From the Harvard Book Store, a window into the thinking of our nation’s cognitive elite:
The #2 hardcover bestseller during my April 2025 visit was Muskism:
Elon Musk isn’t a glitch in the system—he is the system. His worldview promises sovereignty through technology: plug in, power up, and become self-reliant. But the more you connect, the more he owns you.
If Fordism defined the capitalism of the twentieth century, Muskism may define the twenty-first. Fordism helped build the welfare state. Musk undoes it. He thrives on dependence while preaching freedom. His cars run on subsidies; his satellites run the battlefield; his social networks train the AI that trains us.
Muskism sells itself as the future but entrenches age-old hierarchies. It offers autonomy for some and exclusion for others. It’s pro-natalist but anti-immigrant, futurist but reactionary. It speaks of humanity but warns against empathy.
The authors:
Quinn Slobodian is professor of international history at Boston University
Ben Tarnoff is a writer and technologist based in Massachusetts … He is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has also written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, and the New Republic,
These giant credentialed academically-inclined brains say that Elon is pernicious. He’s our “dependent”, which means he is costing us money. What’s worse, this spending has resulted in Musk “owning us” rather than vice versa.
Elon Musk is pernicious and we’d certainly be better off without him. But it is also bad to be “anti-immigrant”, according to the authors, and we thus can’t use our ICE thugs to denaturalize Musk and deport him. Maybe we could persuade him to leave voluntarily? Hardly likely, given the U.S.’s massive exit tax on those who renounce U.S. citizenship. Elon would have to pay 20% capital gains tax plus 3.8% Obamacare tax (NIIT), albeit not the 13.3% California state income tax since he moved to Texas rather than pay his fair share to Gavin Newsom. This tax rate would be assessed against substantially all of Musk’s assets since nearly all of his wealth is unrealized capital gains.
What if we offered our most toxic citizens, the ones who contribute the least to our prosperity (since they don’t pay their fair share of taxes) and contribute the most to our problems (all of the above-cited, plus their presence in our society exacerbates inequality), a reasonable cost way out? If they leave in 2026, for example, they wouldn’t have to pay the exit tax.
Let’s say that someone needs a minimum net worth of $200 million to make the rest of us truly sick with envy. Anyone under $200 million, therefore, would still have to pay for expatriation.
(Separately, one of our neighbors has taken to parking his or her fairly new Rolls-Royce on the street (to make room for a truly valuable car in the garage?). I often walk Mindy the Crippler (our golden retriever) with a physician across the street and his dogs. In response to the Rolls-Royce sighting, the doctor and I have agreed that anyone richer than us should have to pay a 100% wealth tax.)
(Department of Trust Official Sources: SpaceX has a 98% launch success rate over its corporate life. The authors and HarperCollins (publisher) have chosen to feature on the cover a photo of one of the 2% unsuccessful launches.)
> Elon Musk isn’t a glitch in the system—he is the system. His worldview promises sovereignty through technology: plug in, power up, and become self-reliant. But the more you connect, the more he owns you.
What kind of an argument is this? If you have no control over your senses, anything, including food, owns you.
> If Fordism defined the capitalism of the twentieth century, Muskism may define the twenty-first. Fordism helped build the welfare state. Musk undoes it. He thrives on dependence while preaching freedom. His cars run on subsidies; his satellites run the battlefield; his social networks train the AI that trains us.
He’s a businessman. He is using the system to his advantage. Maybe he’s just an indicator of the larger problem in the system? Not the problem itself?
It astonishes me that these credentialed moochers wrote a guide for myself. If they are counting on my $20 they won’t get it.
They better have long scientific citations index, when Mask’s AI finally takes over they will be allocated their wine and soy burgers based on their usefulness rating in the free brave new world.
Maimonides called, he wants his title back. In future Mask AI age, Maimonides profile AI entity will sue them for tarnishing its reputation.
Why trifle with a tax for the parasite Musk. Take all his assets and then export him along with his pedophile friend-of-Putin.
I haven’t been in a bookstore in maybe 10 years and here in NYC don’t even know where one would find one. The Borders around the corner went out of business maybe two decades ago and the Barnes & Nobel a little further away closed down a few years ago. You would think that owning a bookstore is about the worst business out there with Amazon discounting & all sorts of other entertainment available. My guess is the book vending business is a vanity business, like owning The Atlantic, or Time Magazine or the NYT, something for the wealthy who aren’t in business to make money. Consequently it is not surprising the sorts of books in the bookstore windows that Phil ferrets out. Probably about the same perspective as what one would find in the articles of the NYT or The Atlantic or Time. If one bothered to read those publications.
Can’t wait for the next trip to Bostonspun.
I’m convinced Musk read Atlas Shrugged when he was very young. I’m reading it now (I know the gist, but reading it definitely hammers the point home)
The book is torturously slow in the first half and gets really good in the second half, in other words most readers never get to the good part.
If only Ayn Rand had a better editor, and did mercilessly cut it by at least 50%, this would have been a defining work of the twentieth century that changed the course of the world.
I watched the A.S. movies, since I was never motivated enough to read the book. The movies were kind of bland, although I did get the idea of the book.
> If only Ayn Rand had a better editor, and did mercilessly cut it by at least 50%,
Sounds like an easy task for AI?
> Sounds like an easy task for AI?
Yeah, if you want to cut off the wrong half. “Measure once, cut twice” — AI’s motto
I read some 200-300 pages of it when I was a teenager after reading The Fountainhead. I just remember two things from that book, or maybe it was Fountainhead, now after more than 15 years. One was that it was about someone who was very passionate about their work. Another one was that the male and the female main characters got intimate with each other without ever speaking to each other. I’d kind of thought that’s how you knew that you love someone, LOL!
> pro-natalist
I wonder how we could work a vasectomy or tubal ligation into the deal.
Hi Phil (if I may be so informal),
Please call me “Katie”. I’m an Oxford dropout, and the sitting mayor of Seattle. We’re good at running off millionaires here on the Puget sound. I wave a little cute “bye” to their rear-view mirror as they stream across America to join you in the Free State (love what you folks are doing there, but we prefer homelessness, addicts, police-free zones, and criminals).
I quite often look down at the ruins of my city from the sky needle restaurant. Did you know it spins around? Whee! We also have a monorail, high tech Florida dreams of. I think Millennials bypassing Generation X in leadership roles is a good idea, we have so much more wisdoms than them old meanies. We won’t be happy until Boeing is shuttered and the Microsoft campus is turned into immigrant housing. Enjoy your sunny day tomorrow. “9.9% on $1M+ for ever.”
Dearest Ms. Wilson,
Millionaires aren’t available to talk to you right now, honey, but like in Seattle, this undesirable has plenty of idle time. I saw you on the news:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/seattle-mayor-laughs-millionaires-leaving-washington-state-progressive-taxes-waves-bye
So cute. You must not have read the post, but Phil is tolerant of millionaires — just not triple digit ones. Makes him envious. I’m envious of someone with a spare $5 but I don’t go running them off, now do I? No…I just ask them for it. I thought that’s what we progressives did?
Do you like the head high of a sativa strain, or the body high of an indica? (Or a little of both?) I don’t own a car either. I used to sleep in my Benz, had a little incident where they towed me away in it. Phil probably wouldn’t agree, but my favorite Lisp compiler is Stalin Scheme — which ruthlessly optimizes. I like commie, er Democratic Socialist, free software. Microsoft is just so corporate. Bye, I need to wipe the window of this Rolls Royce stopped at the light with a filthy rag. 👋 Best.
P.S.
In case you don’t get what I’m saying ^^^, I know you young people like your fairy tales:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_the_Golden_Eggs
P.P.S.
I’m not sure what I was saying above either — got some slamming chronic in by brain this morning. Off to eat a box of Lucky Charms (now fortified with THC).