Elon Musk doesn’t so much attract chaos as court it. One need only think of his recent storming of the US federal government or his rapid-fire restructuring of X (otherwise known as Twitter) to see the mayhem so often left in his wake. His sometime partner, Claire Boucher (otherwise known as the artist Grimes) calls these frantic gusts of activity “demon mode”. “Demon mode”, Boucher told Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer cum court stenographer, “is when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain”, a rather tame euphemism for lashing out at whoever is closest to him in the pursuit of some inhuman, and inevitably self-imposed, goal. Chaos, for Musk, is one tool among many that he can use to achieve his aims. Humans, it seems, are another. 

 “Demon mode causes a lot of chaos”, Boucher says, “but it also gets shit done.” At its most productive, this approach can lead to the kind of creative destruction to which Musk has repeatedly subjected his companies, or in his words: “Extruding shit out of the system.” Most biographies and profiles of Musk are padded with the same stories of him walking production lines late into the night in an apparently endless quest to find efficiencies. Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, the giant facility east of Reno where the company’s batteries and components are produced, has frequently been the site of such episodes. In July 2017, the company was straining to reach Musk’s apparently impossible production target of 5,000 Model 3s per week. As Isaacson reports, while walking the line, Musk spotted an expensive robot that was being used to awkwardly glue a fiberglass strip to the battery packs, slowing down the batteries’ assembly. This episode launched a mission to find out not only why the robot was being used when a human worker could complete the same task more quickly and efficiently, but also to discover what the strips were for. “Step one should be to question the requirements,” Musk intones. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.”

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The Evangelism of Efficiency

“Delete, delete, delete”—the stripping away of any and all components and processes not completely necessary to the final product —is one of Musk’s favourite mantras. Question every piece of received wisdom, challenge every regulation, reduce every cost. By most metrics, the method has been extraordinarily successful. SpaceX, Musk’s private space technology company, launched in 2002, and now has a valuation of around $350 billion. Its partially reusable Falcon 9 orbital rockets have been launched nearly 500 times since 2010, and the company’s Starlink service uses a vast network of nearly 7,000 satellites to provide internet connectivity to hard-to-reach parts of the globe. Yet SpaceX’s chief innovation isn’t in the technology so much as the way the company is paid. Historically, rockets have been built on a “cost-plus” basis, where a private firm is paid the cost of producing the rocket, plus an additional fee. SpaceX, however, is paid a flat rate for each completed job—exactly the kind of contract that encourages the reckless cost cutting for which Musk is now famous. Likewise, Tesla, Musk’s electric vehicle firm, was kept afloat for much of its first 20 years by selling California’s mandated Zero-Emissions Vehicle credits to the big Detroit automakers.

 Yet if Musk is a rationaliser, then he is a decidedly irrational one. In this endless quest for efficiency, Musk acts as the archetypal capitalist, feeding the inhuman demands of capital: squeezing workers, pushing down costs. For the humans who get in his way, the price can be severe. Staff, even those high up in Musk’s firms, rarely last longer than a few years, eventually exhausted by some combination of bullying and the relentless strain of long hours and manic pace. Lower down the ladder, the risk is even greater: as many as one in every 21 workers at Tesla’s Texas Gigafactory was injured in 2022; at its Fremont facility, in was reported in 2017 that the injury rate was 30 per cent higher than the industry average, and the severe injury rate more than double.

At times, whatever long-term aim Musk may think he has is entirely obscured by the mayhem of his method. After meme-ing his way into buying Twitter in 2022, he quickly stretched the social media site’s architecture to breaking point. Within the first week of his ownership half the company’s staff had been fired. Many who lost their jobs in the early days of Musk’s ownership were quietly rehired soon after, following website black outs and usage limits. His other cost cutting measures were no more successful. The gambit of refusing to pay rent on Twitter’s offices in the hope of negotiating better deals floundered when the owner of the San Francisco site sued. At its Singapore office, staff were marched out by the building’s security.

His tenure in government, as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has been more disastrous still, even by its own standards. So much so that even the Economist has become sceptical. “This newspaper looked forward to what Mr Musk might do with some hope”, it recently wrote. “He has transformed at least two industries. If he could reform the federal government—an organisation whose annual expenditure of $7trn is roughly equivalent to the revenues of America’s 20 biggest companies—that would be a boon for humanity.” The paper continued: “DOGE’s actions so far look as if they are designed not to make government work better, but to expand the president’s power and root out wrongthink.”^⁠ Whether or not the chaos has been necessary for Musk to accomplish his aims is an open question, but there’s little doubt that it has been central to the partly self-created myth of Elon Musk—and, in the process, has turned him into one of the world’s richest and most famous men. 

An Establishment Darling

It’s easy now to forget that just a few years ago Musk was a darling of the liberal establishment. In 2021, the year that Tesla reached a market value of a trillion dollars—only the sixth US company in history to do so—and in which Musk became the world’s richest man, both Time magazine and the Financial Times made him their person of the year. In their write-up, Time proclaimed him a kind of “man-god”. Musk, they gushed, is “the man who aspires to save our planet.” Here is one who “dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable.” 

He is of course no stranger to this kind of overblown, messianic rhetoric. Humanity, for Musk, faces a series of long-term existential threats; to these, he and his companies are the answer. “If we fail”, Musk told the team behind his solar panel installation business, Tesla Energy, in 2021, “we will not get a sustainable energy future.” Tesla, Musk told Bill Gates on discovering that the Microsoft founder had shorted its stock, was “the company doing the most to solve climate change.” Without SpaceX, he regularly intones, “we might then never be a multiplanetary species,” leaving us to face extinction on Earth from nuclear warfare or from a super-intelligent AI run amok. 

In 2018, Musk tweeted: “Tesla exists to help reduce risk of catastrophic climate change, which affects all species on Earth”, a few weeks before the company posted its first quarterly profit for two years. “Even if your faith in humanity is faltering, this is worth caring about. Support makes a difference.” A little over a year earlier, in the middle of Trump’s first term, Musk exited two of the president’s advisory councils over the White House’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement. “Climate change is real,” Musk tweeted. “Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

Fast forward seven years, and Musk would take part in a live discussion where the then soon-to-be-president-elect Donald Trump mocked concerns about the climate crisis, joking that it would produce “more oceanfront property.” Musk, far from challenging Trump, cautioned against vilifying the oil and gas industry. “The world,” he told Trump, a noted climate sceptic, 

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has a certain demand for oil and gas and it's probably better if the United States provides that than some other countries. And it would help with prosperity in the US. And at the same time, obviously my view is like, we do over time wanna move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of, I mean, you run out of oil and gas. It's not there, it's not infinite. And there is some risk. I think it's not, the risk is not as high as, you know, a lot of people say it is with respect to global warming. 

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From where does Musk’s transformation from a messianic rationalist, single-handedly saving the world from climate destruction, to the newly minted Trump acolyte, cautioning against climate alarmism, come? In short, how do we understand the contradictions of Elon Musk?

One route in follows his love of science fiction. Among Musk’s “all-time best” novels are those of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The series begins with Hari Seldon, a mathematician and “psychohistorian” who has developed a scientific study of human behaviour that can predict the future, and the impending collapse of human civilisation. This, he says, will be followed by a dark age lasting 30,000 years. But by predicting humanity’s future, Seldon also acts to change it, shortening the interregnum to only 1,000 years, and leaving a trail out of the rubble for future generations to follow. Musk clearly sees himself in the mould of Seldon. As he told Rolling Stone in 2017, Asimov’s series taught him that “you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.”^[1]

In this fascination is something more than a desire to save the world. What really drives Musk are the demands of ego. Musk casts himself as the hero, acting to save humanity regardless of the consequences. Such egotism is fused with what Evgeny Morozov calls “solutionism”, the idea that all problems have a simple technological fix. What that solution seems to be, more often than not, is to let the geniuses of Silicon Valley get on with what they do, unencumbered by government oversight, meddling bureaucrats and mendacious social justice warriors. Once the enemies of progress are swept out of the way by Trump and his Techno King Musk, a new world of freedom awaits. There is nothing that technology unfettered cannot fix. Even the most intractable human problem is no match for the solutionist geniuses of the Valley. 

Such views recur often in and around Palo Alto, but in recent years have been taken to their logical conclusion by the advances of a new right-wing current in Silicon Valley—nowhere more so than in venture capitalist and Trump outrider Marc Andreesen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto”. Per Andreesen: “There is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” The manifesto is a perfect distillation of a kind of thinking now increasingly prevalent among the Silicon Valley elite. It even has its own demonology: stagnation, degrowth, bureaucracy, statism; “anti-merit, anti-ambition, anti-striving, anti-achievement, anti-greatness”; “the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” 

If all problems can be solved by technology, then it follows logically that the speed and scale of technological development must be accelerated to meet the challenges ahead. (That VCs like Andreesen would stand to gain from this is but a nice reward.) Even the climate crisis is to be fixed by the furthering and deepening of capital-intensive progress. “We believe” Andreesen writes, that “there is no inherent conflict between the techno-capital machine and the natural environment.” Thus, for Andreesen, like Musk, all that is required to avert catastrophe is more and better technology; to get it, we must sweep everything standing in the way of techno-capitalism’s titans, with their visionary genius, aside. Any attendant harms of doing so are merely the price of progress.

The Contradictions of Elon Musk

The electric vehicle (EV) market tells a different story. China is now the world’s largest EV market, with sales forecast to rise to 12.5 million cars by the end of 2025. While there are now more than 60 EV manufacturers in the country, the dominant player is increasing a single firm, BYD, which sold 27 per cent of all EVs in China in 2024. In 2023, BYD surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest EV manufacturer.

Much is being made of consumer reaction to Musk’s lurch to the right. In late March, hundreds of dealerships in cities across the world were hit by protests, the latest in a long list of actions which have mounted since the start of the year. Most weeks see social media feeds filled with videos of burning charging stations and vandalised cars, with the 17 cars torched at a Rome dealership on 1 April simply the latest. The stock market response has been severe: Musk’s fortune has dropped more than $100 billion since December 2024, while Tesla’s stock has fallen by nearly half since its peak value.

But Tesla’s problems are far more deeply rooted. Sales were slowing even before Musk’s political interventions, and while Tesla is still the most popular EV brand in the US, its market share has fallen from over 75 per cent in 2022 to under 50 per cent as of 2024. In the first quarter of this year, BYD sold 416,000 EVs globally; in the same period Tesla shipped 337,000 cars, down 50,000 on Q1 2024. And while other manufacturers are diversifying their offerings, including increasingly low-cost affordable lines, like BYD’s hatchback city car the Seagull, Musk is betting Tesla’s future on the development of autonomous vehicles and robots.

Yet the biggest issue with Musk’s vision for the world, and that of the wider tech industry right, is more conceptual. As the political scientist Henry Farrell has noted, the fundamental weakness of the Silicon Valley worldview is not its internal contradictions, nor its fragile base, but that it is ultimately a “business model that mistakenly fancies itself a political philosophy”. In this, Farrell writes, business interests “become entwined with grand narratives, in which you and your comrades are the heroes who bring about extraordinary changes in the history of the world and cosmos”. How much easier it is to fancy yourself the saviour of civilisation when the route to salvation is indivisible from your own success. Failure, seen from this vantage, is not just an existential risk to one’s firm, but to human civilisation itself. 

There is much that is missing in these wizzbang stories of genius inventors and individual heroes. Absent above all is the real story of any future transition. Salvation or disaster is unlikely to come from Palo Alto or Austin, but further east. The rapid pace of economic and technological change happening in Asia, in particular China, is driving both the global boom in green technology as well as (for the foreseeable) rising global emissions. Any story that disregards this fact, focusing instead on the mind and methods of the visionary, will obscure as much as it reveals.

If Musk, Andreesen and the other stars in the new Silicon Valley firmament are anything, then, it is embodiments of a new California Ideology, a far more radical brew than the emergent blend of technological determinism and libertarian individualism analysed by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron in the mid 1990s. For these titans of the tech world, the answer to our multiple crises, whether of the climate or the economy, even of the “woke mind virus”, comes from unleashing capitalism ever from its fetters. In this they are no mere aberrations. As Brett Christophers shows elsewhere in this issue, even Joe Biden’s climate policy, including his much-vaunted Inflation Reduction Act, was dependent on similarly market-led approaches, lightly nudged this way or that, perhaps, by an arm’s length state. What the new Techno Kings of the Valley represent, then, is a grotesque mutation of an already failing model. What lies behind the contradictions of Elon Musk is therefore not the absurdity of a single individual, nor the straightforward extremism of the technophilic right. We confront in Musk the legacy of liberalism’s deluded commitment to the prospects for a “green” capitalism which has yet to arrive, projected on a grand scale. 

The transition off fossil fuels will, to say the least, be a difficult one, far more than any techno-booster can account for. As energy historians have regularly underscored, past energy “transitions”—in which wood and water were, as the story goes, replaced by coal, which in turn was superseded by oil, which will itself be replaced by renewables—were processes of addition rather than replacement. The history of energy is in fact an accumulation of ever more and different forms of energy, each one piled on top of the others. This poses a unique challenge for the necessary replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy, particularly as global energy demand continues to grow, in part due to the push for electrification in transport and other areas. More EVs, or whatever the next techno-fix that comes from the Valley is, may only tie us further into the carbon embrace.

In the words of historian Jean-Baptiste Fressoz: “After two centuries of ‘energy transitions’, humanity has never burned so much oil and gas, so much coal and so much wood.” The lessons here are sobering. “Getting out of carbon,” Fressoz writes, “will be far more difficult than getting out of capitalism, a condition that is probably necessary but certainly not sufficient.” It will take more than a few self-proclaimed geniuses to get us there.

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