Finding Elon
Searching for Muskism in Africa and beyond
Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff (2026). London: Allen Lane.
In 1998, United States President Bill Clinton arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, for an important stop on his tour of African capitals. As usual, he was championing free trade and open markets. This was the era of so-called globalization, in which Western elites believed that economic integration would go hand in hand with political convergence; China and Russia were going to become more liberal, and democratic countries in the Global South would become richer through commerce with the rich world. Clinton had also made it clear that he believed that the fall of Apartheid was a product of the same forces of freedom and democracy that had putatively destroyed the Soviet Union. But on this visit, Nelson Mandela was not in the mood to indulge Clinton’s historical revisionism.
Mandela explained that his decision to extend invitations to Cuban President Fidel Castro, Libyan Brotherly Leader Muammar Gaddafi, and Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was made “because moral authority dictates that we should not abandon those who helped us in the darkest hour.” Mandela expressed the same intransigence in relation to Washington’s plans for a new trade policy for the continent. He said that the provision of the proposed African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which tied participation to United States foreign policy objectives, “is something we find totally unacceptable.”
How things have changed. In 2025, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa led a delegation of government officials, business leaders and professional golfers to Washington to try to salvage the AGOA, now imperiled by Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” assault on the global economic system his predecessors created. In the 1990s, even the United States (which had been a staunch ally of Apartheid South Africa and helped to put Mandela in prison) celebrated the new African National Congress (ANC) government in South Africa. This time around, Ramaphosa met with a president convinced of the “white genocide” conspiracy theory—the lie that we are carrying out land seizures and the massacre of white farmers—partly because of the influence of his patron and “first buddy” Elon Musk.
That famous billionaire, born in South Africa in 1971, remained silent throughout the meeting in the Oval Office, while his satellite internet service, Starlink, took center stage. Johann Rupert – Africa’s richest man – appealed to Musk to provide satellite service and drones to the South African authorities. Last year, the governing coalition moved to kill a rule mandating that communications infrastructure must be at least 30 percent owned by people from historically disadvantaged groups. Obviously, this was a way of placating Musk, who has staunchly criticized South Africa’s affirmative action policies. Starlink’s entry into South Africa would further expand the company’s footprint on the continent, where it already operates in 27 countries.
As in many countries across the Global South, South African state capacity has been undermined and weakened in the last few decades. The promise of satellites vaulting over the terrestrial infrastructure required to provide high-speed internet in a country where only 1.6% of rural households have access to broadband proved irresistible.
The episode is illustrative of one of the core features of “Muskism” identified by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in their pithy and tightly-argued new book. Muskism, in an era of waning public investment, economic stagnation and geopolitical fracture, offers “sovereignty-as-a-service.” Companies like SpaceX allow the state to actually function, for a fee. Musk, the authors explain, took the microeconomics of internet platforms and scaled up to the level of governments. With the “lock-in” strategy, Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia perfected the art of making customers dependent on platforms. Now, the authors argue, Muskism makes the state dependent on private firms.
The authors define this new version of sovereignty as “access to bandwidth, compute power, launch cadence, and orbital real estate” rather than just control over borders and bureaucracy. Crucially, Slobodian and Tarnoff show that Musk operates as much by binding the state to his platforms as by benefiting from public subsidies. SpaceX secured early contracts from DARPA and the Air Force, and subsequently NASA. Tesla wouldn’t be with us today if it wasn’t for a $465 million low-interest loan from the Department of Energy in 2009 to bring it through a near-death experience. Practically all of Musk’s companies have appropriated technology paid for by US taxpayers, in addition to the subsidies and regulatory advantages provided to his firms. Musk is no libertarian. His goal is not to eliminate the state but to vassalize it.
Muskism, the authors suggest, offers a shorthand for capitalism in the twenty-first century, just as Fordism had for the twentieth. Like “Fordism,” it is characterized by vertical integration and mass production. However, while Fordism combines mass consumption and mass production to promise rising living standards for all, Muskism makes no such commitments.
Slobodian and Tarnoff’s focus on Apartheid South Africa in order to locate the origins of Muskism. Musk’s inescapable presence in anglophone discourse has led countless commentators to fixate on his childhood. Elsewhere, I have criticized a tendency to caricature South Africa’s past and argued that the global emergence of its prominent engineers has a different origin story. Perhaps more pressing than quibbles over the role South Africa played in producing Muskism, however, is the question of what Muskism means for South Africa and the rest of the Global South today. Understandably, Muskism, a short book, focuses on Elon’s symbiosis with the United States government. But what does his business model mean for all of the much weaker states in the world system?
The promise of some version of Fordism in the Third World was core to Washington’s hegemonic project during the Cold War. The concept of “development” in the postwar period was often synonymous with industrialization, in which a gleaming national automotive industry was the paradigmatic sign of success. For a small number of strategic US client states, like South Korea and Taiwan, industrialization and economic upgrading actually worked. But from the 1980s on, the vast majority of countries still stuck in the Global South were encouraged to specialize in goods and services in which they had a “competitive advantage.” African and Latin American states, reeling from debt crises and structural adjustment programs, were re-integrated into the global economy primarily as exporters of raw materials. Brazil’s automotive industry served as the site of struggles that led to the creation of Lula’s Workers’ Party in 1980. Since then, the country has shifted away from manufacturing, and now sends soybeans and minerals abroad — primarily to China.
African countries, with the encouragement of the international development community, focused on expanding fintech and telecommunications sectors which could grow on top of relatively thin infrastructure. The growth of mobile telecommunications networks is emblematic of this model. In the 1990s and 2000s, much of Africa had very low fixed-line telephone penetration. Rolling out mobile networks presented the opportunity to leapfrog landline infrastructure and scale telecommunications systems rapidly and cheaply. On a continent where traditional banking coverage is weak, mobile phones, in turn, offered alternative financial architecture.1
The contrast with the earlier Fordist model of development could not be starker. The latter was based on the dream of full employment; the fintech model promises development for economies without formal employment. Value is created through redistributive grants, pensions, and credit products aimed at those in the informal economy. This is, in the words of historian Keith Breckenridge, “a world without work, where financial institutions dominate the production of value.” Many countries have seen sovereignty degraded in the neoliberal period, now struggling to deliver basic services to their populations. This makes them vulnerable to firms that can offer a short-term fix. The question is whether or not the dependence will be on Muskism, and how long it will last.
The authors argue that Muskism is fundamentally attuned to a deglobalizing word, positioning itself as a successor to the free-trade, integrated global order of the late twentieth century. This is what supposedly distinguishes Musk’s companies from the traditional Silicon Valley firms which embraced offshoring and outsourcing in the 1990s and 2000s. Tesla’s Gigafactories are characterized as enclaves of “self-reliance,” internalizing production and securing supply chains against the instabilities of a fracturing world. Slobodian and Tarnoff frame Tesla’s Gigafactory in China as a pragmatic choice to participate in national projects of competing superpowers simultaneously. By selling resilience to all sides, Musk ensures his own success regardless of which superpower gains the upper hand in the fracturing global order.
Slobodian employed the intellectual-historical approach to potent effect in his studies of neoliberalism, and Tarnoff has written very insightfully about the past and future of the internet. In this book, they scrupulously reconstruct Musk’s worldview and business philosophy. Sometimes, this means we learn more about his own conception of the world than his objective role in shaping it. It is possible to see Tesla’s entry into China as a sweetheart deal won through Elon’s personal charm; Patrick McGee has shown, in contrast, that it was the result of a calculated strategic shift in Beijing. The People’s Republic of China decided to apply to Tesla a model successfully developed in collaboration with Apple.
Musk would be the first foreign automaker permitted to operate in China without a local partner, but he would work intimately with third-party vendors, engaging in skill-sharing that would allow local firms to provide components to Chinese brands like BYD. While Tesla has received billions of dollars in cheap loans, subsidies, and tax breaks from the Chinese government, it has, like Apple, become highly dependent on its Shanghai factory. Moreover, Chinese suppliers are crucial to the company’s global operations.
From this vantage point, Musk himself still looks dependent on the system of global trade built in an earlier era. Slobodian and Tarnoff provide an excellent guide to Musk’s ideology and his business practices, but it remains unclear whether we are dealing with a new regime of accumulation for a deglobalizing world, or a particularly noisy and parasitic individual oligarch whose power nevertheless necessitates the “guide for the perplexed” that the book provides.
Nations across the world are indeed dependent on US technology firms: For many countries, the public sphere essentially exists on Meta servers, and basic communications services are provided by WhatsApp. Google still organizes user access to the rest of the internet, even if it is now just via AI summaries.
In Africa, both US and Chinese firms have invested in internet infrastructure, with global tech giants attracted to the substantial growth potential in cloud computing, streaming, AI services, e-commerce, and digital advertising on a continent where internet penetration is still low.
This is where Starlink comes in. Musk’s foray into Africa is largely continuous with the infrastructure-lite model of development which has dominated the political economy of the continent since the end of the Cold War.
Notwithstanding its broader developmental impact, the advent of mobile telephony helped reduce inequalities in access to communication. In his study of Starlink’s operations in Cameroon, sociologist Georges Eyenga has cast doubts on whether Starlink will have the same equalizing effect.2 As telecommunications experts have long emphasized, satellite internet is expensive, environmentally damaging, and increasingly congested, and should be reserved for the most isolated rural communities.
Major US firms seem to agree. Google, Amazon, and Meta are investing heavily in terrestrial, overland internet infrastructure across Africa. Like Musk, the goal of these tech giants is lock-in. The key difference is that Starlink locks Africans into a far less reliable infrastructure. The danger is that Musk achieves what he did in the United States: convincing amenable policymakers to abandon prioritizing funding fiber and redirect billions of dollars’ worth of state funds to Starlink. The fact that Starlink infrastructure is largely extraterrestrial also reduces states’ leverage over the platform. Unlike a mine or a cable, it is very difficult for most states to seize and nationalize a satellite.
As Evgeny Morozov has argued, the power of today’s platform companies resembles that of conglomerates like International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) Corporation during the Cold War. Like ITT, they depend heavily on US power. They also accumulate enormous political leverage while presenting themselves as neutral innovators. While African leaders have been vocal about maintaining “digital sovereignty,” they have so far steered clear of leveraging control over strategic minerals and infrastructure to mount a more radical challenge to the power of tech platforms on the continent.
African states and populations should not be underestimated, however. Tensions between platform monopolies and the state’s regulatory activities have been a feature of the continent’s politics for much of the twenty-first century.3 Several African states have declared Starlink a threat to their digital sovereignty: Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Cameroon, and South Africa have all either issued formal bans or demanded regularization. Having honed his skills in bitter battles with traditional banks, credit card companies, and government regulators in the 2000s, Musk is a master of regulatory arbitrage. He will no doubt leverage Starlink’s ability to cross borders via satellite and function before formal agreements are reached to muscle his way into recalcitrant markets.
Core to the North Atlantic free-trade philosophy was a techno-optimism that believed in replacing conditional aid with tech investments. These would deliver development and poverty alleviation in Africa by “closing the digital divide.” A 2010 speech by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, encapsulates this vision: “A connection to global information networks is like an on-ramp to modernity.” She explained she had “seen this first hand…in sub-Saharan Africa.” We are not sure if modernity is the right word.
The most famous example is Safaricom’s M-Pesa system in Kenya. M-Pesa and other forms of mobile money allow for peer-to-peer transfers, micro-payment and digital lending. These form the backbone of a growing and highly lucrative fintech sector on the continent.
Eyenga also makes it clear that Musk is actually quite reliant on national terrestrial infrastructure, meaning he must deal with the state and make use its resources.
In 2018, South African state contentiously called the bluff of local tech entrepreneur Serge Belamant who suggested that without his digital payments platform NET1, the South African state would be forced to deliver social grants by carrier pigeon. When it was revealed that NET1 was enabling unauthorized airtime, loan and insurance fees from vulnerable grant beneficiaries it precipitated a national moral panic that led the state to withdraw its contract with the company. This incident, and others like it, have produced an extensive NGO and public policy ecosystem championing so-called Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI): a push for the establishment of digital systems for public benefit.”