Critique de Muskism par Josh

I listened to Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff’s Muskism a few weeks ago and have been trying to figure out what I think about it ever since.

I may have an unusually personal reason for being interested in the book. I worked in tech for the better part of 15 years, and about five years ago I joined a company with a distinct Musky odor.

The biggest difference was how power was organized. At my previous companies, senior leadership teams were essentially oligarchies: each executive had authority over a domain, couldn't simply fire the others, and had to persuade them when proposing major changes. This created internal checks on power and forced executives to build relationships and collaborate.

The company I joined was different. The CEO was effectively an autocrat, while the other executives served at his pleasure. If the CTO wanted to change the company's direction, he didn't need to persuade his peers; he needed to persuade the CEO. Instead of building coalitions within the organization, executives had an incentive to cultivate the person at the top. Predictably, employees became focused less on building a great product than on whatever the CEO happened to care about that week. Mistakes were covered up, and blame was allocated according to political skill rather than responsibility.

I thought this was a terrible way to run a company, so I left after a little over a year.

The punchline is that the company subsequently raised hundreds of millions of dollars and increased its valuation roughly tenfold. And when I later did consulting work with other startups, I found that this kind of highly centralized, founder-dominated management was hardly unique. Many VC-backed founders seemed to have adopted some version of the Musk playbook.

So I think Slobodian and Tarnoff are onto something. The question is whether it deserves to be called an *ism*.

The book is roughly 80% biography of Elon Musk and 20% an attempt to extract from his career a broader political-economic phenomenon that the authors call Muskism. Their argument is not simply that Musk has a distinctive management style or political philosophy. It is that, just as Fordism became an “operating system” for twentieth-century capitalism, Muskism may become one for the twenty-first.

Where Fordism paired mass production with mass consumption and the promise of rising living standards, Muskism promises something closer to sovereignty through technology. States and individuals can become more self-sufficient by plugging into privately owned technological infrastructures - but the paradox is that the more dependent you become on those infrastructures, the more dependent you become on their owners.

This is a much more interesting thesis than simply saying that Musk is an unusually autocratic CEO. And I think the authors are right that Musk is an unusually revealing figure through which to examine the transformation of contemporary capitalism.

But I'm skeptical of the attempt to turn that transformation into a coherent “ism.”

The comparison to Fordism is illuminating. Fordism was not simply a collection of things Henry Ford happened to do. It was a theory of production and economic development: mass production would raise productivity, rising productivity would support higher wages, and higher wages would create mass consumption that supported further production. Ford was the mascot of Fordism, not its essence; other companies could adopt Fordist production without adopting his antisemitism or authoritarianism.

Muskism seems harder to separate from Musk. Slobodian and Tarnoff connect his technological projects, conception of sovereignty, relationship with the state, political ideas, interest in human-machine integration and upbringing in apartheid South Africa into a broader model of political economy. There is a compelling argument here. But I'm not sure all of these things belong to the same “ism.” Fordism had an organizing thesis about how an economy worked. Muskism sometimes seems more like an attempt to assemble a coherent worldview out of the various things that make Musk distinctive.

I'm also less persuaded that the authors have identified a fundamentally new production regime. There are important continuities between Musk and Ford: technological innovation, vertical integration, efficiency and the relentless pursuit of scale. But it isn't obvious to me that these add up to a new organizing principle comparable to the Fordist bargain between mass production, mass consumption and rising wages.

The more interesting difference may be what has happened to the corporation.

Alfred Chandler described the rise of managerial capitalism: as companies became larger and more complex, entrepreneurs gave way to professional managers, bureaucracies and institutionalized decision-making. For much of the twentieth century, this seemed like capitalism's natural direction. The founder built the company; eventually managers ran it.

The remarkable thing about many