How Durable Is Muskism?

The fundamental problem for anyone seeking to narrate the life and career of Elon Musk is that the vast majority of his wealth has accrued over the past six years, during what we might charitably call his “huge fucking clown” phase.

At the start of 2020, Musk had a net worth of around $24 billion. The Elon Musk of the 2010s had by then built a practically bulletproof public image. He made those tens of billions while manufacturing reusable rockets and mass-producing electric cars. He was hailed as the real-life Tony Stark, back when the MCU was not yet cringe.  (Granted, this was just PR. But it was remarkably successful PR. It worked.) 

By contrast, the Elon Musk of the 2020s is the Cybertruck guy who has publicly maligned his estranged trans daughter; he cheats at video games and retweets all of the world’s dumbest conspiracy theories. His rockets are the wrong kind of combustible. He very publicly bought Twitter and very publicly ruined it, revealing himself as both the worst and the thirstiest poster the world has yet seen. He started an AI company to compete with OpenAI, and his AI chatbot dubbed itself “MechaHitler.” He paid hundreds of millions to put Donald Trump back in the White House, then tried to run the government like a startup, and only managed to make himself less popular than Donald Trump. And he did all this while still trying to sell electric cars to liberals who hate Donald Trump.

And yet. 24 billion is just 2.4 percent of 1 trillion. The Elon Musk of the 2010s—the one with the great PR campaign and the exciting companies, the one who wasn’t constantly fretting about white fertility rates and the “woke mind virus,” the one whose business empire was built on fortress futurism, state symbiosis, and financial fabulism—was not the world-bestriding industrialist that the Elon Musk of the 2020s has become. 97.6 percent of his soon-to-be trillion dollars will be attributable to this guy.