Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:06]
Jill Lepore
Pushkin. This is an iHeart podcast.
- [00:14]
Justin Richmond
This is Justin Richmond from Broken Record. The three things I love about summer are pool days, blaring, all the new summer songs that come out, and endless refreshing iced drinks from Starbucks. Even better, my favorite summer drink has returned to Starbucks. The Summer Berry Refresher is available now, a mix of berry flavors shaken with ice and poured over raspberry flavored pearls. It's light, vibrant and just as refreshing as the summer fun you'll be having. So queue up your playlist and head over to Starbucks to check out their summer menu. There's something for everyone, from creamy cold brews to ice cold refreshers. Your Summer Berry Refresher is ready at Starbucks.
- [00:52]
Oracle Representative
In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three at the same time? That's exactly what Cohere, Thomson Reuters and Specialized Bikes have since they upgraded to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure OCI is the blazing fast platform for your infrastructure, database, application development and AI needs where you can run any workload in a high availability, consistently high performance environment and spend less than you would with other clouds. How is it faster? OCI's block storage gives you more operations per second cheaper. OCI costs up to 50% less for computing, 70% less for storage and 80% less for networking better. In test after test, OCI customers report lower latency and higher bandwidth versus other clouds. This is the cloud built for AI and all your biggest workloads right now with zero commitment. Try OCI for free. Head to oracle.com strategic that's oracle.com strategic.
- [01:59]
Indeed Representative
You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites with Indeed sponsored Jobs. Your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit. To get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com podkatz13 just go to Indeed.com podkatz13 right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.
- [03:01]
Jill Lepore
Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet long before Donald Trump appointed him to run Doge, a Department of Government efficiency. Musk had plans. Plans to save the world from climate catastrophe with electric cars and solar panels and underground tunnels. Plans to colonize Mars. Plans to build chips to put in people's brains. He is followed by more than 200 million people on social media. He has two ex wives and 11 children, including a son named X. The bare facts of Musk's life, the way they're usually told, make him sound like a fictional character, a comic book superhero. But what's the real story, the actual history behind the comic book? Welcome to the Elon Musk origin story. I'm Jill Lepore. I'm a professor of history and law at Harvard. For a long time, I've been studying the relationship between technological and political change. I'm fascinated by visions of the future in political discourse, in literature, in science fiction, and even comic books. This series I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism I call muskism. Extravagant extreme capitalism, Extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices are driven by earnings, but also by fantasies. Fantasies that you can find in blockbuster superhero movies, but that come from science fiction, some of it a century old. Elon Musk runs a rocket company. It's called SpaceX. His artificial intelligence company, Xai, the name he gave to Twitter after he bought it. X. Musk loves the letter X. One of his first big startups, X.com? x is sexy, as in X rated. But X is sexy because X means mysterious and X means mysterious because in 1637 when Rene Descartes sat down to write a treatise on geometry, he decided to use X, Y and Z for variables. But his printer setting the type kept running out of Y's and Z's but not X's because you don't use X very often in French. So he used mostly X's. X the unknown. In the 20th century, X became science fiction writers favorite letter of the Alphabet.
- [05:39]
Narrator
Dimension X, X, X, X, X, X.
- [05:43]
Jill Lepore
X, X for extraterrestrial, as in the film the Strange World of Planet X. Be prepared for a fantastic adventure into the future. A monstrous world of terror and chaos. By the 1990s, X Men, Xbox, X Files, and then elon Musk and X.com, spaceX. Something strange was happening to capitalism. As the gap between the rich and the poor got wider and wider, the claims of corporations got more and more grandiose. Google opened an R and D division called X whose aim was to solve some of the world's hardest problems. Tech companies started talking about their mission and their mission was always magnificently inflated, transforming the future of work, connecting all of humanity, making the world a better place. Scholars kept groping for adjectives to describe these new brands of capitalism. Surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, identity capitalism. What about just ex capitalism X for extreme, extravagant, existential. A capitalism in which companies worry very publicly and quite feverishly about planetary disaster, about the all too real catastrophe of climate change, but also about all sorts of so called existential risks to the future of the human race so that they can save us all. A capitalism animated by catastrophe. A capitalism driven by science fiction and driven too, by the disavowal of its own origins. To recover that history, each episode of X Man, we're blasting off to the past. This episode is called Dimension X. Our first destination in time and space is is South Africa in the 1970s. Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971. His father, Errol, was an engineer who owned a construction business. His mother was a former model. They had three kids. Elon was the oldest. His parents got divorced when he was still a boy. Errol Musk has lately become a prominent figure in his son's shadow. Outspoken and controversial, he's compared the jailed far right activist Tommy Robinson to Nelson Mandela and predicted Robinson would one day be Britain's Prime Minister. Errol Musk's relationship with his oldest son is fraught, but he's always maintained that Elon is a genius, as he did about a decade ago during an interview with South Africa's Radio 702. There's something about Elon that's an X factor. What is that?
- [08:31]
Errol Musk
Yeah, I would say that he's always been a very deep thinker. You know, when he was very small, for example, he would ask me, where is the whole world?
- [08:42]
Jill Lepore
The story of Elon Musk's childhood, as it's usually told, is right out of science fiction, from a genre known as the Boy Wonder story. My favorites are the Tom Swift books, a series that started in 1910.
- [08:55]
Narrator
Tom Swift and his electric runabout, the.
- [08:59]
Tom Swift Character
Speediest car on the road.
- [09:01]
Narrator
Barton Swift, esteemed inventor, was drawing a complicated machine, pausing to make some intricate.
- [09:08]
Tom Swift Character
Calculations, when his young son interrupted him.
- [09:14]
Indeed Representative
I'm gonna build an electric runabout, dad.
- [09:17]
Jill Lepore
Hmm.
- [09:18]
Tom Swift Character
I don't take much stock in electric autos, Tom. All the electric runabouts I ever saw didn't seem able to go so very fast or very far.
- [09:31]
Indeed Representative
That's true, but it's because they didn't have the right kind of battery. It seems to me that if you put the right kind of battery into an automobile, it could scoot along pretty lively.
- [09:44]
Jill Lepore
That Tom Swift story was published more than a century ago. But the way Errol Musk tells it, Little Elon was that same boy wonder.
- [09:51]
Errol Musk
When the computers came out, right in the beginning, he came to me and said he would like to have one of these new computers.
- [10:02]
Jill Lepore
In 1984, when Elon Musk was 12, he sold a video game to PC magazine for $500. It's called Blastar. Black screen, Little squarey blobs, Space Invader style. Our mission, destroy alien freighter carrying deadly hydrogen bombs and Status Beam machines. So don't get me wrong, Elon Musk really was a whiz kid. And when Elon Musk tells his own origin story, like when he spoke at the Computer History Museum in California, that's how he tells it.
- [10:35]
Elon Musk
I was very, very bookish. I was reading all the time. So I was either reading, working on my computer, reading comics.
- [10:40]
Jill Lepore
He read a lot of books, but he says that one book above all became his guide for life, the Elon Musk Bible.
- [10:48]
Elon Musk
I guess when I was 12 or 13, I had kind of an existential crisis, and I was reading various books, trying to figure out the meaning of life. And we happen to have some books by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer in the house, which you should not read at age 14. It's bad. It's really negative. Then I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is quite positive, I think.
- [11:11]
Jill Lepore
In Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide, the people of Megalithea build an enormous computer to ask it a question about life, the universe and everything. And after thinking for millions of years, it answers 42. Musk says that taught him a lesson.
- [11:27]
Elon Musk
A lot of times the question is harder than the answer. And if you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.
- [11:34]
Jill Lepore
The Hitchhiker's Guide didn't start out as a book. Adams wrote it for BBC Radio 4, and starting in 1978, it was broadcast on the BBC World Service, including to Pretoria.
- [11:50]
Narrator
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich, and on the whole, tax free. Many men, of course, became extremely rich. But this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of, because no one was really poor, at least no one we're speaking of.
- [12:17]
Jill Lepore
The Hitchhiker's Guide that is begins with an indictment of economic inequality. What was it like to listen to this in South Africa under apartheid? Musk hardly ever talks about apartheid, at least not publicly. I'm going to talk about it for a while here because it's a crucial piece of this history. But first, let me be really clear. White people who happened to grow up in South Africa under apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s are not responsible for apartheid. Peter Thiel, another Silicon Valley entrepreneur and later a key business partner of Elon Musk's, also lived in South Africa for a while as a kid. They were children also. Musk left South Africa when he was 17 to avoid being conscripted into the army, the army that imposed and enforced the regime. I'm not placing blame here. Still, I do think there's a weird way in which the culture of apartheid finds found expression in the 1990s in Silicon Valley's vision of the future. You know, you've said that apartheid is a habit of mind. Can you tell me what you mean by that? I called up Jacob Gamini, a professor of African history at Princeton. He grew up in South Africa and he's written beautifully and powerfully about apartheid.
- [13:31]
Jacob Gamini
What I mean by that is that apartheid was not just a social and political and economic system, but that it was also a cultural system which inculcated in South Africans, both black and white, patterns of behaviour, ways of thinking. It started to transform how people saw themselves, but also how they saw the world.
- [13:52]
Jill Lepore
The color question is rapidly increasing in seriousness and urgency. I consider apartheid to be South Africa's last chance to remain a white man's country. Apartheid, which means aparthood, began in 1948. That same year, 1948, Elon Musk's mother was born in Canada. Her father, J.N. haldeman, was an ardent conservative and anti communist. In 1950, Haldeman moved his family to South Africa. Was there a lot of immigration from, say, North America to South Africa after apartheid was declared? I just find that like an odd journey for a family to make in 1950.
- [14:35]
Jacob Gamini
Oh, yeah, I think that is quite striking. There is this conscious effort and conscious attempt to recruit people to South Africa to beef up white numbers to a point where blacks would not be such a demographic threat. You know, here's a place with, you know, with amazing sunshine, great weather, and you can actually live like a king or a queen.
- [14:58]
Jill Lepore
Elon Musk's mother published a memoir in 2020. It's called a Woman Makes a Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beau and Success. A lot of the book is about growing up in South Africa in the 1950s and 1960s. She says her parents were persuaded to move there from Canada by missionaries who talked of its beauty. Not once does she mention apartheid, though Mani says that's not unusual, that the regime organized itself around acts of forgetting and erasure, including pretending the native population somehow didn't even exist, unlike in the.
- [15:33]
Jacob Gamini
Americas, where the indigenous populations were annihilated. The South African case is different. The vast majority of the population is not annihilated. And whatever you have to build has to be built around this idea that the natives have not disappeared.
- [15:48]
Jill Lepore
A resistance movement rose up, led beginning in the 1960s by a young lawyer, Nelson Mandela. The Africans require the franchise on the.
- [15:59]
Jacob Gamini
Basis of one man, one vote.
- [16:01]
Jill Lepore
They want political independence. Mandela was sent to prison in 1962. Meanwhile, the resistance grew.
- [16:09]
Narrator
This is Radio Freedom, the voice of the Afghan National Congress.
- [16:14]
Jill Lepore
The UN General assembly denounced the apartheid regime in 1973. Two years later, right about when Elon Musk was starting kindergarten, police opened fire on thousands of school children during a protest on and Soweto. Kids were playing in the yard, in the school yard, and they started shooting at random, in the process hitting three kids. These were black children. White children went to white schools.
- [16:40]
Jacob Gamini
Black people had to pay for their education, but whites didn't. Some people will joke that it was actually socialism for whites and capitalism for blacks, Right? That's how apartheid actually justified itself, that, you know, we are creating a class of successful white people, people who ran.
- [16:56]
Jill Lepore
Construction businesses like Errol Musk, Elon's father, made a lot of money in the apartheid era, building two of everything, one for blacks and one for whites. For whites, they built a fantasy world ideologically.
- [17:10]
Jacob Gamini
I think one of the successes of apartheid was in making white South Africans believe that everything they achieved was through individual initiative, that everything that they ever achieved got in life was through their own hard work. You know, never mind the fact that the system was designed to, in some ways, give them all the benefit and to give them all the resources to get it in life.
- [17:31]
Jill Lepore
It's so interesting because the starkness of that divide, you know, the rigidity of the separation, has so many earlier representations in the world of science fiction, right? Like so much of H.G. wells, science fiction is about what? About a terrible, awful future in which we divide people into some who will live underground and do all of the work for us, and we will never see them, and we will pretend they don't even exist. And those of us who will live in the skies and in the clouds. And to me, sometimes when I think about what Silicon Valley is imagining, we will colonize Mars, and some people will go there who really need to be relieved of their experience on Earth. I mean, am I off base to say that some of that seems to revive these notions of very, very strict hierarchies?
- [18:20]
Jacob Gamini
I don't think you're off base at all, Jill. I mean, I think you've put your finger on it. And of course we don't want to instrumentalize this and see it as just cause and effect. But I think there's a strong case to be made for the connection between the Zaparte dystopia and this idealized vision of a world where the elites don't have to share their. Their oxygen with lesser beings.
- [18:46]
Jill Lepore
So I listened to the Hitchhiker's Guide and I find it strange that Elon Musk is such a fan because a lot of it sounds to me like an indictment of people just like him. Or like Amazon's Jeff Bezos, the mega rich with their privately owned rockets blasting off to other planets.
- [19:01]
Narrator
And for these extremely rich merchants, life eventually became rather dull. And it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry, custom made luxury planet building.
- [19:31]
Jill Lepore
Also, hear me out. I think the Hitchhiker's Guide broadcast by the BBC in the 1970s, just when the world was condemning apartheid, sounds quite specifically as though it's an indictment of apartheid, like social and economic systems. And I don't think I'm overreading. Douglas Adams wrote Hitchhiker's Guide on a Hermes manual typewriter. One key is more worn down than the the letter X. And you know what was on the side of that typewriter? A sticker. It says, end apartheid. When Elon Musk started college at the University of Pretoria, apartheid was on the verge of collapse.
- [20:16]
Narrator
Today, the majority of South Africans, black and white, recognize that apartheid has no future.
- [20:25]
Jill Lepore
By Then, in 1990, when Mandela was released after 27 years in prison, Elon Musk had left South Africa behind to launch his new life in North America. After studying at the University of Pretoria, Elon Musk traveled to Canada, where his maternal grandfather was from. He wanted to get to the United States, but it was easier to get a Canadian passport. Having broken with his father, he flew to Montreal with nothing but a backpack, then hitchhiked to Saskatchewan, where his grandfather had lived before moving the family to South Africa. And it's this grandfather, J.N. haldeman, who I want to look at next, because before he left Canada in the 1930s, he'd been a leader of a strange sci fi inspired movement known as Technocracy. It bears an uncanny resemblance to some things going on today in Silicon Valley, repackaged as existential risk futurism.
- [21:20]
Tom Swift Character
What Technocracy Inc. Is chiefly engaged in now is the organization of an army of trained men and women who, when the present interference controls break down and the intricate machinery of production and distribution is in danger of stopping, will be able to prevent that catastrophe before it is too late.
- [21:44]
Jill Lepore
So this sounds like science fiction, but this really happened. People in the technocracy movement, they called themselves technocrats, wanted engineers and scientists to run governments. They took their inspiration from science fiction, where engineers and scientists were always solving problems. They were suspicious of democracy and also of capitalism.
- [22:04]
Tom Swift Character
By price system is not meant merely the capitalistic system, which is only one variety of the species. It means the collapse and complete obsolescence of the entire method of distributing goods and services by means of a price. There will be no place for politics or politicians, finance or financiers, rackets or racketeers.
- [22:30]
Jill Lepore
Grant Whitehoff teaches digital humanities and American Studies at Princeton. He says the Technocracy movement started in New York in 1919 with a guy who ran a floor waxing business.
- [22:40]
Grant Whitehoff
His idea was that engineers had these unique qualities that would somehow make them good social leaders. They could assess a situation from above. They would come up with much more rational or economic solutions than politicians or economic leaders would.
- [22:56]
Jill Lepore
Then with the stock market crash of 1929 and the Depression that followed, democracies were collapsing all over the world. Technocracy really had its moment.
- [23:05]
Grant Whitehoff
Local chapters at that point had sprung up everywhere across the U.S. and Canada. And each of those chapters starts putting forward their own competing ideas. There's an invented unit of measure called the erg. This is one solution that we replace currency with units of energy dependent on how much energy a single worker is capable of producing in a given day and how much they should get in return for that work.
- [23:31]
Jill Lepore
As far as I can tell, it's at this point that Elon Musk's grandfather got involved with Technocracy. He lost his farm during the Depression and ever after didn't believe in banks or banking. A lot of people felt that way and some of them were drawn into this set of ideas about a different way of thinking about money.
- [23:49]
Grant Whitehoff
And some of the chapters start doing odd things to kind of get their message across. They start wearing these identical Gray uniforms driving these, these gray cars in these large parades, blasting speeches out of megaphones. They adopt this yin yang symbol on all of their uniforms and all of their signs.
- [24:10]
Jill Lepore
I'm, I'm kind of pulled in two different directions. You know, on the one hand I just, I just think they're nuts. And on the other hand, it seems to reflect an enormous amount of anguish and uncertainty, but it has a kind of quasi fascistic feel to me. How should we read that?
- [24:27]
Grant Whitehoff
Technocracy from the start was caught up in a lot of different science fictional imaginaries that it didn't always have full perspective on. They want to write themselves in to these gleaming science fictional futures that they are obsessed with, but without actually thinking through what that would mean in practice, what it would mean to replace an entire system of government.
- [24:52]
Jill Lepore
Some of what Elon Musk and other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs now endorse, including through doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, bears more than a family likeness to the technocracy movement. Libertarianism, deregulation of the economy. Faith that technological innovations can solve both political and social problems. A critique of paper currency and the price system. Also, for some reason, technocrats objected to personal names. Musk's grandfather renamed himself 1045001. Another technocrat called himself 1x1809x56, like one of Elon Musk's youngest children, a boy named X Ash A12 or X for short. Elon Musk, after that year in Saskatchewan, spent two years at Queen's University in Ontario. Then he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in economics and physics. He spent a summer interning at Dot coms in Silicon Valley, where things were getting wild. It was a gold rush. In 1995, the Internet opened to commercial traffic for the first time. You could buy stuff online, but how? Musk started a PhD program in material science engineering at Stanford, but dropped out after two days. As he later told CNN, back in.
- [26:20]
Elon Musk
95, there weren't very many people on the Internet and suddenly nobody was making any money at all. Most people thought the Internet was going to be a fad.
- [26:29]
Jill Lepore
Elon Musk started his first company, Zip2, with his brother and a friend. Everyone at the time was trying to engage in what was called disruptive innovation, which means destroy existing industries by doing things completely differently online. Zip2 was a newspaper industry disruptive innovation. It helped newspapers make the transition to online publishing, though it also contributed to a crisis in journalism. All sorts of people founded news aggregators and news feeds. Musk made his first fortune in 1999, he sold Zip2 for $300 million.
- [27:05]
Elon Musk
Cash Receiving cash is cash. I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklins.
- [27:11]
Jill Lepore
He then turned to thinking about online money. Technocrats like his grandfather had wanted to abolish the price system. Musk wanted to restructure the system of exchange itself.
- [27:22]
Narrator
This planet has or had a problem, which was this. Most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned were the movements of small green pieces of paper. Which is odd because on the whole, it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
- [27:43]
Jill Lepore
In 1999, Musk founded a new company, X dot com.
- [27:48]
Elon Musk
So this is an ATM. What we're going to do is transform the traditional banking industry.
- [27:53]
Jill Lepore
Musk put millions of dollars into x dot com. He said selling one business and starting the next was like a high stakes poker game. You win a big pot, you risk it all all over again. This is called serial entrepreneurship. Start it, sell it, raise venture capital to start the next thing. Every time you do this, you've got to come up with a story, characters and a plot because your investors don't have any real metrics. No earnings or profits, no prices. Investors are buying your story. A startup doesn't actually have to make anything or do anything or succeed in any measurable way for a venture capitalist to make money. That startup just has to sound good enough for someone else to invest in it. All it has to do is tell a really incredible story. And the more obviously the story comes straight out of the pages of science fiction, the better. X.com described itself as an online bank, but its founders soon discovered that people mostly wanted to use it as an online payment system. Meanwhile, Peter Thiel had started a company called Confinity that could send payments between devices. Thiel worked as a securities lawyer before helping to found confinity. In 1999, the company launched a service it called PayPal. If people were going to buy things online, they needed to be able to pay for things online. As Thiel saw it, they were reinventing money. In 2000, Confinity and X merged. One thing Musk regrets is that the company's product got called PayPal instead of X. The founders of these companies became known as the PayPal mafia because they made staggering sums of money. When PayPal went public in 2002 and was later bought by ebay. And then they went on to found their own venture capital companies, funding other startups, including YouTube and Facebook. X capitalism was born. Later, Musk, nostalgic about this time in his life, reacquired the domain x.com for a long time, there was just a little X there on a blank page because the only thing in the source code was the letter X. It was just waiting there when, in 2022, Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X. But we're skipping ahead. Back in 2002, once Musk had his PayPal fortune, he mostly used that money not to fund other people's ventures, but to start a company of his own, a rocket company. And for that, he needed a new origin story. Next time on X Men Blasting off to Mars with SpaceX. This is an iHeart podcast.