“Tech-Driven Prosperity & Right-Wing Racist Politics”: Quinn Slobodian on Elon Musk and SpaceX IPO

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 10,000 in orbit, which accounts for over 70% of all of the satellites in the sky. So, he’s produced this whole new market sector of low Earth orbit. These things are only 500 kilometers from Earth, much, much closer than the geostationary satellites. They’re used by consumers. There are over 10 million subscribers worldwide. But, essentially, they’re also used by armed forces in the field, famously in Ukraine, and they’re going to be a central part to the Golden Dome strategy that Trump has already started handing out contracts for. So, there’s something called Starshield, which is a more heavily encrypted military network for satellites that is absolutely central to this missile defense program that is the source of a great deal of incoming revenue for people like Musk. So, the idea is he can scale up from 10,000 to, as described in the SpaceX prospectus, up to 1 million, and thus create a kind of global telecommunications monopoly.

However, this is also one of his greatest vulnerabilities. You can’t just put satellites into the sky without getting approval. In fact, something called the International Telecommunications Union, which is an agency of the U.N., needs to approve these, and there’s no way that they’re going to approve his request for 1 million satellites. Also, individual countries need to accept his ability to sell the receivers down on Earth, and many countries are still unwilling to do that. South Africa has said no. So far, India has said no. When Musk refused to do content moderation in Brazil after the attempted coup there, Brazil went ahead and seized the assets of Starlink. So, if you read that SpaceX prospectus, you also find out that there are a lot of weak points and chokepoints. And Musk’s greatest vulnerability is still old-fashioned legislation, regulation, laws made by democratically elected governments.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And there was at least one European pension fund, a Danish fund, that announced that they will be excluding SpaceX from their investments, claiming — the CEO claimed the extreme concentration of power effectively prevents the board from exercising meaningful oversight and makes it impossible to remove Musk against his will. What is the potential danger to the — even to the U.S. economy of so much investment, especially by index funds, in SpaceX?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, the problem there is the situation we’re in in the United States is a very small number of tech companies are responsible for a great deal of the stock market rise in the last couple of years. Those small number of tech companies also have an unprecedented number of concentration of power in the figure of these founder CEO techno-kings, if you like. If one of those founder CEOs starts to go off on a limb, as Musk has been very well known to do, to commit himself, let’s say, even more passionately to the neofascist causes in Western Europe that seem to be so important to him personally, then you could create a crisis within that company, within its profitability, which then doesn’t just become a problem for that company. It produces a cascade effect of loss of investor confidence in the tech sector altogether. It drains money out of people’s savings accounts and their retirement accounts. And it can be the kind of tipping point that leads to a crash in the sector altogether.

So, at a broad level, you know, what the brave stance of the Danish pension fund should show us is not just that we need to regulate the outliers, the extreme — the more extreme members of this Silicon Valley leadership class, but we should ask a bigger question about why the political economy of the U.S., and, by extension, the world, has become a one-way bat on unproven technology. Why isn’t there more diversification? Why isn’t there more attention to forms of the green capitalist models even that were so popular only a few years ago? Why is the biotech sector, the higher ed sector not valued for the things that it brings, instead of only this often outrageous and absurd vision of launching AI data centers into the stratosphere?

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, we just have a minute, Quinn, but one word we didn’t use in this segment was ”DOGE.” Elon Musk is the face of cutting government spending, yet he is taking up more and more of government funding. If you could comment on that, and what the protesters held outside Nasdaq as they chanted “No Nazis on Nasdaq,” what they mean?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, yes, I think DOGE is understood best not just as an effort to cut government across the board, but as a way to refashion and reformat government to make it more open to be the site of injection for new services from Silicon Valley, specifically Palantir and Musk’s AI tools. So, it’s not about demolishing the government; it’s about making the government more compatible, ready for the kind of products that Musk offers, and to make him then an indispensable part of the infrastructure. Already they’re talking about commercial dominance in Musk’s control of military communications infrastructure.

When the politics of that person who is doing that is also consonant with the furthest right-wing parts of the European identitarian movement, then one starts to see why people would hold up signs talking about Nazis in the Nasdaq. It makes us all ask a question, that even if those stocks should do well, even if those retail investors aren’t holding the bag, as it were, by the end — let’s say they keep profiting — and at same time Musk keeps filling his feed with questionings about whether or not racism should be recalibrated back to a kind of normal status quo ante, whether or not remigration is the right policy for Western Europe and the United States, and whether or not any piece of democratic policy that goes against his best interests is simply a matter of corruption and bugs in the mainframe — that’s what we really should be worried about, the possibility of those things to live together: tech-driven prosperity and radical right-wing racist politics.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Quinn Slobodian teaches international history at Boston University. His new book is Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. And we’ll link to your Atlantic piece headlined “Elon Musk’s SpaceX Endgame.”

Coming up, President Trump booed by hometown basketball fans here in New York City at the Knicks-Spurs game. We’ll speak to sports journalist Dave Zirin. Back in 20 seconds.

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