on jill lepore’s sci-fi history of elon musk.
The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.
— Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”
X marks the spot in Jill Lepore’s revised podcast exploration of Elon Musk’s career, biography, and ideological origins. Four years ago, in a radio show that grew out of her detective-style approach on the podcast The Last Archive, Lepore began to investigate Musk’s fascination with science fiction. Now, given Musk’s recent immersion in reactionary politics, she has gone back to the Muskiverse. In X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story, she updates her tale. On X Man, Lepore cleverly uses Elon Musk’s obsession with the letter X to tell her story. It becomes a sign, a symbol, a clue, an elusive signifier, a recurring motif. It becomes a way to denote the uncanny connections worth chasing on a mysterious map of buried historical treasures that, when unearthed, might reveal surprising discoveries, that might, at last, reveal the essence of what is going on and what it all means.
As a historian, Lepore is not merely a perceptive observer, she is also a magnificent stylist. One characteristic of her approach is the positioning of careful historical research within a mood of detective-story suspicion and uncanny connection. It’s not quite conspiratorial, but there is an uncanny quality of “let’s connect the dots.” Or is it, er, let’s locate the X’s. History is a puzzle, the clues left there for noticing, the revelations to be found in piecing things together. Sherlock Holmes lurks in the background here (elementary, my dear von Ranke!), as does Monsieur Poirot (mon ami, Herotodus!). Aha! declrares Lepore, now it all adds up and is clear. Elon Musk’s childhood in Apartheid South Africa, his obsessions with comic book heroes and science fiction fantasies, his strange family origins in the obscure Technocracy movement, his painful relationship with women, his difficulty with the complexities of gender as a whole, they explain who Musk is and what has driven his righward turn.
Yet what takes Lepore’s historical detective work to another level is the lingering suspicion that sometimes it does not all quite add up. There is a more noirish shadow always creeping into her history, a sense that maybe there is no order, no plan, no coherent logic to discover from the clues. She never goes full-on nihilistic, not by the slightest, but the edge of anxiety always gnaws at the tale. We find ourselves perhaps more with a figure such as Sam Spade (We didn’t believe you. But we believed your $300 billion dollars).
Lepore never gets quite as cynical as that hero of the hard-boiled detective story, but one does sometimes feel that we are wandering a landscape of darkly lit streets, flickering neon signs, and endless double-crossings. There is never resolution, no stunning return to order and normalcy at the end of X Man. There is only the continued haunting of the present by the chaos of the past. As Lepore remarks toward the end of her saga, “Nothing in the past can tell us what might happen next.”
The detective story approach to history was already present in Lepore’s earlier podcast, The Last Archive, but in X Man she moves over to the not unrelated genre of science-fiction. Here, Lepore claims, are the stories that Musk loved growing up and that continue to inform his efforts to make sense of the world.
To Lepore, however, he profoundly misinterprets the deepest warnings and lessons of science fiction. From Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Karel Capek’s play R.U.R (Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti) to Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler to more contemporary authors, science fiction hinges on the dangers of expertise and tech solutionism, of engineers and scientists thinking they can control the world and bring it to perfection. Emerging during an earlier era of enormous social inequality, imperialism, racism, sexism culminating in world wars about what sort of system might prevail—fascism, communism, liberalism, capitalism—science fiction often questioned, or at least cautioned against, the efforts of those in power to resist democratization. It is, as one of its more recent practitioners tells Lepore, ultimately an extension of the ancient theme of hubris.
The ultimate X in X Man is Musk’s futurism, which to Lepore is anything but . It is, instead, for her, all about the past. Musk’s motives are haunted, even driven, even trapped, by buried stories of the struggles of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. This is where X marks this spot. It’s where the excavation is necessary.
In the course of eight episodes, we learn not only about the obvious parallels between Trump’s MSG rally in 2024 and the infamous German American’s Bund’s 1939 Nazi rally there in 1939, but far murkier and more intriguing origin stories. For instance, Musk’s obsessions with Batman, the Joker, and the Dark Knight remakes of this 1930s comic book figure become a far deeper well lurking below obvious accusations of fascistic tendencies. The supervillian as superhero, one of the themes from Batman, has moved into actual politics. After all, what did Musk call himself, at the 2024 MSG rally? “Dark MAGA.”
Lepore takes us back into the “magnificantly inflated” initiatives of increasingly wealthy tech companies in the early twenty-first century. Some have called their vision “platform capitalism” or “surveillance capitalism” or “identity capitalism.” Lepore proposes we call it “X capitalism.”
She notices that Google named a new division by the letter and of course it would become a hallmark (an x-mark?) of Musk’s career too. “X for extreme, extravagant, existential,” she explains. Tech sought to “save us all” in yet another era of social dysfunction, economic inequality, and this time around, a growing climate catastrophe. Yet in doing so, tech masked the very forces of capitalism that powered its own prominence. Entrepreneurs such as Musk claimed they were here to save us from human extinction, but the X in extinction is the tell. What is causing the problem is precisely their own capitalistic practices, their own drive to secure dominance, wealth, and control for themselves, their dream of visionary engineers capable of exploiting resources, from the natural to the human, in order to save it. “Science fiction as business model,” Lepore calls it.
Before Musk donned his “Dark Maga” hat, the inventor-millionaire-eccentric entrepreneur Tony Stark, or Iron Man, was his model. Rolling Stone magazine literally equated Musk with Stark in a 2017 article (written by another rather problematic, messianic, manipulative figure, the “pick up artist” king Neil Strauss). But the true origins of tech billionaries making their money in the extinction economy of capitalism, only then to argue that it is only tech that can save humanity is to be found, for Lepore, in Musk’s own South African childhood.
Musk (like big tech business partner Peter Thiel) grew up in that nation’s Apartheid system while also, during his early years, absorbing science-fiction parables from Tom Swift‘s boy wonder tales to the absurdist parody of Isaac Asimov’s classic sci-fi work Foundation found in Douglas Adams’ novel Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (itself starting a radio show, like Lepore’s podcast).
Musk’s own father described him as possessing an “X factor” as a young man, but it was Musk’s grandfather, Joshua N. Haldeman, who offers the most fascinating past in which Musk’s vision of the future resides. Having lost his farm in Western Canada during the Great Depression, Haldeman joined the Technocracy movement, an obscure, strange, cultish, vaguely fascistic, science fiction-infused call for engineering expertise to save society. Here, Lepore argues, we can locate the savior complex of big tech, and of eccentric figures such as Musk, who have made their millions within it. Technocracy members even changed their names to numbers, just what Musk himself has done with one of his children, named, you guessed it, X Æ A-12—or X for short.
In the Technocracy vision of the future, all the problems of the past can vanish if we let the technocrats run things. Wearing matching grey suits, as in the masses in the famous 1984 Apple commercial, they would hold rallies and car rallies in matching gray automobiles blasting messages from rooftop speaker horns. Workers of the world unite, and let us run the show, was the main message, or civilization will crumble.
And what if it does? For Musk, we can leave it for outer space. Musk’s SpaceX, of course, blasts off from long-running sci-fi fantasies of a dying earth and a search for escape to Mars or elsewhere, all led by visionary rebel engineers. They will take humanity to “Planet B.” Capitalism destroyed the Earth, now its richest beneficiaries will save us by leading us to new planets where, as Lepore notes, the goal seems to be to establish colonies modeled precisely on the history of colonialism. The goal is not an egalitarian, democratic future, but one that gets rid of all that mess for order and hierarchy. Lepore turns to mixed-race South African comedian Trevor Noah to make the comical point emerge in full. What would we find if we follow Musk to Mars? That we have been brought there to be slaves in this new technocractic dystopia. Space-ism and racism—they are linked. The further away Musk dreams of going, the more his trajectory leads back to the immediacy of the past, always present, in all its traumas—buried, barely, just below the terraform.
Discoveries in the X files continue. To help explain the “domestic politics of Muskism,” Lepore leaps to the “Baby X” experiment published in Ms. Magazine of 1972, in which a baby was not assigned a boy or girl name at birth, as well as more avant-garde, radical science fiction. Here Elon Musk’s strange saga of relationships with women links to the larger vexing Tech Bros relationship to women in general. Short story: the misogyny is never far from the plot for them.
Lepore then takes us to post-gender, feminist, domestic, and other revolutionary visions of the future. These are quite different from the antiquarian and modernist sci-fi that so preoccupies Musk. Mentioning the legacy of Ursula Le Guin and interviewing the contemporary science fiction writer Vandana Singh, Lepore points out that there is much else out there in the sci-fi imagination beyond the masculinist anxieties driving the genre’s most famous texts.
In the dominant version of sci-fi, “boys with toys” are the protagonists, trying to save the day. Yet they can never quite execute their plan. Unruly others keep getting in the way. To wit, the Baby X of 1970s “gender-free” experimentation turned up again as an AI experiment, an algorithmically designed bot named, of course, Baby X. In the 2014 film Ex Machina, the AI is a woman. Modern day computational Frankensteins often get gendered female.
The plots often turn on the question: what happens if the invented, superintelligent being turns on the humans who created it. What if its logic goes berserk? That logic, of course, is the logic of those few in power, in which intelligence is only about how to maximize profit, exploit others, and dominate them for one’s own benefit. As Lepore slyly notes, maybe that isn’t so intelligent.
The deepest fear of conventional sci-fi, she points out, is of the robot rebellion. What if the robots, the women, or, in the case of recent AI, the robot-women, revolt? That’s the deepest worry, Lepore thinks. As perhaps it has always been for the powerful. To flip the saying of Mary Shelley’s husband, “They are few, ye are the many,” the nagging concern for these men is always “They are the many and we the few.” Women, poor people, colonized populations, trans folks: they are the disobedient masses who must be controlled. They are the actual disrupters who keep ruining everything in this little boy’s fantasy of the world. They are…the X factor. If they awaken, watch out.
Woke, indeed. Perhaps shadowed by the noirish history of Cold War “mind control,” we arrive at precisely Musk’s recent shift from identifying climate change as the main problem facing humanity to an obsession with the so-called “woke-mind virus.” By the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, Musk tilted ever-rightward, linking the fantasies of his grandfather’s Technocracy movement ever more closely to the fascistic dimensions of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and eventual victory in 2024. DOGE is the tech-savior vision come true, only the raygun has now become a chainsaw. Shades not of sci-fi but of another genre, horror: Chainsaw Massacre!
It’s really, however, Lepore points out, The Terminator that has become Musk’s key fantasy. Here is a film in which after all, a robot becomes the ultimate Frankenstein, returning from the future to the past to to try to root out those who would oppose its dominance in coming days. Questions linger, though. Is Musk the builder of the terminator, Lepore wonders. Is he the owner of Cyberdyne Systems, the maker of the apocalyptic Skynet? Or does he picture himself as the rebel human in danger of being killed? Or is he the Schwarzeneggerian protagonist himself, come to terminate (in this case federal contracts, grants, and jobs)?
By the end of Lepore’s podcast, we learn that what whatever Musk is, he might most of all be more the end of a story, not the beginning of one. His is a long-running tale of powerful mens’ fears of the rest of us. Robots become fantasies of the proletariat, of women, of the colonized, of the masses. They are only “resource to be exploited,” as contemporary science fiction writer Ted Chang remarks to Lepore, and never equals to be embraced. Anything but democracy. Anything but equality. Only “no-holds barred capitalism” is, as Lepore notes, the vision of what the world has been, or could be, or should be.
Fascism, as Walter Benjamin noticed, comes not only for the living, but also for the dead, not only with manifestos of futurism, but also with a claim on the imagined past as well. For Lepore, as it was for Walter Benjamin during another time of crisis, one response is to reclaim that past by brushing it against the grain to reveal its uglier roots, its buried origins. Might we coax out from there other potential futures than the ones on offer by the powerful elites? It would take, Lepore’s podcast proposes, moving beyond the self-proclaimed alphas to perceive other, yet-to-be-determined X, Y, and Z factors.