Front Burner Presents: The Making of Musk, Episode 2

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Front Burner Presents: The Making of Musk, Episode 2 ("Technocracy, Inc.")

Main Theme

This episode, hosted by Jacob Silverman and presented by Jamie Poisson, delves into the lesser-known history of Elon Musk's family—particularly his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman—and explores the ideological threads connecting Haldeman's radical 1930s technocracy movement to Musk’s own worldview. It traces how the dream of rule by engineers and technocrats mutated over the 20th and 21st centuries, finally converging with the rise of Silicon Valley's tech elite and Musk's own rise to power.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Joshua Haldeman: Musk’s Grandfather and the Birth of Technocracy

• Colorful Family History

  • Jeff Leo, a Regina-based CBC journalist, recounts his surprise at discovering Haldeman's outsized role in Saskatchewan history, describing him as a "larger than life" character who led every organization he joined ([02:26-03:16]).
  • Haldeman's background included farming, chiropractic medicine, politics, aviation, and adventure, making him a Saskatchewan fixture for a decade ([01:28-02:54]).

• The Search for Control in Crisis

  • Haldeman’s life was marked by repeated attempts to impose order on chaos, especially during the desperate years of the 1930s Dust Bowl ([03:49-05:01]).

• Technocracy, Inc.

  • Technocracy Inc. was an early 20th-century movement advocating for government by scientists and engineers instead of politicians, arguing that expertise, not democracy, should steer society ([06:27-07:18]).
  • Haldeman became the leader of the Canadian branch, seeking to reorganize society along strictly rational, technocratic lines ([09:15-10:55]).

"One of the fundamental problems they saw ... was that it was run by politicians who they saw as morons ... rather than being driven by science, study, research, expertise."
— Jeff Leo ([07:18])

2. Anti-Democratic Ideals: Parallels from Grandfather to Grandson

• Authoritarian Echoes
  • Silverman raises the question: Is there a direct ideological thread from Haldeman’s technocracy—antidemocratic, hierarchical—to Musk’s own ideas about governance and technology? ([08:11-08:32])

"When Musk today talks about how governments should run, is there a thread we can trace back through family lore to the ideas his grandfather championed?"
— Jacob Silverman ([08:11])

• Musk’s Own Words
  • A clip of Musk lambasting government bureaucracy (“The government is just like the DMV that got big...”) reinforces the theme of mistrust in democratic institutions and belief in technocratic solutions ([08:32-09:15]).

3. Demise and Migration: Haldeman Leaves Canada

• Clash with Canadian Authorities

  • During the start of World War II, the Canadian government saw Technocracy, Inc. as a potential threat and banned it; Haldeman resisted and was arrested, contributing to his eventual departure from Canada ([11:05-12:16]).

• Prophecy and Apartheid South Africa

  • Inspired by a vague prophecy, Haldeman moved his family to apartheid-era South Africa, attracted by a vision of “order and hierarchy,” which also presaged Musk’s South African upbringing ([13:38-14:43]).

4. The Formation of Myth: Influence on Musk

• Family Storytelling
  • Haldeman’s adventures became part of Musk’s family lore, passed down by Musk’s grandmother, Winifred ("Grandma Winn") ([16:17-16:29]).
  • Both Haldeman and Musk are described as risk-takers, dominating figures in every organization, lovers of aviation, and fiercely political ([16:47-17:43]).

"He thinks he shares some of his spirit of adventure and love of risk."
— Jeff Leo, quoting Musk ([16:47])

• Striking Parallels
  • Silverman and Jeff Leo trace similarities in personality, ambition, and leadership style—both were drawn to leadership, court controversy, and resist any challenge to their authority ([17:01-17:43]).

5. Silicon Valley and the Spread of Technocratic Belief

• Musk’s Arrival in Silicon Valley
  • Musk’s journey from Pretoria to Saskatchewan to the US culminated in Stanford, then startup life—marked from the start by a will to dominate and control ([19:02-22:16]).
  • At Zip2 and later PayPal, Musk displayed a penchant for disregarding others' expertise, sleeping in the office, and cultivating a “singular mind” myth ([21:02-22:05]).

"He’d tell them that they were full of shit and that he knew better."
— Derek Proudian, investor ([21:21])

• Bossism and ‘Bosshood’

  • Will Shoki, South African journalist, links the concept of "baskap" (Afrikaans for "bosshood" or bossism) to Musk's management style: exercising unfettered authority and intolerance for challenge ([23:02-24:07]).

• Hostility Toward Democracy and Participation

  • Musk’s aversion to unions and dissent in his companies is described as a direct hostility to democracy in organizations—favoring top-down control ([24:19-25:05]).

6. The PayPal Mafia: Building New “Technocracies”

• Formation and Influence
  • The episode recounts Musk’s crash (literal and figurative) with Peter Thiel, merger to create PayPal, and the subsequent formation of the “PayPal Mafia”—a network of tech elites with shared roots, including several white South Africans and libertarians ([26:21-35:04]).
  • These networks became influential backers of conservative, anti-democratic causes in the US, echoing technocratic and anti-egalitarian family tendencies ([32:56-35:04]).

"It also created a powerful sustaining network that backed largely conservative politicians and causes… It was a network that would be essential in helping elect Donald Trump president twice." — Jacob Silverman ([30:47-31:35])

• Silicon Valley’s “Culture Fit” for the Technocratic Elite
  • The Valley offered a capitalist, anti-regulatory environment that was a natural fit for Musk and other PayPal alumni from colonial Africa, where rule by the “right” elites was the norm ([35:13-36:20]).

7. The Modern “Techno-Authoritarianism”

• Ascendance of the Tech Elite

  • With Musk at the center, the podcast tracks the rise of a new oligarchy: powerful entrepreneurs like Musk and Marc Andreessen pushing a worldview that privileges technocracy—rule by coders and engineers—and an “antagonism to democracy” ([39:03-39:56]).

• Warning Signs from History

  • Adrienne LaFrance draws parallels to the early Italian futurists, a proto-fascist movement, highlighting the dangerous echoes in the rhetoric and manifestos of today’s tech billionaires ([40:03-41:14]).

"It really has a lot of sort of echoes of the early futurist movement of the 1930s."
— Adrienne LaFrance ([40:03])

• Musk in Politics

  • Musk’s political activism—especially his influence in Trump’s White House, and his public advocacy for replacing democracy with technocracy—is noted as a further hardening of these anti-democratic, elitist ideas ([43:01-44:50]).

• Elite Rule and its Perils

  • Both LaFrance and Silverman close with warnings about the growing, unelected influence of a handful of tech leaders over democracy—and how this power is both seductive and ultimately fragile ([44:50-46:28]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• "He did so much in his life, had so many different chapters." — Jeff Leo on Haldeman ([02:54])
• "The government is just like the DMV that got big." — Elon Musk ([08:32])
• "You see that very plainly in Musk, in the ways he treats organizations that he’s involved in as his own personal fiefdom." — Will Shoki ([23:48])
• "If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself." — Elon Musk ([17:43])
• "He’d tell them that they were full of shit and that he knew better." — Derek Proudian ([21:21])
• "Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown to force them to bow before man." — Adrienne LaFrance, quoting Andreessen's manifesto ([40:31])
• "What meaning does democracy actually have… We don’t live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy." — Elon Musk ([43:01])

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• Intro to Haldeman and Technocracy: [01:28–07:18]
• Technocracy’s Anti-Democratic Ideals: [06:27–10:55]
• Haldeman’s Arrest and Departure: [11:05–12:16]
• Prophecy and South Africa Move: [13:38–14:43]
• Parallels Between Haldeman and Musk: [16:17–17:43]
• Musk’s Early Tech Career & Leadership Style: [19:02–22:05]
• Bossism, Unfettered Power: [23:02–24:07]
• PayPal Mafia & South African Influence: [26:21–35:04]
• Silicon Valley's Ideology and Techno-Authoritarianism: [35:53–39:43]
• Echoes of Fascism in Tech Rhetoric: [40:03–41:14]
• Musk in Politics, Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism: [43:01–46:28]

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Takeaways for Non-Listeners

• Elon Musk’s anti-democratic, technocratic philosophy has deep family roots, linked to his grandfather’s radical advocacy for rule by experts.
• Many early Silicon Valley elites shared ideologies and backgrounds that favored hierarchy and technocracy.
• The culture of "bossism" and disdain for collective governance shaped both Musk's leadership style and the Valley's mythos.
• Techno-authoritarianism, once an obscure fringe ideology, now shapes global power through unelected tech elites.
• The episode underscores the urgent societal questions raised when democracy and diversity are replaced by rule from above—often by the self-anointed “smartest people in the room.”

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Transcript

[Jacob Silverman]

Did you know you can opt out.

[Jamie Poisson]

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[CBC Podcast Announcer]

Book [e-mail] this is a CBC podcast.

[Jamie Poisson]

Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. Back in October we brought you the first episode of the Making of Musk all about Elon Musk's much lesser known past, hosted by Jacob Sil. Now we want to share the rest of the season with you over the next few days. In this second episode, Technocracy Inc. Jacob explores whether Musk's authoritarian streak traces back to his Canadian grandfather. Before Joshua Haldeman brought his family to South Africa, he made waves as part of the radical 1930s technocracy movement. And while the two men's lives only overlapped for three years, we find echoes of Eastern Elon's worldview in Haldeman's protec anti democratic ideology. Have a listen.

[Jeff Leo]

All I knew about Musk's connection to Saskatchewan at that point was that his mom had been born here in Regina, where I live. And that was about it. So imagine my surprise when I start googling his grandpa's name and it's everywhere.

[Jacob Silverman]

Jeff Leo is a senior investigative journalist for CBC based in Regina. When he started looking into Elon Musk's roots, he thought the family's Canadian branch would be a footnote in a much larger story. Instead, he found a man, Elon Musk's grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, who didn't just pass through the history books but seemed determined to leave his name splashed across their pages.

[Jeff Leo]

In a decade in our local newspaper, he showed up like more than 500 times. And it's like Haldeman expresses his views about the grain commission and Haldeman gets in a shouting match with a group of women at the Regina Housewives Society. And I thought, okay, I did not know this. I did not know he was such a character.

[Jacob Silverman]

A farmer turned chiropractor turned politician. Oh, and an amateur pilot, Haldeman was part globetrotting adventurer, part political agitator and part mad visionary. When he wasn't making soapbox speeches, he was boxing, riding broncos or flying planes across continents, spending summers in the Kalahari Desert searching for mythical lost city with his growing family forced to ride shotgun.

[Jeff Leo]

He did so much in his life, had so many different chapters.

[Jacob Silverman]

And then there was his uncanny Forrest Gump like ability to pop up at the strangest intersections of Canadian politics, including a run in with Tommy Douglas, AKA the greatest Canadian, the father of universal healthcare.

[Jeff Leo]

I mean, here's a guy who interacted with some of the most famous Canadians, fought elections against two Canadian prime ministers, led virtually every organization he ended up joining and was just on a frenetic path to try to understand the world and try to have some control in it.

[Jacob Silverman]

Control, it's a word that comes up again and again with Haldeman. His life wasn't just adventure for adventure's sake. There was always a deeper drive to impose order and find certainty in a world that felt like it was spinning apart. And nowhere was that clearer than during the crisis that shaped him.

[Historical Narrator]

The devastation of drought. Starving cattle, their food buried beneath the dust, seek vainly for something to eat, often perishing of hunger by the wayside. Homes abandoned by hundreds as neither man nor beast can live. In the stricken area, dust piled up like snowdrifts in winter. Perhaps a disaster similar to this destroyed earlier civilization.

[Jacob Silverman]

In the 1930s, the Dust bowl raged through Saskatchewan, displacing thousands of farmers and leaving thousands more totally destitute.

[Jeff Leo]

I mean, you see these photos of the time, they were farming sand.

[Jacob Silverman]

It was a brutal time. Just as the region began to bounce back From World War I, the Great Depression hit. And then the dust came.

[Jeff Leo]

The level of desperation was unbelievable and people were searching for solutions and also sort of searching for explanations like what is going on here?

[Jacob Silverman]

The people had been failed by the ruling elites and some were looking for answers. Fringe political movements took root up and down the continent. European style. Right wing fascism found followers in North America. In 1939, months before the world exploded into an all consuming conflict, 20,000 people attended a Nazi rally at New York City's Madison Square Garden organized by the German American Bund.

[Historical Narrator]

If you ask what we are actively fighting for under our charter, first a social just white gentile who ruled United States.

[Jacob Silverman]

But it wasn't just happening on the political right. Communism and left wing worker movements found new adherents, making them immediate targets of government suspicion. Some politically non conformist groups tried to break through the political divide between socialism and capitalism by mixing heterodox beliefs or claiming that they were above politics entirely. One of those groups was Technocracy Incorporated.

[Jeff Leo]

So the basic idea of Technocracy was that technology was moving forward at such a rapid pace that it was going to eventually eliminate most jobs. And so there was a belief that, you know, we needed a fundamental shift in the way society was organized.

[Jacob Silverman]

With society wracked by economic depression in the 1930s and a simultaneous industrial and manufacturing revolution underway, Technocracy Inc. Decided that democracy had become outmoded. Unable to keep up, it was time for a profound reordering of government.

[Jeff Leo]

One of the fundamental problems they saw with the way society was organized at the time was that it was run by politicians who they saw as morons who were essentially being driven around by the whims of the population rather than being driven by science, study, research, expertise. And therefore we're making just continual bad decisions. So the solution was a government by experts, a government by scientists, a government.

[Jacob Silverman]

Who wouldn't be tossed around by the whims of the population.

[Jeff Leo]

So essentially a move away from domestic democracy to technocracy.

[Jacob Silverman]

This all sounds eerily familiar and leaves me wondering. When Musk today talks about how governments should run, is there a thread we can trace back through family lore to the ideas his grandfather championed? Do the two men show the same faith in technology, hierarchy, and the supremacy of individual will?

[Elon Musk]

The government is just like the DMV that got big. So when you say, like, let's have the government do something, you should think, do you want the DMV to do it? If a commercial company operated the way the federal government does, then it would immediately go bankrupt. It would be delisted, the officers would be arrested. If the people of Britain take charge and actually ensure that there's a government that represents their interests and not a government that represents foreign interests, then I think Britain has a great future. If the technology that's coming is used in the right way, we can have an incredibly exciting future. One which is, you know, sort of Star Trek made real.

[Jacob Silverman]

I'm Jacob Silverman, and this is the making of Musk. Episode 2 Technocracy, Inc. A futurist's dream, Technocracy promised a world where scientists and engineers would run society like a perfectly tuned machine. Everyone would benefit. Eliminating inequality, no elections, no political parties. It was an authoritarian blueprint that claimed to be grounded in logic and the ruthless pursuit of efficiency. There wouldn't even be money. It would be replaced with a kind of social credit system based in part on one's energy consumption. Oh, and there wouldn't be separate countries either. The North American continent plus Greenland would be united in a super state called the Technate. For Joshua Haldeman, technocracy represented a way to bring order to a collapsing world, to control the chaos that had upended his life. So he went all in. As with virtually every organization he joined, he eventually became the leader of the Canadian branch of Technocracy, Inc. For its followers, Technocracy promised salvation. But Canada's elected leaders saw something else. Sedition.

[Historical Narrator]

Our first concern is with the defence of Canada. To be helpful to others, we must ourselves be strong, secure and United States.

[Jacob Silverman]

In September 1939, as Hitler unleashed total war on Europe, the Canadian government joined the British in declaring war on Germany. From that moment, Canada was on high alert for subversive organizations that might destabilize the allied cause. Technocracy Inc. Was identified as a threat.

[Jeff Leo]

Our prime minister at the time, William Lyon Mackenzie King, in a speech in the House of Commons said that one of its objectives is, is to overthrow the government and constitution of this country by force.

[Jacob Silverman]

Prime Minister Mackenzie King called for the organization to be banned. Joshua Haldeman, never one to shy away from confrontation, wasn't interested in complying.

[Jeff Leo]

He fought back immediately. He posted an ad and he said, like the Canadian government's making a political blunder, a mistake. This is a dumb move. Go after Technocracy because we're really patriots. And then shortly after that, he was arrested.

[Jacob Silverman]

Haldeman didn't end up doing any prison time. But the arrest and the crackdown on prescribed political groups helped end his role in Technocracy. It also led to him giving up on Canada entirely. He would spend the next decade looking for a place that matched his vision. A society that didn't just tolerate his politics, but embodied them. And like so much in Joshua Haldeman's life, the path to his new forever home was circuitous and surprising with a colorful cast of characters pointing the way. It's 1936. The dust has ravaged Saskatchewan for five years. Haldeman, then still a leader in Technocracy Inc. Is dissatisfied with the path his country is on. So he goes looking for answers. And the first port of call for any self proclaimed technocrat. A medium. Naturally, she offers him a sort of prophecy. A new life would open For Haldeman After 14 years living and working in Regina, Canada.

[Jeff Leo]

And then at the end of that time, he would move to a, quote, faraway place. A city in a faraway place.

[Jacob Silverman]

Like most psychic predictions, its vagueness describes a lot of different possibilities. But Haldeman, a man with apparent regard for both science and spirituality, carried it with him 14 years later, a decade after he'd broken with Technocracy and is once again in the political wilderness. Haldeman meets an Anglican minister from South Africa and the dots begin to connect.

[Jeff Leo]

He became convinced that it was South Africa was that faraway place. And specifically the thing about South Africa that really attracted him was a prophecy that that Anglican minister made and I'll read the prophecy. South Africa will become the leader of white civilization in the world.

[Jacob Silverman]

That sounded good to Haldeman. He moved his family across the ocean to Pretoria, the administrative capital of a newly entrenched apartheid regime. For him it wasn't just a new country, it was a model for the order and hierarchy he believed the world needed. Joshua Haldeman died in a plane crash in 1974 when Elon Musk was three years old. Haldeman, a seasoned pilot, flew into the power lines on his descent into Brits airfield outside Pretoria. He was accompanied by his son in law Peter Ray. This fatal crash and their deaths were a painful tragedy for the family. But it wasn't such an unlikely end for Joshua Haldeman who was an encourageable risk taker and adventurer. His life sounded like a series of quests from one of the role playing games his grandson would enjoy decades later. In addition to flying, he jumped trains, searched for a lost desert city, threw himself into right wing politics and moved his family across the world to help build a country based on that extreme political vision. And while Elon wouldn't remember his grandfather, these myths loomed large.

[Jeff Leo]

Winifred, his wife, was there to narrate and tell the stories and all the adventures from his life.

[Jacob Silverman]

Winifred, or grandma Winn as she was known, was a larger than life character too. A former dancer, sharpshooter and companion to Joshua, she passed away in 2012 and her stories resonated with Musk.

[Jeff Leo]

In commenting on his grandfather, he said, you know, he thinks he shares some of his spirit of adventure and love of risk.

[Jacob Silverman]

The grandson seems modeled on the great man of family lore.

[Jeff Leo]

There are a lot of striking similarities. You know, both men had a love of aviation.

[Elon Musk]

I have a design for a plane.

[Derek Proudian]

You do?

[Jacob Silverman]

Yes.

[Elon Musk]

A better design, I mean probably. I think it is, yeah.

[Jeff Leo]

They both seem to end up leading almost every organization they joined.

[Elon Musk]

Do you work on all of them in a single day? No, no, but I do have, I do have a long work day. I work a lot.

[Jeff Leo]

Both men very much, you know, wore their politics on their sleeve and were not afraid to get in a dust up.

[Elon Musk]

If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go yourself, but go yourself. Is that clear?

[Jacob Silverman]

As Elon Musk turned his attention to right wing politics in recent years, journalists and historians have pointed to his grandfather's story looking for echoes of the anti woke crusader we see today. And they've found them in the characters of the two men certainly, but also in technocracy, whose ideas seem to have trickled into the silicon substrate of tech politics. Nearly a century later, those same ideas, societies led by technologists, not politicians, would find new fertile ground. Not in Saskatchewan, not in Pretoria, but in Silicon Valley, the place Musk would land to stake his own claim to power.

[CBC Podcast Announcer]

Take us back to when you really.

[Jacob Silverman]

Started all of this.

[Elon Musk]

Well, that was the summer of 95. I had no money whatsoever. I was working, doing research in Silicon.

[Jacob Silverman]

Valley on a completely different subject and trying to start this company at the same time. That's Musk reflecting on his arrival in Silicon Valley, the place he had dreamed of when he left South Africa. It had been a long, circuitous route to get there. After he left Pretoria in 1989, he made his way to Saskatchewan, the land of his grandfather, where he still had family. He enrolled at Queen's University in Ontario before successfully transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, now firmly on US soil. The Palo Alto dream was closer than ever. After he graduated from Penn, Musk enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford, the academic engine of Silicon Valley. But he never fully matriculated, never even sat down for a class. Instead, in the great tech industry tradition, Musk dropped out and joined a startup. The company was a web based directory called Zip2.com and it would bring Musk his first great fortune. Zip2 was designed to help newspapers build online city guides, a kind of Yellow Pages meets Google Maps. From the very beginning, Musk worked hard to cast it as a major innovation.

[Derek Proudian]

Elon was always very interested in media attention. I remember him wanting to always be the front person for Zip2 and be on every interview, you know, just get as famous as possible.

[Jacob Silverman]

This is Derek Proudian, a seasoned investor who back in 1996 was funding various startups, looking for the next big thing. From the moment that Proudian met Musk, he was struck by the young South African entrepreneur's confidence.

[Derek Proudian]

This kid's got a kind of reality distortion field that goes around him and you know, after you talk to him for an hour, you're kind of convinced that, you know, up is down and left is right and whatever he wants to get into of it, it's very persuasive.

[Jacob Silverman]

He was an easy person to buy into, but less easy to manage.

[Derek Proudian]

And so he would come into these meetings with executives who had, you know, 20 plus years of experience in their function area and he'd tell them that they were full of shit and that, you know, he knew better.

[Jacob Silverman]

Considering Musk's family folklore and his elite education, it's perhaps not surprising. He landed in a place that believed technologists were kings and that the smartest person in the room should be in charge, even if they had no experience. Because that person, in Musk's mind, was always him. He was 26 years old with no track record. But on the Silicon Valley score sheet, his intensity and devotion marked him as a potentially great entrepreneur.

[Derek Proudian]

You know, Elon would routinely sleep in the office and he would park his car in a local lot and, you know, he just accumulated, you know, dozens and dozens of tickets that he never paid.

[Jacob Silverman]

The sort of charismatic, single minded leader who would sleep in the office. A Musk hallmark. From Tesla to doge or tackle boardroom naysayers head on, it seems from the very beginning, Musk had a clear idea of how things should run. He did not want to collaborate. He wanted control. At Zip2, that instinct created tension, but it also gave him a model for how to lead, act with certainty, silence, dissent, and keep decision making at the top. It would become a defining pattern, one that some recognized instantly.

[CBC Podcast Announcer]

A lot of corporate South Africa was organized around this idea of baskap, which is an Afrikaans term which means bosshood or bossism. And what that meant is that you were the big boss in charge. You were the. The big man and figure to whom everyone should be different and obsequious to.

[Jacob Silverman]

Boss cop, the big boss, the unquestioned authority. This is Will Shoki again, the South African journalist we heard from last episode who sees a connection between this management style and the worldview Musk was raised in. It's an attitude he carried with him into every company he built.

[CBC Podcast Announcer]

You see that very plainly in Musk, in the ways in which he treats the organizations that he's involved in as his own personal fiefdom and so feels as if he has unfettered executive power that cannot be challenged and cannot be questioned.

[Jacob Silverman]

And as we've seen from Musk's many public blowups, boardroom dramas, and his sundered relationship with Trump, the world's richest man, doesn't take well to being challenged.

[CBC Podcast Announcer]

It translates one, his commitment to really being the boss, and two, feeling very intensely any threats to that power, whether it's from affirmative action programs that diversify the color and identities of skilled workers, or whether it's from organized working class members of unions who are fighting for better pay and better wages. His fierce crackdown on any kind of union organizing in his organizations shows this hostility to democracy and to participation.

[Jacob Silverman]

It seems from his very first venture, the myth was already forming. Elon the visionary Elon the founder, Elon the singular mind, a story that would grow more powerful with each new startup, even when it wasn't quite true. But the myth would build. Elon's next big move would take his ambitions to the stars. And in keeping with so many of his future ventures, it would start with a crash.

[Elon Musk]

There are two kinds of Canadians those who feel something when they hear this music, and those who've been missing out so far. I'm Chris Howden.

[Jamie Poisson]

And I'm Nil Kurgsal. We are the co hosts of as It Happens, and every day we speak with people at the center of the day's most hard hitting, heartbreaking and sometimes hilarious news stories.

[Elon Musk]

Also, we have puns here. Why as It Happens is one of Canada's longest running and most beloved shows. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts.

[Jacob Silverman]

It's March 2000, and the California sun is setting over Palo Alto's Sand Hill Road, where many blue chip venture capital firms have offices. A silver McLaren F1, the fastest production car in the world, winds through the quiet streets. Elon Musk, 28 years old, sits behind the wheel of the one indulgence he allowed himself with his Zip2 windfall US$22 million. If you're wondering. He used the rest to launch a payments startup called X.com and in the passenger seat is a man who might be the answer to his next big payday, Peter Thiel. The two men are in the midst of negotiating a merger between X.com and Confinity, their respective Internet banking startups. Musk is driving them to an investor meeting, which could help get this thing over the finish line. Musk and Thiel were both supremely ambitious. Their personalities didn't always gel following them over the years. Thiel always appeared to me as reserved, cold, a congenital contrarian with a superiority complex. Musk was far more buoyant, dramatic, a troll with a superiority complex. Their relationship was frosty at times and would later be derailed, at least temporarily, over a boardroom coup. But for now they've decided that it might be better to join forces than remain rivals. And what better way to seal the deal than with a drive in a 627 horsepower car than Musk barely knew how to handle on northern California's winding roads? Egging on his colleague a bit, Thiel prods Musk to open up the throttle on the million dollar supercar. What can this thing do? Thiel asks. Musk slams the accelerator. The McLaren lurches forward like a rocket. The speedometer needle dances higher and higher. But here's the thing about having 627 horsepower at your disposal. Sometimes you get more than you bargained for. The car spins out on the iconic Silicon Valley roadway. It hits an embankment and goes airborne, making a full 360 degree horizontal turn through the air. Musk's McLaren crashes to the ground. Incredibly, both men make it out with only a few scratches. The car, one of only 106 ever made, is a total loss. It's also uninsured. But Musk and Thiel still have an important meeting to get to. So they stick out their thumbs and hitchhike over to Sequoia Capital, the most storied VC firm in tech. Having cheated death, it's time to close that deal. This is the kind of story that fits neatly into both family lore and Silicon Valley legend. The risk taker who courts chaos and walks away unscathed. Just another sign his success was inevitable. Which in this case, it was. In March 2000, the merger was finally complete. The new firm would soon be known as PayPal, and it became a giant. Over the years, Musk has positioned himself as a co founder of PayPal. In reality, the company was built on the combined work of both camps. And Musk's tenure as CEO was brief. He was even replaced while away on his honeymoon. But what mattered was what PayPal gave him. Money and a network. It made him rich enough to start dreaming on a different scale. And it tied him to a circle of entrepreneurs who would go on to shape the future of Silicon Valley.

[Derek Proudian]

PayPal collected a whole bunch of people who were young and intense and were entrepreneurial themselves. And then all of a sudden it was bought by ebay. So a bunch of these folks are like, okay, we're well, what do I do next?

[Jacob Silverman]

This is Reid Hoffman, who after working at PayPal, founded LinkedIn. Speaking in 2014 to Bloomberg, YouTube, Reddit, SpaceX, Palantir, Yelp, Affirm. These multi billion dollar companies were all founded by PayPal alumni. The company became a pipeline, churning out new tech elites and massively valuable startups. Others would join influential venture capital and finance firms or found their own. It also created a powerful sustaining network that backed largely conservative politicians and causes. Reid Hoffman is a rare Democrat among them. It's a network that would be essential in helping elect Donald Trump president twice.

[Derek Proudian]

We all have still really tight network and so we're all calling each other going, hey, I'm thinking about doing this. What do you think?

[Jacob Silverman]

Who do you call for what?

[Derek Proudian]

So for example, macroeconomic financial, bold models. I'll call Peter for a willingness to just think super big with risk is not a variable.

[Jacob Silverman]

Elon that close knit web of phone calls and favor trading is the stuff of Silicon Valley myth. Founders and investors debating business ideas, pooling capital and backing each other's plays across decades. And it earned them a nickname, the PayPal mafia. A living network bound together by shared history, shared wealth, and often shared politics. And if you trace those connections far enough, some of them lead back to the same place half a world away. South Africa.

[CBC Podcast Announcer]

You know, it's very hard to concretely speculate about how it happened that so many white South Africans found themselves working for the same startup and have since orbited around the same political and economic networks.

[Jacob Silverman]

That is journalist Will Shockey again. In addition to Musk, three key figures in the PayPal mafia have ties to Southern Africa. First and foremost, there's Peter Thiel, Musk's joyride buddy. The son of German evangelical Christians, Thiel's early life was spent in South Africa and what is now called Namibia, which was part of the South African border wars we learned about in episode one. Today he may be best known for his work as a venture capitalist and for his company Palantir, which plays a shadowy role in how governments collect and manage data, especially for surveillance. Unlike Musk, Thiel has always been an openly political animal, describing himself as a libertarian since his undergraduate days at Stanford. According to biographer Max Chafkin, when Thiel was at Stanford in the late 80s, he spoke approvingly of apartheid. During his time there, he also founded the Stanford Review, a conservative newspaper that would become a launching pad for numerous like minded venture capitalists and startup founders, many of whom went to work for Thiel. Another member of the PayPal mafia was its COO, the Cape Town born David Sachs, who later became a successful tech CEO and venture capitalists after helping wrangle other tech conservatives to back Donald Trump during the 2024 election. Sachs is now the president's crypto and AI czar. Then there's Roloff Bua, who is PayPal's CFO. Buther is the grandson of Pick Buther, a key player in apartheid South African politics. Now Roloff Buta is a partner at Sequoia, the most important venture capital firm in the Valley, and the one that Thiel and Musk were on their way to in 2000 when Musk crashed his supercar. So is it a coincidence that so many of these people have this connection to apartheid era South Africa?

[CBC Podcast Announcer]

It's a very subtle thread, but the.

[Jacob Silverman]

Thread is There it starts with some of the economic ideas behind both places.

[CBC Podcast Announcer]

The apartheid regime had long justified itself as a sebastian of free enterprise against communism. And libertarian tech culture provided a new narrative for some of the same pro business, anti egalitarian impulses to thrive.

[Jacob Silverman]

Apartheid South Africa sold itself as a capitalist frontier. The place where business could thrive without interference, where the right people could build empires without regulations or workers rights getting in the way. Silicon Valley in the 2000s, it was selling a pretty similar dream, albeit with much better marketing.

[CBC Podcast Announcer]

They did kind of ride this wave of a kind of hyper capitalist, anti regulation, move fast and break things culture that in a sense is ideologically convenient for those who have already had a head start, that is in, in apartheid. I think it just felt almost natural for them that Silicon Valley would be the next frontier in living out this upbringing that had taught them to see the world in a specific way.

[Jacob Silverman]

Sounds like they'd found a culture fit. So we have this picture emerging. A group of white entrepreneurs from colonial Africa who found their perfect playground in Silicon Valley's male driven, move fast and break things culture. And at the center of it all is Musk, armed with what Will calls bossism, this deeply ingrained belief that he's the unquestioned authority in any room he enters. Like his grandfather, he also believes that engineers should be in charge of society. After the sale of PayPal helped spawn the PayPal mafia, Musk was no longer just another startup founder. He had the money and the self belief that he can engineer his way out of any problem. He exhibited the kind of evangelical faith in technology that was essential for any entrepreneur looking to make it in the Valley. As his star rose, that faith hardened into something more severe, something like zealotry. According to Musk's evolving worldview, there was nothing top engineers couldn't do. And he was hardly the only one thinking this way. Did it seem like a big deal?

[Adrienne LaFrance]

Yeah, I mean, it was a really big deal among Silicon Valley types. Sort of the accelerationist crowd as they call themselves. And it's just.

[Jacob Silverman]

This is Adrienne LaFrance, the executive editor of the Atlantic magazine. She's telling me about this moment back in 2023 when a 5,000 word manifesto started lighting up text circles. It was written by a Silicon Valley pioneer, the co inventor of the web browser, a kingmaker, investor and political power player.

[Adrienne LaFrance]

Marc Andreessen is one of the most influential figures in tech. And he's someone who has been sort of interested in being kind of a public intellect, for lack of a better term. For many Many years.

[Jacob Silverman]

In his Techno Optimus Manifesto, Andreessen laid out a totalizing vision. Technology is always the answer. Stop the techno skeptic hand wringing, pursue unfettered innovation, and let technologists and entrepreneurs and venture capitalists lead the way. Humanity, he promised, would benefit.

[Adrienne LaFrance]

A lot of the language of this ideological movement is couched in sort of like building a better world, a world free from diseases, more leisure time.

[Jacob Silverman]

You know, there's something compelling about that, but it's also simplistic.

[Adrienne LaFrance]

Technology is amazing. I love technology.

[Jamie Poisson]

It's great.

[Adrienne LaFrance]

I think where this movement becomes alarming is when it bleeds into authoritarianism and oligarchy.

[Jacob Silverman]

And so, as Adrian implies, the blind celebration of builders masks a political transformation happening, one where billionaire moguls like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk amass great power. They and a handful of peers decide how technologies are built, deployed, and who profits.

[Adrienne LaFrance]

It's a very reductionist worldview. That sort of tech is always good. If you can build it, you should. And anyone who questions you is the enemy. It's very antagonistic to, to skeptics, to anyone who would ask questions.

[Jacob Silverman]

Maybe that's why Andreessen has blocked me and so many other journalists on X. And there's something else troubling.

[Adrienne LaFrance]

One thing that really jumps out at me is it really has a lot of sort of echoes of the early futurist movement of the 1930s.

[Jacob Silverman]

Futurism was an Italian movement that glorified speed, machines and violence, ideas that later fed directly into Mussolini's fascism. And sometimes these echoes are more explicit than others.

[Adrienne LaFrance]

There is one section of Andreessen's manifesto that directly quotes, with one word swapped out from the manifesto of Futurism, which was, you know, an early pre fascist document. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown to force them to bow before man.

[Jacob Silverman]

Andreessen had simply changed the word poetry to technology. Covering the tech right. For the last few years, I've realized that some of them, like Marc Andreessen, will come right out and say what they think. They'll quote a proto fascist text, or they'll share some pretty eye raising comments by Internet Nazis. You know, the guys with pseudonymous X accounts with Greek statue avatars and a creepy reverence for a fictionalized American past. With many of today's tech billionaires, the truth is in their social media posts, podcast interviews and manifestos. From their own words and gestures, you can recognize a will to power and an impatience with democracy that has made them eager to break the existing political order. Elon Musk is much the same, issuing bold middle of the night statements about the decline of Western civilization. But Musk also has the Internet trolls capacity for brazen provocation followed by denial and misdirection. No, you didn't see what you just saw. When on inauguration day, a grateful Musk gave what looked like two Nazi salutes to a crowd of fans, many political observers described it as just that. However, Musk and his defenders summoned a range of excuses about how the supposed Roman salute was a benign, heartfelt gesture, with many arguing that Musk was just.

[CBC Podcast Announcer]

Trying to do a hand gesture for.

[Jacob Silverman]

My heart goes out to you, but I no, no. It was an international salute that we've.

[Derek Proudian]

Had for maybe the last 10,000 years.

[Jacob Silverman]

This salute, truther ism is outrageous. This is the most do it right now.

[Historical Narrator]

This is the biggest.

[Jacob Silverman]

No people, you didn't see what you just saw. The popular term for this kind of thing, especially when done by the richest person in the world, is gaslighting.

[Elon Musk]

What meaning does democracy actually have? If the people cannot vote and have their will be decided by their elected representatives, then we don't live in a democracy, we live in a bureaucracy.

[Jacob Silverman]

This is Musk speaking from the oval office in February 2025. He's standing next to Trump with his son X at his feet, pitching Doge as a savior of democracy in America. And Musk seems sincere, warning that an unelected bureaucracy is stymying the democratic will of the people. But at the same time, here is an unelected billionaire in the Oval Office telling us what democracy means. And it seems to mean replacing Federal employees with 19 year old coders in AI software. A technocracy, in other words. But maybe not one that would have impressed his grandfather. Technocracy Inc. Imagined a highly centralized state run by engineers and scientists, not a libertarian free for all, dominated by billionaires. Musk and Andresen's vision is rooted in a very different creed, one that puts power in the hands of a small elite, but keeps the state itself as thin as possible. With Musk and Andreessen, an elite tech political class has seized enormous influence for itself, and it only wants more. I've been thinking about this new class of power brokers a lot in recent years. As I wrote a book about the tech right and the 2024 election. It was the same context that inspired Adrian to write a piece titled the Rise of Techno Authoritarianism.

[Adrienne LaFrance]

I felt that people needed to understand the outsized political Influence that these many tech leaders are having, not just political influence, but influence sort of on all of our lives. In particular, a small group of tech leaders really see themselves as the ones who should be making decisions on behalf of a population that didn't elect them. And that alarmed me.

[Jacob Silverman]

Adrian wrote her article before the election, but its contours were coming into view. And the authoritarian posture she described only became more visible and more influential as Musk put more than $200 million toward electing Donald Trump, while his colleagues, like Marc Andreessen, contributed millions more. Don't get me wrong, Silicon Valley has given a lot of donations to Democrats over the years, but this was something different. Not just donations, but direct involvement, advice, even staffing. An unprecedented shift. And it seemed these men had found another culture fit a reactionary politics that gave them common cause with Trump's MAGA movement.

[Adrienne LaFrance]

There is a sort of permanent sense of being the underdog despite being the most powerful people in the world. And I think some of this has to do with the culture of Silicon Valley and how it's evolved, you know, from the era in which it was just like, you know, optimistic nerds working on cool things in their garages to this point at which the power has so consolidated and is so in the hands of a few.

[Jacob Silverman]

The optimism of the garage tinkerer had curdled into grievance, paranoia, and a hunger for power. It had moved beyond boardrooms and corporate back channels to the most public stage. Silicon Valley titans traded their flip flops and hoodies for tailored suits. Standing together at Trump's second inauguration, a government flanked not by elected representatives, but by self anointed technocrats and Musk at its heart. But for all that power, Musk's own story and his eventual break with President Trump shows how fragile his sense of control can be. Musk's highly leveraged empire is sustained by his ego and showmanship, by his ability to constantly raise money and shuffle around assets. It's massive but fragile. And nowhere is that fragility more exposed than inside his own family. Next time on Understood the making of Musk.

[Elon Musk]

The reason it's called dead naming is because your son is dead. So my son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke wine virus.

[Jacob Silverman]

I was literally like, hell no. I am not about to let this bitch come for me and have that just slide. So I had my little threats response and it went mega coconuts viral. The podcast contacted Elon Musk through his family office. He did not respond to our request for comment. Understood the making of Musk is a chalk and blade production for cbc. It is written and produced by Jason Phipps, M. Walley, Eva Krisiak and me, Jacob Silverman. This episode features clips from British Pathe, First Look Media, cbs, SG Trader, Hindustan Times, cbc, Joe Rogan, Bill Maher, Khan Academy, cnbc, Bloomberg NBC, Jordan Peterson and Matt Bernstein. Matthew Blackman is our South African story consultant. Fabiola Carletti is our coordinating producer. Mixing and sound design by Julian Uzieli and Julia Whitman. Our story editor is Derek John. Our Executive producer is Nick McCabe. Locos, You can follow Understood on whatever app you're using to listen to me now and check out my previous season, the Naked Emperor, a deep dive into fallen crypto king Sam Bankman Fried.

[Jamie Poisson]

That was the second episode of the Making of Musk. We'll be back tomorrow with episode three.

[Elon Musk]

For more CBC podcasts go to CBC CA Podcasts.