Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian argue that Elon Musk isn’t just a tech billionaire with odd behavior. His moves—taking over Twitter, pushing for private space travel, championing AI development—add up to a coherent set of ideas about how markets, state power, and technology should fit together. They call this “Muskism,” and they compare it to Fordism: an organized ideology that can be described, critiqued, even mapped out in stages. In their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Tarnoff and Slobodian trace Musk’s vision back to his earliest ventures. They show how he uses charisma to attract top engineers, leverages government support for space exploration, then turns it into private profit. They detail the pattern: propose a grand technological goal, enlist public resources, then privatize the gains—and frame failure as part of the legend. That cycle, they say, ties into a broader push to reshape democracy itself. Max Read’s conversation with them presses on the question of coherence. Musk’s positions on climate change, labor rights, and free speech often seem contradictory. Yet Tarnoff and Slobodian insist there’s a consistent logic: accelerationism. He wants society to move faster, break existing norms, concentrate power in fewer hands. They point to his handling of Twitter—dismantling content moderation, promising absolute free speech—as a real-world experiment in radical deregulation. If you want more detail, check out their Law and Political Economy project essay, “Muskism as Fordism.” It lays out key phases—shake-up, scaling, enclosure—and compares them to Henry Ford’s mass-production model. Then listen to the full Unpopular Front chat to hear Tarnoff and Slobodian flesh out examples, from Tesla’s factory politics to SpaceX’s government contracts.