Musk, Trump Relationship More Professional | The Debrief

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AMY GOODMAN : This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

On Friday, dozens of activists with student, labor and community groups with the Stop Funding Billionaires campaign protested in front of Nasdaq headquarters here in New York to protest the upcoming SpaceX IPO . They chanted and held signs that read “No Nazis on Nasdaq.”

Quinn Slobodian now joins us. Quinn is a professor of international history at Boston University. His new book, co-authored with Ben Tarnoff, is Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed .

What concerns you most about this IPO offering and Musk being on the brink of becoming a trillionaire, Professor Slobodian?

QUINN SLOBODIAN : Well, there’s a whole lot of things that concern me about it, but one of the things I find most striking is the way his relabeling of himself as the “techno-king” of Tesla in 2021 is now becoming somewhat more of a reality at a larger scale through the SpaceX IPO . What I mean there specifically is he’s really bending and reshaping corporate governance as a whole around his individual personality. The movement of his companies from Delaware to Texas means that he’s not held accountable to shareholders in the way he would have been before. The creation of a whole share structure so that he has 85% of the shares that would be required to vote him out of a leadership position means that he’s produced a kind of ironclad, almost monarchical position inside of this company that actually completely short-circuits the whole idea of the public company, which is that there’s supposed to be a kind of a “shareholder democracy,” quote-unquote, that can hold leadership accountable. In this case, if you look at that SpaceX IPO , it says that the key person risk, meaning everything hangs on Musk’s shoulders, is so great that even if he dies, there actually isn’t even a succession plan. It would be in a completely unprecedented zone. So, the degree of influence being centralized in one extremely erratic and often dangerous personality is something that seems to be of great concern.

Also, I think that there are a couple of other things we talk about in the book that helped to get a handle on some of the stuff that Eric was explaining so well. One of the things we talk about in the book is something called attention alchemy. So, Musk has been very good at turning himself into a kind of a human meme stock. As Eric was mentioning, making retail investors have access to 30% of these shares means you’re relying on the kind of hype cycles and a lot of the kind of hyperloyal fan base that Musk has built up online, especially in now his kind of bespoke social media echo chamber of X.com. So, he’s able to produce his own reality inside of that space of X.com, such that, for example, when you looked at yesterday what the top news, today’s news, was on X, both of those things were to do with Elon Musk. One of the thing was — one of the things was that Elon Musk questions whether colonialism had made Africa poor, and the other one said that Argentine President Javier Milei praised Musk for defeating the woke mind virus.

If you look at SpaceX, as he describes it, as a vertically integrated innovation engine stretching from a social media platform to satellites and rockets, then what he really seems to be saying he’s going to do is create a closed communications ecosystem where that really does become today’s news, where he can control the message and the content, and then use this to kind of automate away the problem of social consent at scale. So, above and beyond those problems that I think are accurately being identified of the average index fund holders being left holding the bag, there’s kind of a larger ideological project at work here, that I think we should all be very concerned that this is now becoming kind of the load-bearing infrastructure for the global financial system.

Another term we introduce in the book is the idea of state symbiosis. It seems that Musk is also creating a situation where he becomes deeply reliant on state contracts. The state becomes reliant on him. He has over $7 billion of defense contracts just this year. And the idea there in the end is that if this starts to teeter, then he’ll be too big to fail, and the state will have to step in to bail him out.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Slobodian, could you talk about Starlink a little bit — it’s already the world’s largest satellite internet provider — and the immense power that it has, not just in terms of the economy, but in terms of warfare and state power around the world?

QUINN SLOBODIAN : Starlink is really kind of the crown jewel of the SpaceX offering. It’s the part of the company that actually makes money. The rockets kind of break even. The AI segment is burning money at an unprecedented rate. Starlink satellites, he first started putting into low Earth orbit in 2019, and by now there are around 10,00…