SpaceX CEO Elon Musk discusses U.S. space operations with the Royal Canadian Air Force in 2019. Credit: Defense Visual Information Distribution Service (public domain)
Elon Musk has jumped from being simply the richest man on the planet to a shadow president with his hands on the levers of executive power. This coup by the Silicon Valley elite has been analyzed from a variety of angles across the corporate and alternative media. In late 2024, Liberation News profiled Peter Thiel, the “don” of the so-called “PayPal Mafia” that includes Musk and a coterie of names that are power players in venture capital and Silicon Valley, but relatively out of the public eye.
It is key to understand that at the end of the day, these Silicon Valley oligarchs are capitalists and criminals, and they are working for their class interests. It is not hyperbolic to call this group of men a mafia. However, it would be a mistake to ignore the ideological and historical forces that shaped this faction of the bourgeoisie into what it is today.
Who owns the future?
The future is a powerful and animating idea, and it is a site of struggle. The capitalist class has spent billions of dollars to establish hegemony over how we imagine the future — through how science is taught and technology is developed, through film and literature and art, in the ways that we talk about progress and development — and so-called “futurists” like Musk are key players in this battle of ideas.
Many people and groups have claimed the title “futurist” over the decades. The term has its origins in the European avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century. Italian poet — and avowed supporter of fascist dictator Mussolini — F. T. Marinetti penned the “Manifesto of Futurism” in 1908. This text exalted mechanization, automation, and war as the way to “cleanse” the Earth of decadent and inefficient romantic aesthetics of the 19th century. Unsurprisingly, Marinetti would go on to co-author the manifesto and political program of the Italian National Fascist Party.
While the futurists as an artistic movement fell into obscurity after World War II, many of the key tenets of the futurists — the fetishization of violence, technology, war, and speed, the rejection of the past, and wholesale embrace of all new technology regardless of consequence, in particular — animated Cold War era scientists, engineers, and authors.
In this era, futurist figures like scientist and science fiction author Isaac Asimov and former Nazi-rocket -scientist-turned-director-of-NASA Wernher von Braun were common fixtures on TV, painting dramatic images of human exploration of space and the cosmos. Von Braun, a member of the Nazi Party and the SS, was the lead engineer on the German V2 rocket which decimated London during the blitz. This rocket was constructed using enslaved laborers in concentration camps.
After the war, von Braun was spirited away to the United States under Operation Paperclip and became a key part of the Apollo Program. In 1953 he wrote a book called “Project Mars” which envisioned the world in the year 1980 — united under a world government. This world government’s power is cemented by a Star Wars-style Death Star called Lunetta in orbit of Earth that was integral in the nuclear annihilation of the USSR and the People’s Republic of China in a devastating Third World War. In the text, this Western-led world government is undertaking a crewed Mars mission, something von Braun had a deep fascination and passion for.
Upon getting to Mars, the astronauts in von Braun’s book find the red planet inhabited by indigenous Martians whose society is organized along technocratic lines and led by an executive figure known as an Elon. Errol Musk, Elon’s father — a South African, pro-apartheid politician, engineer, and beneficiary of a Zambian emerald mine — has stated in interviews that in his youth he read the work of von Braun and other fellow Nazi rocket scientist Hermann Oberth in the years before Elon’s birth. In fact, von Braun’s Martian leader, along with the fact that Elon’s maternal great grandfather was also named Elon — a name with roots in biblical Hebrew — was a direct inspiration for the name of his son.
The veracity of the version of the story as described by Errol Musk is contentious, but ultimately, the goal of von Braun’s “Project Mars” is stated directly in the author’s preface: to reach the “tens of thousands of young lads [who] live their inner lives in dreams of a rocket-powered world,” and convince them to become scientists and engineers. Regardless of the origins of his name, one of those tens of thousands of young lads was most certainly Elon Musk. For example, Musk often claims that he founded SpaceX, while primarily being a funnel for public wealth via NASA and Defense Department contracts, to ensure that humanity becomes a “multi-planetary species.”
This is the refrain that he was once most known for, appearing often in shirts that say “Occupy Mars.” In addition to the ambient influence of von Braun’s thinking on aerospace science and industry, Musk has also stated that Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy was “fundamental” to the creation of SpaceX. These novels center on mathematician Hari Seldon who, with mathematical certainty, predicts the coming collapse of the Galactic Empire. Through interventions as an enlightened and farsighted leader, moving behind the scenes and in the public eye, Seldon is able to “save” human civilization.
Whether or not Musk personally views himself as a Hari Seldon-type figure, it is demonstrable that he consciously situates himself and his companies within this narrative structure and tradition. He, and other contemporary futurists to come out of Silicon Valley, want us to see them as a Seldon-type figure. Similarly, whether or not he is aware of the futurists of a century ago and their deep affiliation with the origins of fascism, these threads deeply inform his worldview. Many of these tendencies are embodied in a parallel early 20th century political movement to which Elon Musk also has familial ties: Technocracy.
Technocracy and fascism
On his mother’s side, Musk is the grandson of Joshua N. Haldeman, a Canadian-born proponent of the Technocracy movement who moved to South Africa in 1950 and was a zealous supporter of Nazi Germany and South African apartheid. Technocracy was a North American movement that developed in the 1930s in the U.S. and Canada and promoted an anti-communist, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal view of economic development in the light of the manifest crises of capitalism during the Great Depression.
The Technocracy movement had its roots in various utopian, technocratic, and anti-democratic tendencies and was formalized as Technocracy Inc. by its founder, American engineer Howard Scott. Scott situated the economic crisis of the Great Depression as rooted within the “price system” governing commodity exchange and circulation, on which basis the Technocrats positioned themselves as more radical and enlightened than communists, fascists, or liberal democrats.
One aspect of Technocratic thinking that resonates today is their understanding of automation. In short, the view of Technocracy is that the working class is in the process of being abolished by the advance of technology. This allows them a fantasy of a fully bourgeois society in which there are no workers to be exploited or enslaved, but simply owners and machines.
This was critiqued succinctly by communists of that era: “When the Technocrats dismiss the working class as a diminishing and negligible factor, this only means that the general direction of their theories is toward fascism, that is, toward evolving new props to the collapsing capitalist system.”
In all but name, Musk is a motor force in the revival of many Technocratic, futurist, and ultimately fascist visions of the future. In addition to the economic theories described above, Technocracy Inc. also proposed the creation of a “Technate of America,” described in “The Technocrat”, the magazine of Technocracy Inc. as a political entity that “will encompass the entire American Continent from Panama to the North Pole because the natural resources and the natural boundary of this area make it an independent, self-sustaining geographical unit.”
This is a map that U.S. imperialists have been dreaming about for centuries. In the 18th and 19th century there were numerous attempts to integrate Canada, to steal more and more Mexican territory, and to directly annex Cuba and Puerto Rico. Confederate expansionists organized in the fraternal order the Knights of the Golden Circle dreamed of annexing all of Mexico and Central America, the Caribbean, and northern South America, turning the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean into a “Golden Circle” of slave plantation states.
But just because something is not unprecedented does mean it is not new. The revival and inversion of these 19th and 20th century forms in the present day is new, but not historically unprecedented. We can see the echoes of Technocracy and futurism in the personage of Musk and how that shaped him, as an individual raised in this milieu — the intersection of American, German, and South African fascism, in the traditions of futurism and Technocracy, and the aligned with the capitalist interests of U.S. imperialism and global white supremacy.
The scam of ‘capitalist innovation’
For the first month of Donald Trump’s return as president, he has largely yielded executive powers to Musk, who has taken this role as Senior Advisor to Trump and Administrator of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as an opportunity to wage a full scale attack on many segments of the federal government. One of the main targets has been federal agencies and departments that serve the Department of Education, Veterans Affairs, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, all of which serve as the facilitators of key benefits, assistance, and programs that hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. rely on daily.
Musk has been able to make these cuts, as if he was taking a chainsaw to these programs and benefits, because at the core of it, he has displayed throughout his career that he is a willing servant of capital. Throughout his professional career he has found new veins to tap into to draw profits from, no matter the moral or ethical cost. Further, his wealth by-and-large has been created by Musk’s role as a reverse Robin Hood figure. From Tesla to SpaceX, these enterprises have all relied on the U.S. public wealth as a crutch to evade collapse or failure.
Tesla’s story of relying on public wealth as a support to avoid collapse and bankruptcy is well documented. In 2010, during the Obama Administration, Tesla Inc. was in dire straits. Its model of promising a sports car that cost $100,000 that appeared shoddy in manufacturing and unreliable as a product was unsurprisingly not marketable enough to maintain Tesla’s solvency.
“We can’t move forward … without a major amount of capital,” said Musk in December 2008. Luckily for Musk, the Obama administration was more concerned with greenwashing pet projects than solving the climate crisis and a just transition to a renewable energy system.
Nearly a year after Musk made the admission that he needed an injection of capital, Obama doled out an $800 billion stimulus package to “create a new green energy economy.” One of the receivers of this stimulus was of course Tesla, receiving $465 million in a federal loan to manufacture his Tesla Roadster. Contrary to the so-called “innovation” that the capitalist class asserts they provide to society, the Roadster completely co-opted the body chassis of the already existing Lotus Elise. This lack of innovation then led to concerns of its design and safety, concerns that were validated after two consecutive recalls of hundreds of Roadsters, both relating to the chassis’ and electrical system’s incompatibility with the frame and body.
Where the Roadster failed as a car, it succeeded as a propaganda piece. In 2018, Musk’s SpaceX launched a Tesla Roadster into space, ostensibly aimed at Mars, in a publicity stunt designed to be a meme. The car itself had a dummy in the driver’s seat, a copy of Douglas Adams’ “A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation Trilogy” is digitally stored on the car’s internal computer.
The images of the stunt create a visual callback to a line Futurist Manifesto: “We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.”
Ultimately, the Roadster is now a simple piece of space junk floating somewhere between Earth and Mars.
The Roadster being launched into space. (screenshot from Youtube)
And even with all hundreds of millions of investment, Tesla remains unable to produce a simply good, let alone safe, product. As they are powered by a lithium-ion battery, any likelihood of auto collisions on the road opens a lethal opportunity to ignite the battery. Further, Tesla doors require electric mechanics to be operable, trapping those within if the battery is ignited from overheating during such a collision or being submerged in a body of water. A common collision on the road could transform a Tesla into a deathtrap for those riding within in a matter of seconds. These horrific instances have become so infamous that a grassroots effort to document the Tesla Death Count on tesladeaths.com, where the total standing Tesla Autopilot deaths currently stand at time of writing at 52.
Even attempts to rescue passengers externally only transfers life-threatening risks to the first responders, where the high-voltage system can shock those that come close to the inflamed vehicle. Secondly, a damaged lithium-ion battery releases carbon monoxide and hydrogen, toxic gases that put all near at risk. Columnist David Sehyeon Baek describes how “a single battery cell overheats and causes a chain reaction with other cells. This reaction generates extremely high temperatures, reaching up to 900°C (1,650°F), and releases flammable gases, making these fires intense and difficult to control.” For this reason, these deathtraps require water amounts in the tens of thousands of gallons to be extinguished, posing a burden on the local water systems. In a country such as the United States where about 40% of areas suffer some level of drought, this is yet another burden Tesla brings on public resources.
But Tesla’s kickbacks of robbing the public wealth of taxpayers pales in comparison to that which occurs by SpaceX, known officially as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. Since 2008, the taxpayer money funding SpaceX projects has amounted to around $20.7 billion. Through government contracts and grants, the privatization of space exploration, Musk has profited greatly over the public institutions that he has waged war on as a commissar of “efficiency”.
The basis of Musk’s corporate seizure of the public sector via DOGE is not to sweep up corruption or eliminate waste, nor is it to privatize specific industrial sectors historically in public commons (the contracted work and militarization of U.S. space exploration has thoroughly conquered this concept). Musk’s efforts to colonize space, to profit off of greenwashing reforms with EV development, and to commit a crusade in the pursuit of government efficiency, all masquerade the true goal. Musk, like Trump, is an avatar tasked by the billionaire class to undo decades of progress and benefits, such as social security benefits, public education, and the Labor Relations Board.
These institutions were once demands by the working class, only given as a concession by the ruling class to quell levels of organization that put the established powers’ feet under the fire. Musk’s task as a servant of capital is to do what he does best: reroute the public wealth into the pockets of the billionaire class while further impoverishing the workers that make the superprofits possible day in and day out. While he is currently at the head, Trump’s administration is a coalition of which the Silicon Valley technocrats and futurists are simply one faction. Ultimately, it is the struggle of the working class that will dictate what the billionaires can get away with.
