I’ll start this review with a confession: I try to ignore reactionary rich guys who try to dominate the news cycle. I think of it as a practice to protect my mental health and a way to deprive them of the attention and clicks they seem to crave. Yet after hearing these authors give a compelling book talk I ended up picking up this slim work analysing the Musk economic and ideological system and couldn’t put it down.

Slobodian and Tarnoff cover Elon Musk’s South African upbringing, his uncanny ability to be technologically ahead of the curve and raise capital through “finacial fabulism”, and eventually his fear of AI, the desire to merge with it, and his social media fuelled rightward turn to some truly repulsive ideas about race, gender, class.

The authors avoid the traps painting him one dimensionally as a genius, or villian, or lunatic. Instead it is well researched with his bizarre behavior well contextuallized within broader movements. The authors idea of “cyborg conservativism” where Musk both is a transhumanist while hating trans people was especially illuminating. To him the “woke mind virus” isn’t a joke. He seems to see the world as code and human empathy and progressivism as a suicidal bug that must be erradicated before humanity can ascend.

I wonder how we stand stand up against the worlds richest man who is literally fighting to change what it means to be human, who is using his immense capital to accelerate the exact idealogies and technologies that I fear the most.