of these new computers. In nineteen eighty four, when Elon Musk was twelve, he sold a video game to

PC Magazine for five hundred dollars. It's called blast Star Black Screen, little squary blobs, Space Invader style our mission destroy alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and status beam machines. So don't get me wrong. Elon Musk really was a whiz kid. And when Musk tells his own origin story, like when he spoke at the Computer History Museum in California, that's how he tells it. I was very party bookers. I was reading all the time, so I was either

reading or working on my computer or reading comics. He read a lot of books, but he says that one book above all became his guide for life, the Elon Musk Bible. I guess when I was twelve with the Tina had Company existential crisis, and I was reading various books. I'm trying to figure out the meaning of life. And we happen to have like some books by Nietzche and Schopenhauer in the house, which you should not read at age fourteen. It's really negative. Yeah, And I read The

Hitchhiker's Guide the Galaxy. It was quite positive. I think in Douglas Adams is Hitchhiker's Guide. The people of megal Athia build an enormous computer to ask it a question about life, the universe and everything, and after thinking for millions of years, it answers forty two. Musk says that taught him a lesson a lot of times. The question is harder than the answer, and if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.

The Hitchhiker's Guide didn't start out as a book. Adams wrote it for BBC Radio four, and starting in nineteen seventy eight it was broadcast on the BBC World Service, including Tupratoria. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich, and on the whole tax free. Many men,

of course, became extremely rich. But this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of, because no one was really poor, at least no one. We're speaking of. The Hitchhiker's Guide, that is, begins with an indictment of economic inequality. What was it like to listen to this in South Africa under apartheid. Musk hardly ever talks about apartheid, at least not publicly. I'm going to talk about it for a while here because it's a crucial piece of this history.

But first, let me be really clear. White people who happened to grow up in South Africa under apartheid in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties are not responsible for apartheid. Peter Thiel, another Silicon Valley entrepreneur and later a key business partner of Elon Musk's, also lived in South Africa for a while as a kid they were children. Also, Musk left South Africa when he was seventeen to avoid being conscripted into the army, the army that imposed and

enforced the regime. I'm not placing blame here. Still, I do think there's a weird way in which the culture of apartheid found expression in the nineteen nineties and Silicon Valley's vision of the future. You've said that apartheid is a habit of mind. Can you tell me what you mean by that? I called up Jacob Glamini, a professor of African history at Princeton. He grew up in South Africa,

and he's written beautifully and powerfully about apartheid. What I mean by that is that the party it was not just a social and political and economic system, but that it was also a cultural system which incarcated in South Africans, both black and white, patterns of behavior, ways of thinking. It's side to transform how people saw themselves, but also how they saw the world. The color question is rapidly increasing in seriousness and urgency. I consider apartheid to be

South Africa's lost chance to remain a white man's country. Apartheid, which means a parthood, began in nineteen forty eight. That same year, in nineteen forty eight, Elon Musk's mother was born in Canada. Her father, J. N. Haldeman was an ardent conservative and anti communist. In nineteen fifty, Haldiman moved his family to South Africa. Was there a lot of immigration from saying North America to South Africa after apartheid was declared? I just find that like an odd journey

for a family to make in nineteen fifty. Oh yeah, I think that is quite striking. There is this conscious effort and conscious attempt to recruit people to South Africa to beef up white numbers to a point where blacks would not be such a demographic threat. You know, here's a place with amazing sunshine, great weather, and you can actually live like a king or a queen. Elon Musk's mother published a memoir in twenty twenty. It's called A Woman Makes a Plan Advice for a lifetime of adventure,

beauty and Success. A lot of the book is about growing up in South Africa in the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties. She says her parents were persuaded to move there from Canada by missionaries who talked of its beauty. Not once does she mention apartheid. Domini says that's not unusual that the regime organized itself around acts of forgetting and a razure, including pretending the native population somehow didn't

even exist. Unlike in the America's Right, you know, where the indigenous populations were annihilated, the South African gates is different. The vast majority of the population is not annihilated, and whatever you have to build has to be built around this idea that the natives have not disappeared. A resistance movement rose up led beginning in the nineteen sixties by a young lawyer, Nelson Mandela. The Africans require the franchise on the basis of one man, one vote. They're one

political independence. Mandela was sent to prison in nineteen sixty three. Meanwhile, the resistance grew is Radio Freio, the voice of the African National Congress. The UN General Assembly denounced the apartheid regime in nineteen seventy three. Two years later, right about when Elon Musk was starting kindergarten, police open fire on thousands of school ldren during a protest, and so wadow we play in the yard, the school yard, in the

pools of hitting creatures. These were black children. White children went to white schools. Black people had to pay for their education, but whites didn't. Some people were joking it was actually socialism for whites and capitalism for blacks, right, And that's how a party it actually justified itself that, you know, we create in a class of successful white people,

people who ran construction businesses like Errol Musk. Elon's father made a lot of money in the apartheid era, building two of everything, one for blacks and one for whites.

For whites, they built a fantasy world. Ideologically, I think one of the successes of a part aid was in making whites out off can't believe that everything they achieved was through individual initiative, and everything that they ever have got in life was through their own hard work, you know, never mind the fact that the system was designed to some ways gave them all the benefit and to give

them all the resources to get on in life. It's so interesting because the darkness of that divide, you know, the rigidity of the separation, has so many earlier representations in the world of science fiction, right, like so much of H. G. Wells as science fiction is about what about a terrible, awful future in which we divide people into some who will live underground and do all of the work for us, and we will never see them, and we will pretend they don't even exist, and those

of us who will live in the skies and in the clouds. And to me, sometimes when I think about what Silicon Valley is imagining, we will colonize Mars, and some people will go there who really need to be relieved of their experience on Earth. I mean, am I off base to say that some of that seems to revive these notions of very very strict hierarchies. I don't think you're off base at all, Joe. I mean, I

think you've put your finger in it. And of course we don't want to instrumentalize this and see, you know, it does just caused an effect. But I think there's a strong case to be made for the connection between this a part of dystopia and this idealized version of a world where the elites don't have to share their

oxygen with lesser beings. So I listened to The Hitchhiker's Guide, and I find it strange that Elon Musk is such a fan, because a lot of it sounds to me like an indictment of people just like him, or like Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The mega rich, with their privately owned rockets blasting off to other planets, and for these extremely rich merchants, life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory.

Either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, nor the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus where created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry, custom made luxury planet building. Also hear me out. I think the Hitchhiker's Guide, broadcast by the BBC in the nineteen seventies, just when the world was condemning apartheid, sounds quite specifically as though it's

an indictment of apartheid like social and economic systems. And I don't think I'm overreading. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide on herme's manual typewriter. One key is more worn down than the rest, the letter X. And you know what was on the side of that typewriter, a sticker. It says end apartheid. When Elon Musk started college at the University of Pretoria, apartheid was on the verge of collapse today if black and wide the lack of nine bapati.

By then, in nineteen ninety, when Mandela was released after twenty seven years in prison, Elon Musk had left South Africa behind to launch his new life in North America. We have to get back in the rocket again to go still further back in time, two generations in fact, because after graduating, Musk traveled to Canada, where his maternal grandfather was from He wanted to get to the United States,

but it was easier to get a Canadian passport. Having broken with his father, he flew to Montreal with nothing but a backpack, then hitchhiked to Saskatchewan, where his grandfather had lived before moving the family to South Africa. And it's this grandfather, j Nn Haldeman, who I want to look at next, because before he left Canada in the nineteen thirties, he'd been a leader of a strange sci

fi inspired movement known as technocracy. It bears an uncanny resemblance to some things going on today in Silicon Valley, repackaged as existential risk futurism. What technocracy ink is chiefly engaged in now is the organization of an army of trained men and women who, when the present interference controls break down and the intricate machinery of production and distribution is in danger of stopping, will be able to prevent that catastrophe before it is too late. So this sounds

like science fiction, but this really happened. People in the technocracy movement, they call themselves technocrats, wanted engineers and scientists to run governments. They took their inspiration from science fiction, where engineers and scientists were always solving problems. They were suspicious of democracy and also of capitalism. 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. There will be no place for politics or politicians, finance or financiers. Rackets are racketeers. Grant Whiteoff teaches Digital Humanities and American Studies at Princeton. He says that technocracy movement started in New York in nineteen nineteen with a guy who ran a floor waxing business.

His idea was that engineers had these unique qualities that would somehow make them good social leaders. They could assess a situation from above, they would come up with much more rational or economic solutions than politicians or economic leaders would. Then, with the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine and the depression that followed, democracies were collapsing all over the world.

Technocracy really had its moment. Local chapters at that point had sprung up everywhere across the US and Canada, and each of those chapters art putting forward their own competing ideas. There's an invented unit of measure called the ERG. This is one solution that we replace currency with units of energy, depended on how much energy a single worker is capable of producing in a given day and how much they

should get in return for that work. As far as I can tell, it's at this point that Elon Musk's grandfather got involved with technocracy. He lost his farm during the depression and ever after didn't believe in banks or banking. A lot of people felt that way, and some of them were drawn into the set of ideas about a different way of thinking about money. And some of the chapters start doing odd things to kind of get their

message across. They start wearing these identical gray uniforms, driving these gray cars in these large parades, blasting speeches out of megaphones. They adopt this Yin Yang symbol on all of their uniforms and all of their signs. I'm kind of pulled into a different directions, you know. On the one hand, I just I just think they're nuts, And on the other hand, it seems to reflect an enormous amount of anguish and uncertainty. But it has a kind

of quasi fascistic feel to me. How should we read that? Technocracy from the start was caught up in a lot of different science fictional imaginaries that it didn't always have full perspective on. They want to write themselves into these gleaming science fictional futures that they are obsessed with, but without actually thinking through what that would mean in practice, what it would mean to replace an entire system of government some of what Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley

entrepreneurs now indoors. There's something of a family likeness to the technocracy movement, a fixation on futurism, a kind of radical rationalism, the idea that technological innovation can solve political and social problems, a critique of paper currency and the price system. Also, for some reason, technocrats objected to personal names. For instance, one technocrat renamed himself one X one eight zero nine x five six, like Elon Musk's youngest son, a baby named x Ash twelve or X for short.

Elon Musk, after that year in Saskatchewan, spent two years at Queen's University in Ontario. Then he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in economics and physics. He spent a summer interning at dot COM's in Silicon Valley, where things were getting wild. It was a gold rush. In nineteen ninety five, the Internet opened to commercial traffic for the first time. You could buy stuff online. But how Musk started a PhD program in material science engineering

at Stanford but dropped out after two days. As he later told CNN back in ninety five, they weren't for many people on the Internet, and certainly nobody was making any money at all. Most people thought the Internet was going to be a fat elon. Musk started his first company, zip two, with his brother and a friend. Everyone at the time was trying to engage in what was called disruptive innovation, which means destroy existing industries by doing things

completely differently online. Zip two was a newspaper industry disruptive innovation. It helped newspapers make the transition to online publishing, though it also contributed to a crisis in journalism. All sorts of people founded news aggregators and news feeds. Musk made his first fortune in nineteen ninety nine. He sold Zip two for three hundred million dollars cash receiving cash is cash. I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklin's.

He then turned to thinking about online money technocrats. Like his grandfather had wanted to abolish the price system, Musk wanted to restructure the system of exchange itself. This planet has or had a problem, which was this, most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much

of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. In nineteen ninety nine, Musk founded a new company, X dot com. So this is an ATM. All we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry.

Musk put millions of dollars into x dot com. He said, selling one business and starting the next was like a high stakes poker game. You win a big pot, you risk it all all over again. This is called serial entrepreneurship. Start it, sell it, raise venture capital to start the next thing. Every time you do this, you've got to come up with a story, characters, and a plot. Because your investors don't have any real metrics, no earnings or profits,

no prices invests. You are buying your story. A startup doesn't actually have to make anything, or do anything, or succeed in any measurable way. For a venture capitalist to make money. That startup just has to sound good enough for someone else to invest in it. All it has to do is tell a really incredible story. And the more obviously the story comes straight out of the pages of science fiction the better. X dot Com described itself as an online bank, but its founders soon discovered that

people mostly wanted to use it as an online payment system. Meanwhile, Peter Teal had started a company called Confinity that could send payments between devices. Teal worked as a securities lawyer before helping to found Confinity. In nineteen ninety nine, the company launched a service it called PayPal. If people were going to buy things online, they needed to be able to pay for things online. As Teal saw it, they were reinventing money. In two thousand, Confinity and X dot

Com merge. One thing Musk regrets is that the company's product got called PayPal instead of X. The founders of these companies became known as the PayPal Mafia because they made staggering sums of money when PayPal went public in two thousand and two and was later bought by eBay, and then they went on to found their own venture capital companies, funding other startups, including YouTube and Facebook. X

Capitalism was born a few years back. Elon Musk, nostalgic about this time of his life, bought the domain X dot com. There's just a little X there now on a blank page because the only thing in the source code is the letter X. Mostly though, Musk used his money not to fund other people's ventures, but to start a company of his own, a rocket company, SpaceX Next Time on the Evening Rocket, blasting off to Mars. The Evening Rocket was written and read by me Jillapoor for

the BBC. The Evening Rocket was produced by Viv Jones. Oliver Riskin Cuts was the researcher. The editor was Hugh Levinson. The commissioning editor was Dan Clark. Ionah Hammond was production coordinator. Mixing by Graham put a Foot and original music by Corn Tooth. For Pushkin, it was produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Jake Gorski, who also did the mix and sound design. Production support from Ben Nattapafrick. Our executive producer

is Mielobell. Our operations team includes Daniella Lakhan, Maya Kanig, and Carl Mgliori. Thanks also to John Schnar's Jacob Weisberg, Maggie Taylor, Heather Faine, Nicole Moreno, and Eric Sandler.