The Evening Rocket: Robin Hood

the richest man in the world. Since then, he's been jockeying for the top place with other tech giants. As NBC reported the spring. Altogether, the worth of those on the list is thirteen point one trillion dollars, up from eight trillion last year. The rise ring as most the world was shut down during the pandemic. Welcome to The Evening Rocket. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian, a professor at Harvard. This episode, which is called robin Hood, is the last in the series I've been hosting about a

new kind of capitalism. Call it Muskism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extra terrestrial capitalism, a form of capitalism influenced by fantasies that come from science fiction. During the pandemic, the contrast between the dire suffering of the masses and the vast increase of wealth among a very few cast Muskism in a particularly troubling light. In the US, Bernie 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 well 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. Lately, what with one thing and another, Elon Musk has been in the headlines more or less constantly. He's had phenomenal, really

almost unbelievable success. The electric car revolution really does seem to be coming, and a lot of that is thanks to Tesla, to Musk's vision, and to Tesla's commitment to renewable energy. Meanwhile, Musk's other company, SpaceX, has spectacularly realized the promise of its founding with the success of rockets that go up and come down safely, they're reusable, and

with SpaceX carrying astronauts to the International Space Station. Then there's Neuralink, which Musk announced has implanted a computer chip in the brain of a live pig named Gertrude. Thebets you're hearing are real time signals from the neural link

in Gertrude's head. In other recent Musk news, Starlink, another SpaceX project, launched a record number of satellites, as reported by CBS News and Sacramento NAH to a string of lights streaking across northern California tonight, and the sky lit up. Our newsroom falls lit up as well, bringing off the hook with people wondering what are they. It seemed as though anytime Musk did anything at all, newsroom phones lit

up with controversy. Those satellites were designed to bring Internet service to the least networked parts of the world, but some astronomers said they were ruining the night sky. SpaceX believes these fears are overstated and Gertrude the pig. Some neuroscientists were dubious about this experiment. One researcher telling the BBC, the science was mediocre, and during the pandemic, Musk at first opposed the shutdown and vowed to keep his Tesla

factory open, tweeting in all caps 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 too 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. If earlier, Elon Musk had been Iron Man, a hybrid Silicon Valley Hollywood superhero. In twenty twenty one, he dubbed himself the doge Father after the cryptocurrency as if he were head of a cryptomfia. A CNBC reported market seemed 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 Las. Stock price is too high, IMMO in my opinion, and now give people back their freedom. It's going to get attention. Stock now down almost seven percent. In the world of Muski is m a single tweet by a single person, not an announcement from a central bank, can drive a stock pricer hobble a currency market. In January, after the insurrection at the US capital Twitter band Donald Trump.

With Trump gone, Musks seemed to become the loudest voice in the room the Love Hate Twitter account to follow. If Trump's tweets destabilized American politics, Musk's tweets, as even the doge Father himself observed, seemed to be destabilizing financial markets. Meanwhile, as Musk, Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg jockeyed for first place in the World's Richest Man contest with inconceivably large fortunes, 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 reasonly collapsed, the Flanian pubble bead is only exchangeable for other Flanian pubble beads, and the

trigantic pew doesn't really counted money. I started out this series with The Hitchhiker's Guide because Elon Musk read it as a kid growing up in South Africa, and he cites it all the time, like, for instance, when he announced that he plans to name the first ship to

Mars the Heart of Gold. But The Hitchhiker's Guide is also a strange influence on Muskism, partly because Adams was so brutally gut wrenchingly funny about the arbitrariness of money and the foibles and follies of financial schemers and assorted idiot executives. If we could, up a moment, move on to the starbitalis school policys, 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 of legal tender. We have, of course, all the comm immense live also run into a small intatient problem on account of the high level of leaf availability. So in order to obviate this problem and defectively revalue the leaf, we are a badlingbach on an extensive defaiation

campaign and burned on atists. If you've been following the story of cryptocurrency, the scene from The Hitchhiker's Guide might sound a little too on the nose. Elon Musk had been a real booster of bitcoin. He announced earlier this year 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 an earlier episode of The Evening Rocket.

Turns out that mining bitcoin really is burning down the forests. But of course there's a backstory to Muscism's relationship to currency, so we're going to blast off to the past. The kerfuffle over bitcoin really dates to eighteen forty eight and the discovery of gold in California. A flood of gold reach havoc 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. Service imagined a different outcome in a novel called Moon Metal, in which gold is discovered at this 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, 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 it the same relative value 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 The Evening Rocket for the last few episodes, you'll remember that it was during this era. Then 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 prices. My 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 finance is 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 as tomorrow, but a unit of work or heat is the same in nineteen hundred, nineteen twenty nine, nineteen

thirty three are the year two thousand. The ERG never did replace the dollar, and the US formerly 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 ERG, it has some relationship to energy. The energy it takes

to produce it. Financial analysts who talk about bitcoin tend to refer not to the Hitchhiker's Guide but to Peter Pan and the so called Tinkerbell effect. It takes his faith and trust. Oh and something I forgot dust dust gaff yep, just a little bit of pixie dust. Bitcoin's value, like the value of other money, only exists if you believe it exists, like Tinkerbell or Neverland. Nevertheless, in a report issued earlier this year, JP Morgan suggested that bitcoin

is poised to become the new gold standard. Cryptocudencies were designed to make payments without a trusted third party, such as a government or the financial institution they involved. Eshwar Prasad is an economist at Cornell University and a fellow at the Brookings Institute, author of a forthcoming book on the future of money. He believes cryptocurrency has set off a revolution, a foundational change in finance, but that bitcoin

itself has not admit its subjectives. 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, Perside argues, well, of all kinds of effects on finance, it really is the future. But he's not persuaded that

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. But the problem is that digital access is unequal and financial literacy is unequal.

You might give people easy access to a lot of products, but if you don't teach them their risks embedded 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 his technologies much more to their advantage, so they become even better off than they are right now.

One version of that story is the story of robin Hood, when feudal barons ravaged the countryside to live in pomp and splendor. When one man alone, they're challenged the might of his country's oppressors, robin Hood. No, not that robin hood. This robin hood couldn't be easier to make a trade using the robin Hood app three taps, I just bought some stock earlier this year, this robin hood the investing app led to a rockiss over a video game company

called game Stop. A number of Wall Street firms had taken a bet that the pri of game Stop stock would fall, and somehow a group of people on Reddit decided that they were going to take on these hedge funds and show them the power of the masses. So they basically rallied around a lot of retail investors who would start buying up game Stop stock, thereby driving up its price. So they started buying up shares, which was made possible through this robin Hood app which allows for

low cost or essentially zero commissioned trading. The problem, of course, is that those who got to the party late were the retail investors, and they got sucked in and ended up losing a lot of money, because, as you might expect, the speculative frenzy finally ended, the price of game Stop stock fell and many of these retail investors got burned. There. It is Wendy Second start of the right straight on till morn. That's Peter Pan leading the way to the

island of lost boys who never grow up. Musk's fans seemed to think of him less as Peter Pan, though, and more as Robin Hood. That I think is partly due to the story of dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on nothing except a meme about a dog, 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 cryptocurrency, for all its promise, had become nothing more than an

unregulated penny stock market. Musk hadn't been much involved in all of this, but in twenty nineteen, after people started tweeting that he should be the CEO of dogecoin, he said it was his favorite cryptocurrency. Dozecogn's value skyrocketed, then, in a kind of quintessential act of Muscism, Musk kept tweeting about it and upwind its price. This past February, Musk talked about dogecoin on Clubhouse, a kind of audio chat room. Popular and Silicon Valley occasionally make jokes about dogcoin,

they are really just meant to be joked. But dose cooin is made as a joke to make fun of cryptocurrencies, obviously, but fate Love's irony and often as part of my says that most ironic outcome is most likely, or I say the most entertaining outcome is often the 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, the future, the future. But to me, beneath the thunder of rocket engines and far from the glare of computer screens, there's something medieval going on here. Even calling a cryptocurrency a coin is kind of a throwback. So I called up a medievalist named Rory Naismith who teaches at Cambridge. I asked him how people in the Middle Ages trusted money. You can trust the people behind it, and that's important. They think about money very much in

personal terms. These coins are very often issued in the name of a king or a bishop or someone like that. That's one side of it. There's a strong sense that money is precious metal. It's not quite worth its weight in gold or silver, at least not always, but that is still there as a kind of kind of fallback. So there's a degree of abstraction that we put our trust in the identity of the person whose faces on the coin, say, but there's also a degree of real

concrete value. You could melt this thing down right, Yes, that's exactly right, and right down to the seventeenth eighteenth century people thought of their silverware, their forks, their plates, all that sort of thing as in a very real sense another kind of money. Then, of course came paper money and banks and the nation state, and the growth of state power and government regulation of currency, the Bank

of England, the Federal Reserve. It's as if some advocates of cryptocurrency, some of them use an investing app named after a mythical medieval character, want to uninvent all of those things. They want to go back to a time before those things were invented, to a fantasy Middle Ages where the currency is coin and robin Hood is stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. In a way, it's also a bit like not necessarily just the future of money, but also going back to the past of money.

It's it's quite light going back to this period in the Middle Ages, when you thought much more in terms of people and sources rather than bigger states and bigger institutions that would underpin the authority and trustworthiness of these coins. To me in Sherwood Forest, Elon Musk isn't Robin Hood. He's the king whose face is on the coin. In Musk retrust. In February, Musk tweeted the single word doze under a picture of a SpaceX rocket in front of

the moon. Doge to the Moon became a rallying cry. This was all a performance, a joke, topsy turvy, like a medieval carnival. Musk would tweet outrageous things, then say he was only joking. On April Fool's Day, he tweeted SpaceX is going to put it literal dogecoin on the literal Moon. A joke, but also not a joke. Musk said that SpaceX will be accepting dogecoin as payment, with

one doge funded launch scheduled next year. Meanwhile, Tessa was in the news for investing in and accepting bitcoin, and then in the news for walking all that back. Days later, NBC's Saturday Night Live announced that Musk would host an upcoming episode. It aired on Mother's Day Eve. Musk brought his mother onto the stage and told her his present for her was dogecoin. In his opening monologue, Musk announced

that he has Asperger syndrome. Look, I know I sometimes say or post strange things, but that's just how my brain works. To anyone I've offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric Carson. I'm sending people to Mars and our rocketship. Did you think I was also going

to be a chill, normal dude. Some people in the autism community celebrated Musk's announcement a milestone, and, as some autistic writers observed, there was something very moving when he joked that he was pretty good at running human in emulation mode. Elsewhere, Musk has joked that he's an alien or a robot other ways that he's conjured a struggle experienced by many people on the autism spectrum who've been

forced to mask their very selves. But there were critics too, who maintained that Musk's announcement was deeply cynical and just another element of an anything goes capitalism. In Slate magazine, journalist Sarah Ludermann who was autistic objected to a billionaire using Asperger's to insulate himself from criticism of his business practices, writing Apparently Asperger's syndrome means in never having to say

you're sorry. What struck me, though, is that Musk's monologue made out as if people who criticize him object to him personally. But it has never been my sense that serious people who criticize Musk do so because they object to his tone or his mode of expression. The coral isn't with what he says or how he says it, but with what he does and with the world he seems to want to build. The coral isn't with Musk,

but with Muscism. To Luderman's point, appearing on SNL gave Musk all sorts of opportunities to tell a new, redemptive story about himself. He appeared in nearly every sketch as the Nintendo villain Warrior 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 if instead of panning for gold, we just create our own currency currency? Yeah? And what the heck would

it be based on? Whatever we say it's based on da ain't how money works. The money ain't the 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, and 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 muskis m 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 dollas coin? Well, it actually started as a joke based on an Internet meme. Okay,

but what is doa co? Finally he admits the truth. I keep telling you it's a cryptocrcy you can trade for conventional money. Oh so the hustle, Yeah, it's awesome. That night, Dogcoin 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 Raba planet, so mad with 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 the currency. Some people think this is what's most likely to happen to cryptocurrency too. Meantime, the air is being filled with shining pixie dust as famine and pestilence and pandemic join

hands with financial disaster to punish the grasping world. This is an age of technological wonder, an entrepreneurial experimentation. It is in many ways tremendously thrilling. SpaceX and Tesla engineering marvels as social engineering, though I don't find any of this thrilling. The people with the most money shouldn't get to decide what happens on Earth, or on the Moon, or to the skies, or on Mars or anywhere. To me, the larger story about the rise of Muscism extravagant, extreme

fantastical capitalism is its anachronism. I can't tell you anything about the future of Muscism, but it strikes me that for all its obsession with the future, Muscism is trapped in the past. Elon Musk is a visionary But what I've come to believe during the research for the series is that those visions come from a future first imagined in science fiction long long ago, decades, sometimes more than a century ago. Rockets to Mars, electric cars, cryptocurrency, a

future without governments or banks. A future where engineers and scientists, and only engineers and scientists have the answers. A future whose long dead author is very often pictured. A world where the poor and the powerless and the robots know their place, and it is to serve the powerful quietly and obediently, and without daring to claim sovereignty or independence

or even intelligence. This future was imagined by a very tiny number of men during an age of imperialism before women could vote, an age of staggering economic inequality and brutal racial injustice, an age of pandemic disease, on raveling democracies and World War The President is tough, but that past is past, and I don't want it ever to be the future again. The Evening Rocket was written and read by me Jillapour 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 Cornti for Pushkin. It was produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Jake Gorski, who also did the mix and sound design. Production support from Ben Natt of Haafrick. Our executive producer is Mielobell. Our operations

team includes Daniella Lakhan, Maya Kanig and Carl mcgliori. Thanks also to John Schnar's, Jacob Eisburg, Maggie Taylor, Heather Fain, Nicole Moreno and Eric Sandler.