David Remnick: It may take us many years to understand fully what's happening in America right now. This attempt by Donald Trump, as well as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, the authors of Project 2025, and so many others, to radically reshape this country and its institutions as quickly and as brutally as possible. We've been talking a lot on the Radio Hour about the colossal upheaval of the first hundred days of the Trump administration and what could be more important, but today, the subject that we're going to drill down on is an appraisal of Elon Musk and his vision of our future.

Of the many politicians who have tried to position themselves as Trump's heir and closest advisor, really only Elon Musk rivals the boss, and in some ways, he exceeds him. There's that astronomical untold wealth, there's his delight in trolling his enemies and his contempt for government and its rules, and there's a deep belief in him that what's good for Elon Musk is precisely what matters. Yet, the thing is, Elon Musk is not just a chaos agent, as he's sometimes called. He's driven by a distinct ideology, or at least a clear set of obsessions.

To find out more about this, I called up Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of These Truths and other works of history. I called her because she's written about Elon Musk for The New Yorker, and she's also produced a podcast about him called X Man. She's a professor at Harvard University and a staff writer at the New Yorker. We spoke last week. Jill, Elon Musk is only recently a MAGA figure. He supported Obama, he supported Biden in 2020. He was strong on climate change and the shift away from fossil fuels. To what degree do you understand him as a self-interested agent where Trump is concerned, or is he really sincere in his turn to the right?

Jill Lepore: I think Musk is a man of many costumes and he likes to play roles. He is a person who is very immersed in the world of video gaming, comic books, science fiction, and Hollywood superhero movies. Wearing the dark MAGA hat and the Occupy Mars black t-shirt is as much a costume and a performance as it is an expression of sincere political commitment. Musk went to Stanford in 1995 for a PhD program. He left after a couple of days to start his first company.

In order to raise funds for their ventures, they were all encouraged to promise to be altering the destiny of the species, and that sense of the messianic language that was required to get funding from venture capitalists, I think a fully grown-up person would engage in that and know that it was bullshit. I'm sorry, this is radio. A fully grown-up person would engage in that and know, "It's just nonsense. This isn't what you have to do to get money." I think a very young, impressionable, arrested development person who's grown up on superhero culture might really come to believe that, that they are better than anyone else on the planet and that the future destiny of humanity is something that they hold in their hands-

David Remnick: Uniquely.

Jill Lepore: -and, "If I want to be a messiah, there have to be existential risks that I can save humanity from," so they have to keep propagating new risks. Then it's AI, and Musk is determined to either defeat it or create it, depending on the time. In our consciousness, I think most Americans, certainly most people around the world didn't start paying attention to Musk until he decided that the existential risk to the future of humanity and civilization was Twitter itself in 2022, and then he decides to buy it to defeat the woke mind virus. At that point, people start paying attention to him, but that's just the latest in a list of existential risks that he and he alone can fix. It's soon after that that he hitches himself to Trump.

David Remnick: Before he gets to anything ideological, what Musk encounters first and takes very seriously is the pop culture that he's immersed in, the science fiction, the comics. Talk to me a little bit about that immersion in pop culture. In fact, you compare Musk at one point to Batman himself.

Jill Lepore: The thing about it, as a historian, that really pisses me off, this is pedantic and narrow, but he misreads everything that he reads. He miswatches it all, right? He looks at Batman and he kind of wants to be the bad Batman, the Christopher Nolan.

David Remnick: The Christopher Nolan. Right. Exactly.

Jill Lepore: The Dark Knight, the one who dresses in black. The guy who is just a fascist ruling over the city of Gotham because the people are so stupid and such losers.

David Remnick: Yes. He's not the Adam West Batman.

Jill Lepore: He's not Adam West. He's also not the Batman of the 1930s comic books who was really created in 1939 to fight fascism. It's a weird underwater world to try to be in the mind of Elon Musk or even just the, "Let's conquer Mars in the spirit of H.G. Wells." H.G. Wells was a critic of British imperialism. All of his colonization stories were anti-imperialist cautionary tales.

David Remnick: This isn't a reference that I'm intimately familiar with, to be honest, but some of our listeners will be. You say this is critical to understanding Elon Musk. Let's listen.

Douglas Adams: Zaphod Beeblebrox now knows himself to be the most important being in the entire universe, something he had hitherto only suspected. It is said that his birth was marked by earthquakes, tidal waves, tornadoes, firestorms, the explosion of three neighbouring stars. However, the only person by whom this is said is Beeblebrox himself, and there are several possible theories to explain this.

Jill Lepore: Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which started as a BBC radio drama in 1978. It was broadcast to Pretoria, where Musk was a little kid. Musk talks about a very consistent kind of "How I became Elon Musk" story that he has told for the whole of his adult life, was that when he was 12, he had a kind of existential crisis about being human. He read Spinoza and Nietzsche. He didn't really understand them, but then he read Hitchhiker's Guide. There's a book version as well, and it helped him to understand the meaning of life. He dedicated himself to exploring the cosmos and bringing the light human consciousness to the stars. This truly drives me insane because there's--

David Remnick: It's just all about world historical genius who's going to usher humanity into a new era, isn't it?

Jill Lepore: Yes, it's Zaphod Beeblebrox who is the captain of the Heart of Gold spaceship, which is what Musk has promised his first spaceship to Mars will be called in honor of Beeblebrox. Beeblebrox, he's a goon. He is the most self-deluded, grandiose idiot. He's a bumbling fool. The whole point of Hitchhiker's Guide, which is itself a spoof of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which it does not take seriously, is an indictment of the mega-wealthy.

David Remnick: You're saying Musk missed the irony of the entire book?

Jill Lepore: One of the details I came across in doing the work for this series, I found an old auction notice for the typewriter that Douglas Adams used to write the scripts around 1976/1977. It has a bumper sticker on the side of the typewriter that reads "End Apartheid." Think about that.

David Remnick: Wow.

Jill Lepore: Think about Douglas Adams writing Hitchhiker's Guide in the middle of the 1970s. The Anti Apartheid movement, the boycotting is going on. It's a really strong movement. It's not as powerful as it'd become in the '80s. It's not like everybody who's got an "End Apartheid" sticker on their typewriter in 1977, but Douglas Adams does.

David Remnick: How did Musk respond to the apartheid all around him?

Jill Lepore: In fairness, Musk left South Africa at the age of 17.

David Remnick: In '89, yes.

Jill Lepore: You could easily conclude that that was in order to avoid compulsory military service in defense of the regime. I think that's the charitable way to understand his desire to leave the country.

David Remnick: How did he come to be so enraged by what he called the woke mind virus? Was that out of personal experience with his kid?

Jill Lepore: There's this famous interview he gave with Jordan Peterson in which he said in 2020, during the pandemic, he was pressured into approving puberty blockers for one of his children, and he greatly regretted it, and now he would say, "The woke mind virus killed my son." His daughter, Vivian Wilson, essentially disowned him. She has said, "You can't blame this on me." That's a story that he tells that makes him feel happier about himself, like there was something virtuous in his mind about his rightward turn, but he had always been this way. It's a family saga. I don't have any particular insight into that.

David Remnick: Jill, you mentioned these existential crises that Musk wants to solve, and one of which is getting human beings off the planet and settling in space. This motivates his interest in privatizing space travel and, of course, the creation of his company, SpaceX, even the name of which seems to be ripped out of an old science fiction paperback.

Jill Lepore: Yes. There actually is like a whole really lovely genealogy of science fiction stories about the commercialization of other planets, all of which, again, are cautionary tales, but that Musk reads as instruction manuals. There's a kind of on the farther side of the far right embrace of the economic opportunities and the military prospects of space exploration. I think that turns a lot of people in Silicon Valley toward Trump because he seems to be somewhat open to it. He doesn't know very much about it, but he is, of course, delighted by the attention of billionaires.

I think there's a kind of courtship that begins to happen there, and then, of course, Musk earns a great many contracts through SpaceX, including under the etches of Space Force. There's an interview where Musk says something like, "It takes as long to do the paperwork to build a rocket as it takes to actually build the rocket," and so becomes really committed to the idea that there's regulatory excess that can only be eliminated through Trump's victory.

When I hear Musk say at those rallies, "We're at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election," he means SpaceX. He means, "I need the federal government to, without any restriction, delay impediment. I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars, and that's only going to happen through Trump." Part of this larger project of DOGE is to divert funds that are used to serve the poor, the needy, the sick, immigrants, anyone who might be vulnerable and not worthy somehow, I think, in how Musk likely sees the world. Their needs ought to be put very much at the back of the line so that we can bring humanity to space, and also so that we can pursue unfettered the development of artificial intelligence.

This also relies on the quantification of human needs, whereby we shouldn't feed the poor, we shouldn't clothe the naked, we shouldn't heal the sick. We should let them all suffer and die because their needs, those are minuscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE, and that has nothing to do with democracy, or citizenship, or decency, or any set of beliefs or commitments or moral clarity about the nature of the human condition.

David Remnick: I think a lot of Trump voters, traditional Republicans, think of DOGE, think of Musk's efforts purely as cost-cutting. In a way, I think what you're suggesting is that the ideological component here, which is far darker, is being snuck in through the back door.

Jill Lepore: I remember in 2009 or so, I went to a Tea Party rally in Washington. I remember chatting with some very nice people from Texas, and I was asking them what they had seen while they were in D.C. for this rally. It was like a Glenn Beck 9/12 rally or something like that. I said, "Did you go to the Smithsonian? Did you see the monument? Did you go to the Jefferson? Did you go to the Lincoln Memorial? What'd you do?" and they were like, "No, we would never go to any of those places. They would defile us."

Their hatred for the federal government extended to the buildings that were built with taxpayer money to celebrate American ideas, American ingenuity, American art, American beauty. American music. I was really staggered by that, that there was just such a strong hatred of the fed. I do think that's not an ideology. That's an appetite. That's an emotional response to something, but I do think that Musk's DOGE taps into some of that.

David Remnick: To what degree do they overlap in their interests? I understand that Trump loved getting hundreds of millions of dollars for his campaign, but when it comes down to what you just explained about the way Elon Musk sees the world and the future and what the interests of the government should be or should not be, I wonder how much it overlaps or not with what a guy whose background is not Musk's, but is in fact in New York real estate and reality television. How do they overlap at all?

Jill Lepore: If you publicly, as an elected official, disavow the threat of climate change, but instead propose to purchase or conquer Greenland and Canada, which are great real estate opportunities given the reality of climate change, then you are actually engaging in a kind of calculation that is as cynical and as indifferent to human suffering as is Muskism.

David Remnick: I know that historians don't like to predict the future any more than halfway decent journalists would, but Musk and Trump are going to break up fairly soon, either for reasons of conflict or because Musk's attention will wander elsewhere. Where will Musk go next?

Jill Lepore: I wouldn't be surprised if he moved to Europe. I wouldn't be surprised if he moved to Germany or Italy. I think he needs to mix it up and enjoy the arrows that come at him so that he can use those arrows to construct a vision of himself as invincible. I think that there's a vincibility around leaving Washington with his tail between his legs. He's going to need to exert his virility in a very public way. I don't think he's going to be doing battles in state elections like in Wisconsin again. I think that moment is over.

David Remnick: We're talking the week, of course, that Harvard University decided to, in a sense, stand up to the Trump administration. It had some very difficult decisions to make. Jill, you've taught at Harvard for a long time, so I can't help but ask, what do you think Elon Musk makes of that situation?

Jill Lepore: I think Musk is probably surprised at witnessing an act of real principle and courage and defiance that comes from a sincere commitment to deeply held, centuries-old values. That is a rare thing in our world. It is no part of his experience of the world insofar as I have ever witnessed it, and it's something to be cherished. I am full of admiration for that act. I hope it is emulated. I hope it has vast consequences. It may not. It's easy from where I sit, in Cambridge, to think that Harvard is the center of the world and it is not, and yet it is a really momentous decision. Musk lives in the world of the trivial. As profound as the consequences of his decisions are, he is a deeply trivial human being.

David Remnick: Tell me what you mean by that.

Jill Lepore: He delights in the goofy, snarky, four-word tweet with an emoticon after it. He's a trivial person.

David Remnick: Jill Lepore, thank you so much.

Jill Lepore: Thanks so much, David.

David Remnick: Jill Lepore is a professor of American history and of law at Harvard University. Her podcast about Elon Musk is called X Man, and you can read her @newyorker.com on so many subjects. You can also subscribe to The New Yorker @newyorker.com.

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