10 Historian Quinn Slobodian and tech writer Ben Tarnoff present an impressive portrait of Elon Musk and the world that made him. Muskonomics: A New Book About Elon Musk Explains How He Came To Be By Luis Polanco Named after American industrialist and business magnate Henry Ford, “Fordism” describes a 20th-century economic and manufacturing strategy that advocates for mass production and mass consumption. The term has come to be used in economic and business contexts, but it also has come to describe an implicit set of social norms about work and family that play out in broader society. What Henry Ford was to the 20th century, Elon Musk might be to the 21st century. At least, that’s what writers Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff argue in their joint book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed (Harper, 256 pgs., 2026, $30). Muskism proposes that Musk is our era’s comparable industrialist who ushers in a new economic epoch. For Slobodian and Tarnoff, Musk is an interesting specimen representing a changing worldview that merges technology and politics. When you get a historian and a tech writer to co-write a book on one of the most prominent contemporary global figures, you get fascinating results. Slobodian, a professor of international history at Boston University, has written several books, including Hayek’s Bastards, for which he received a National Book Critics Award in criticism. Tarnoff is a frequent contributor to New York Review of Books and author of Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future. Slobodian and Tarnoff each bring a distinct perspective when brought together, and for that reason, they make a compelling pair to tackle Musk. Muskism is a book about the life and career of Elon Musk, but it more importantly addresses the historical trends and circumstances that have shaped and given rise to Musk as an international citizen, businessman, entrepreneur, rocket enthusiast, former advisor to the current United States president, and Internet troll. Slobodian and Tarnoff cover Musk’s upbringing in apartheid South Africa, his early career in Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom, his founding of the aerospace manufacturer SpaceX in 2002, and his takeover of Tesla, the automotive company known for its battery-powered electric vehicles. The second half of the book aims to track Musk’s preoccupation with the idea of “cyborgs,” a term that is short for “cybernetic organism” and represents the merger of the biological and the mechanical or electronic. In the second half, the authors also discuss Musk’s online antics, especially on X (formerly Twitter), and how those antics triggered business decisions. The first half chronicles the emergence of a new type of economy steeped in the increasing importance of technology firms and new entrepreneurial ventures, while the second demonstrates why Musk has sought to gain a foothold not only in communication platforms but artificial intelligence and other technologies that aim to automate human capacities. Slobodian and Tarnoff arrive at unexpected and perceptive explanations of how different stages of Musk’s life brought forth key tenets of Muskism. For example, in discussing apartheid South Africa in the 1980s, the authors discuss how apartheid embodied Muskism because it relied on technology to entrench social inequality. “[A]partheid South Africa was the cradle of Muskism,” the authors write. “It taught the lesson of fortress futurism: the belief that technology can strengthen self-reliance in a hostile world.” When Slobodian and Tarnoff turn to the early days of Silicon Valley, they write, “Silicon Valley would teach him that the real opportunity didn’t lie in escaping the state but grafting onto it—using its guarantees as scaffolding for private gain.” While the founding ideology of Silicon Valley was that networked technology would sideline the role of the state, Musk instead saw that technology could be integrated with state functions and resources for private profit. In the authors’ view, Musk positions himself as an intermediary between different actors within the federal government. On the topic of Musk’s involvement and development of SpaceX, the authors point out, “In space, the state would finance the development of ‘fundamental technologies,’ as Musk said. Publicly funded innovations in rocketry would be central to SpaceX’s success. But that wasn’t all: the state would also become a customer.” By becoming the recipient of funding meant to advance technological development, Musk could then turn around and sell back to the state. Slobodian and Tarnoff deliver an incisive read on the subject of Tesla. “If Tesla is the company that most defines Musk in the eyes of the public,” they write, “it also offers the most complete example of Muskism in action.” They identify three developments that allowed for Tesla’s success: its position as the beneficiary of public investment with the Obama-era attempt to generate a green energy economic recovery; its position as one of the era’s major technology companies alongside FAANG (Facebook, now known as Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google, now known as Alphabet); and its model of vertical integration that allows it to exist within the political and geographic confines of one nation as compared to the older multinational corporations. Muskism synthesizes biographical detail with broad historical developments to illuminate both the individual life of a contentious personage and to reveal something novel about the direction of the economy and politics. As Slobodian and Tarnoff write in their conclusion, “No person embodies the twentyfirst-century man-machine more than the subject of this book, Elon Musk.” VIDEOAGE October 2026 Book Review
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