Muskism summary

Musk soon found his way to Silicon Valley. This is where he learned how to turn ideas into companies, and companies into monopolies. Thanks to his new environment, Muskism would soon start to exist in the real world. 

And it was all fueled by the exponential spread of the internet. 

In March 2002, Elon Musk incorporated Space Exploration Technologies – SpaceX. His ultimate ambition was massive: to colonize Mars. He got his first big push when eBay bought PayPal. Musk, still a major shareholder, walked away with $180 million after taxes. It was exactly the boost he needed to get SpaceX going.

And once again, the government would play a central role in the company’s survival. 

In the late 2000s the cleantech boom swept through Silicon Valley. The Obama administration was experimenting with “green capitalism,” a policy aimed at reducing dependence on foreign oil. The perfect brewing ground for Tesla. 

Musk took over Tesla in 2008, four years after having been touted as an investor by its founders, engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. One year later, in June 2009, Tesla received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy. 

“I am become meme,” Musk tweeted on July 22, 2019. The idea would soon become a running joke for him. But how did it come up in the first place?

Let’s rewind a bit. The 2010s were the decade of the new tech giants. Facebook bought Instagram and Whatsapp, Microsoft bought LinkedIn, and Google became Alphabet. This was the time Musk decided to get active online. Really active. In 2017, he was already tweeting an average of three times per day. By 2018, that had doubled. By 2024, he was posting sixty times per day on average, sometimes even hitting forty times in one hour. 

“We’re like a giant cyborg. That’s actually what society is today.” That’s what Musk told OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman at a Vanity fair event in 2015.

To Musk, we had already gone a long way in integrating with machines, and social media was playing a central role. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter were, in his words, “giant cybernetic collectives,” networks where man and machine were merged as one. 

In October 2022, Musk made the shock move of acquiring Twitter for $44 billion – eight times the company’s 2021 revenue. He rebranded it as X. Financially, the acquisition made little sense. But that wasn’t the point. Acquiring Twitter was about taking the reins in the online sphere to weed out the woke mind virus. 

Musk quickly laid off 80 percent of Twitter staff, pushing the rest to just work harder. Then he set to work restoring the voice of the far-right. He reinstated hundreds of banned far-right users, and changed the platform’s verification system, making it subscription-based.  

Trump was sworn in for his second term on January 20, 2025. Within half an hour of the ceremony commencing, DOGE workers had information files on millions of federal workers. Only a few days later, they sent a mass email out. Its message was simple: Quit now with paid leave or risk getting axed. 

The Department of Government Efficiency represented a new level for Musk. His previous ventures had relied heavily on support from the government. Now he was in it himself. And he would wreak havoc, all in the name of modernization.