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Elon Musk’s apocalyptic style

Science fiction, fascism and the end of the world

On 9 March 2022, Bill Gates met Elon Musk in Nevada to discuss philanthropy and the climate crisis. He came away disappointed. Musk said that Gates’ model of philanthropy, ie using vast personal wealth to save lives right now, was “bullshit”. He preferred to talk about Mars. “He’s overboard on Mars,” Gates told Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson. He found Musk’s thinking bizarre: “It’s this crazy thing where maybe there’s a nuclear war on Earth and so the people on Mars are there and they’ll come back down and, you know, be alive after we all kill each other.”

Musk’s obsession with outwitting the end of the world has been one of the defining features of his career for the past 25 years. Now that he is not just richer than ever but a far-right activist on a legally nebulous mission to shred the federal government, it is essential to understand his relationship with apocalypse. He has always glorified his own impulses by equating them with humanity’s best interests: what is good for him is good for the species. For a long time, he got away with it.

Musk regularly cites four works of science fiction as formative influences on his thinking: Douglas Adams’ The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whose witty humanism has completely escaped him; Iain M. Banks’ Culture series (ditto); Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, about a human raised by Martians; and, most of all, Isaac Asimov’s multi-decade series of novels, Foundation. Asimov was an indefatigable techno-optimist who anticipated concerns about unaligned AI in 1942 with his reassuring Three Laws of Robotics and co-authored a book about climate change, 1991’s Our Angry Earth, which concluded: “We can do it, you know. We can get there. We can have it all.”

In the Foundation saga (1951-93), a “psychohistorian” called Hari Seldon foretells that the galactic empire he inhabits will inevitably collapse into a dark age and establishes a distant colony of problem-solving intellectuals that will enable human civilization to recover as quickly as possible: a mere millennium. Asimov also introduces a “Zeroth Law” to his Three Laws of Robotics, superseding the rest: a robot’s paramount duty is no longer to individual human beings but to the welfare of humanity at large.

Musk clearly sees himself as Seldon: the visionary scientist-statesman who can see the future but is mocked, scorned and hampered by lesser minds. Seldon’s far-flung brains trust is the template for Musk’s Mars colony. Asimov’s lesson, Musk told Rolling Stone in 2017, was that he should act to “prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age, and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.” He tweeted in 2018 that Foundation and the Zeroth law were “fundamental to creation of SpaceX,” Musk’s space technology company. Like Asimov, Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, Musk believes that humanity can only survive in the long run if it becomes multiplanetary, finding alternative homes in the event that climate change, nuclear war or collision with an asteroid render Earth uninhabitable.

Musk’s mission bemused some peers (one former PayPal colleague called his dreams of Mars “bananas”) but his apparent idealism inspired extraordinary industry and loyalty in his employees. He similarly framed his electric car company Tesla and its subsidiary SolarCity as a crusade to reduce carbon emissions. In 2017, he quit Donald Trump’s presidential council of CEOs after the President pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement. In 2023, he bombastically claimed at the DealBook Conference that, as Tesla CEO, he had “done more for the environment than any single human on Earth”.

Musk also became obsessed with the dangers of unaligned AI after a 2012 meeting with Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind. What he called “our biggest existential threat”, led him to co-found OpenAI and create the neurotechnology company Neuralink. Musk is a Silicon Valley “solutionist”, who sees technology rather than democratic decision-making as the answer to our problems.

All of these fixations — AI, climate, Mars — eventually cohered under the umbrella of “longtermism”. Named by William MacAskill and Toby Ord, the Oxford philosophers behind the effective altruism movement, longtermism reimagines the ethics of philanthropy by regarding the wellbeing of future generations as equal to that of the current population. By this logic, the study of existential risk becomes far more important than, say, funding malaria nets in Africa.

The writer Paris Marx condemned longtermism as “a technocratic dream that purports to give some of the wealthiest people in the world the ability to plan the far future of humanity according to their personal whims”. The philosophy certainly made effective altruism far more alluring to megadonors such as Musk, who called it “a close match for my philosophy”. MacAskill recalled a telling exchange when they both appeared on a panel about AI: “I tried to talk to him for five minutes about global poverty and got little interest.” That conversation between Musk and Gates in 2022 was therefore a mutually befuddling clash between longtermist and short-termist priorities, or Mars versus malaria nets.

Of course, Musk’s urgent rhetoric aligned nicely with his business interests. He told Gates that the best way to fight climate change was to buy Tesla stock. According to the tech writer Kara Swisher, he once told her, “If Tesla doesn’t survive the human race is doomed.” How convenient that the fate of humanity and the fate of his preposterous wealth were one of the same. Last year, Tesla’s annual net income more than halved from 2023 to 2024, to just $7.13bn, and its sales dipped for the first time ever. The company’s sense-defying valuation (it peaked at $1.12tn in January) derives from the outsized power of his image as a visionary genius.

Musk’s turn to the political right has dramatically impacted his risk assessments. It began with his dismissal of a tangible threat that conflicted with his commercial self-interest. When Covid-19 threatened to shut down a Tesla factory in California, he told employees in an email that “the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself”. Lockdown was the start of his radicalisation. He has since spread numerous conspiracy theories about the virus and government efforts to minimise its death toll.

What about climate change? Somewhere along Musk’s seven-year journey from deeming Trump “one of the world’s best bullshitters ever” to becoming his most powerful ally, he appeared to lose interest. During an interview with Trump on X last August, he softened his earlier critique of the fossil fuel industry and claimed that the biggest danger from carbon emissions will be “headaches and nausea” as the air becomes thinner. Certainly, Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord for a second time has not spurred Musk to the same outrage he displayed in 2017. Nor has the administration’s efforts to delete references to climate change from federal websites and grant applications while reducing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ability to track climate change.

Musk also seems to have conveniently retreated from his earlier AI doomerism. The recent Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris was scuppered by American opposition to the kind of regulation that Musk once claimed was essential for human survival, and its refusal to acknowledge the environmental costs of AI. In fact, the US insisted on removing any reference to existential risk from the final declaration.

In short, the administration in which Musk informally serves is antithetical to almost everything he once professed to care about. But then he has found a new source of dread. “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” he tweeted in 2022. The following year, he used the spectre of World War Three to justify his decision to limit Ukraine’s access to his Starlink satellites. It is impossible to be sure in each case whether his hyperbole is cynical or sincere but he speaks as if Armageddon is always around the corner.

It seems obvious now that Musk’s obsession with preventing humanity’s doom is less a rational assessment of existential threats than a psychological disposition. As Isaacson writes: “Musk’s siege mentality was often apocalyptic. In business and in politics, he had a tendency to perceive — and be energised by — dire threats.” He overstates problems in order to argue that only he can fix them and must not be obstructed in any way, and to label his critics as not just wrong but evil. For example, Musk has absurdly described his purchase of Twitter and active promotion of hate speech and disinformation as “part of the mission of preserving civilization, buying our society more time to become multiplanetary”. Perhaps he was thinking of the role of former Nazi scientists in the US space programme.

For activists, apocalyptic oratory is usually focussed on a clear goal: the abolition of nuclear weapons, or a moratorium on drilling for oil. For Musk, who currently runs six companies and whatever the hell DOGE is, it is primarily a style that can migrate from one issue to another without any consistency bar the conviction that he is destined to save humanity, on this planet or the next. His self-image as planetary saviour burns brighter than any individual endeavour. He therefore has less in common with Hari Seldon than with Mark Rylance’s Peter Isherwell from Don’t Look Up: a bloviating tech messiah who has the ear of a corrupt president and whose greed and ego prove catastrophically more substantial than his windy humanitarian bromides.

But it is worse than that. At least Isherwell is not a fascist. Musk has found a new home on the far right, which has its own apocalyptic narratives of decline, crisis and a looming dark age. The Musk-endorsed Great Replacement Theory is a myth of racial Armageddon, of the kind that once fuelled Nazism and eugenics. Several of his young DOGE staffers have previously tweeted about eugenics and white supremacy.

In this telling, civilization is imperilled not by faceless asteroids or AI but by other people. Musk has framed progressive politics, for example, as a roadblock to Mars. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” he told Isaacson. His eschatological language has changed from good marketing (save the world, buy a Tesla) to good propaganda (save the world, vote right).

On inauguration day, after delivering that stiff-armed fascist salute, Musk hailed President Trump: “It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured.” Whether civilization still meant humanity at large, or had acquired a more exclusive ethnonationalist definition, was left to the imagination but some observers detected an echo of the neo-Nazis’ infamous 14 words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

DOGE’s wrecking-ball approach to government finances also resembles the apocalyptic style at its worst. Silicon Valley shibboleths like disruption and “move fast and break things” celebrate the destruction of the status quo in the name of building a better world. But the radicalised version of Musk is much better at breaking than building. At Twitter, he didn’t start again and introduce a new, better model; he vandalised and degraded the old model until it became a digital junkyard.

Musk is taking the same approach to the federal government, with much higher stakes: a thirst for short-term demolition without a vision for long-term renovation. Most cruelly, his gutting of USAID will directly kill people in the developing world. Kara Swisher summed up his worldview nicely on Ezra Klein’s podcast: “It’s all about destruction. It’s not creative destruction, it’s: ‘Let’s wipe the slate clean and then we will build the civilisation we want. And let us show you the way of how we can get back to glory’… They burnish it with this techno-utopianism that is really techno-authoritarianism if you break it down. They know best and if we just listen to them, the world would be a better place for everybody.”

This planetary narcissism is the vital thread in Musk’s apocalyptic thinking. The rest, it turns out, was a sham. The climate and AI safety can go to hell. What really matters is the standard authoritarian ploy of fostering a sense of crisis that enables him to act without restraint.

As one of Asimov’s Foundation characters admits, the Zeroth Law is hopelessly subjective: “Humanity is an abstraction. How do we deal with it?” Musk’s messianic answer is to embody the abstraction and speak for the whole. The lives of actual human beings — NPCs, he calls them — are worth less than nothing.

The eternal Orwell

On the 70th anniversary of his death, why is Orwell still our most useful writer?

In 1969 Sonia Orwell took the plunge. In the 19 years since George’s death, she had zealously guarded her late husband’s legacy but she had always declined to write about him at length. What changed her mind was Mary McCarthy’s waspish review of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, the four-volume Orwell anthology overseen by Sonia. McCarthy, who had never met George but had mutual friends, pondered what he would have made of Vietnam, Prague, CND, revolting students and so on. Some of her conclusions infuriated Sonia, who shot back in the pages of Nova magazine with a coldly furious six-page essay, ‘Unfair to George’. In McCarthy’s eyes, she quipped, Orwell seems “to fail if he does not set down his thoughts on events which happened after his death.” That process continues. Half a century later, people are still trying to turn him into the eternal commentator.

Orwell was fascinated by authors, such as Kipling and Swift, who had written themselves so deep into the national imagination that they couldn’t be written out. “Whether you approve of him or not,” he wrote of Dickens, “he is there like the Nelson Column.” Orwell has likewise become a cultural landmark but one with unique oracular power. On politics, in the broadest sense of the word, he is our must useful writer. To say that he is “more relevant than ever” is a cliché — he was pretty damn relevant in his lifetime — but Orwell has yet again become an indispensable authority in the age of populism and Big Tech. Whether you want to talk about Trump, Brexit, Corbynism, China, political correctness or the Amazon Echo, has he got views for you.

It does not end with his two unimpeachable classics, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. Last year in Parliament, for example, Clive Lewis paraphrased ‘Antisemitism in Britain’, Robert Jenrick referred to Homage to Catalonia and Baroness Altmann dug deep for a line from one of his ‘London Letter’ reports for the Partisan Review. The section of ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ in which Orwell fretted that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world” wasn’t published in his lifetime but it has been quoted recently by both the literary critic Michiko Kakutani in The Death of Truth and the Disney star Zendaya in Spider-Man: Far From Home. “He had a real gift — partly a great publicist’s gift — of summaring complex ideas in soundbites and tart phrases,” says Peter Pomerantsev, author of This Is Not Propaganda. “He shares that with Marx, for example. He gives us a vocabulary to talk about slippery subjects.”

But why Orwell, above all others? His close friend Malcolm Muggeridge’s The Thirties is spangled with quotable observations, many of them still pertinent, but you don’t see any of them turned into Facebook memes. Mary McCarthy was more of an intellectual superstar in her lifetime than Orwell was in his but we don’t turn to her journalism for guidance on Trump and Putin. Hannah Arendt has found a new readership in the age of authoritarian populism but she has yet to figure in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The simple answer is Nineteen Eighty-Four. Around two million of Orwell’s words are currently in print. Only a fraction of them would be available were it not for the last thing, give or take a few book reviews, that he ever wrote. Animal Farm was a sensation but not sufficient to make him a legend. It was Nineteen Eighty-Four that ensured scholars would round up every single scrap of paper they could find and journalists and politicians would never let him go. Orwell made clear that he considered much of his work not worth reprinting, so it would have been inconceivable to him that so much of his output as a cash-strapped, workaholic freelancer would one day acquire the status of gospel.

When Nineteen Eighty-Four entered the world, on 8 June 1949, Orwell was on the way out. He wouldn’t admit it but his ruined lungs were beyond repair, imprisoning him in his room at University College Hospital. That was where he filed his last articles; where he read books, wrote letters and kept tabs on a world in which he could no longer participate; where he married Sonia in October 1949; and where he breathed his last in the small hours of 21 January 1950, at the age of 46. He was buried under the birth name, Eric Arthur Blair, that he never got around to changing.

The timing of Orwell’s death made him look like a prophet cut down in his prime, and the obituaries were glowing. Muggeridge observed, somewhat enviously, “how the legend of a human being is created”. In the longer term, his passing meant that Orwell was incapable of letting anyone down by moving to the right, as many of his contemporaries did, or growing cranky and out of touch. Right on the major issues of his day, he was saved from being wrong about the post-war world.

The obituaries made much of his commitment to honesty. Lionel Trilling argued that Orwell, unlike Shakespeare or Joyce, was attractively accessible: “He is not a genius — what a relief! For he communicates to us the sense that what he has done any of us could do.” It’s true that Orwell’s deceptive simplicity allows other writers to feel inspired rather than daunted, but he was a genius of sorts, with an unrivalled gift for telling the truth as he saw it, especially when it was easier not to do so. That’s simple in theory but painfully difficult in practice, especially for a political writer. In that respect, Orwell had the immense advantage of never wanting an easy life. Austere and unclubbable, he revelled in bad food, old clothes, the venom of his enemies and the irritation of his friends. According to his friend, the novelist Anthony Powell, he could “only thrive in comparative adversity”. He was no glib provocateur, churning out the 1940s equivalent of clickbait, but he felt that if he wasn’t annoying his readers on a fairly regular basis, especially those who were ostensibly on the same side, then he wasn’t doing his job. Another novelist friend, Arthur Koestler, wrote that “his uncompromising intellectual honesty was such that it made him appear almost inhuman at times.” For his pains, Orwell was at various points blacklisted, censored, sued, surveilled and vilified.

As a writer on the left who is often fiercely critical of the left, the columnist Nick Cohen considers Orwell an invaluable spiritual ally. “Lots of writers are put in this position where they think, ‘Do I toe the party line and write what the bosses or readers want me to write or do I stand up for myself?’” he says. “It’s as bad on the right as on the left. When you do stand up for yourself George Orwell’s on your side. You hear this rather upper-class English voice saying, ‘Don’t listen to that bollocks. Don’t sell yourself out. Don’t suppress what you think is the truth.’ He does give you courage. He makes you think, well, the boss, the editor, the politician, the Twitter mob, they’re not powerful. You are.”

Crucial to Orwell’s integrity was his capacity to give himself a hard time. He was a journalist for 21 years, from October 1928 to March 1949, during which time he never budged from his fundamental principles — freedom of expression, social justice, individual liberty — but changed his mind many times when those principles collided with events. Capitalism and fascism were “Tweedledum and Tweedledee” in 1937, until he decided that the real Janus-faced threat was totalitarianism. War with Germany was first a nightmare to be avoided, and then an existential necessity. Unlike more doctrinaire writers, he could learn from his mistakes because he asked himself tough questions: Why do you think what you do? What are your unacknowledged biases? What explains your false predictions? In his last ‘London Letter’ of 1944, he took his previous columns to task: “Of course there are many mistaken predictions… many generalizations based on little or no evidence, and also, from time to time, spiteful or misleading remarks about individuals.” Can you imagine any newspaper columnist in Britain writing those words today?

Dr Nathan Waddell, who teaches English Literature at the University of Birmingham, says that his students “relish Orwell’s clarity of critique, simple language, and unwavering bravery in speaking his mind, no matter the possible consequences. He continues to enjoy the status of a cultural sage in their eyes: someone who holds some of the intellectual and critical keys with which they might unlock the secrets of the times.” While Waddell’s students are critical of Orwell’s failings, such as his faint streak of homophobia, pre-war antisemitism and sketchy representation of women, they don’t regard them as disqualifying. “I was pleased to discover that my students didn't find him particularly problematic or outdated,” says Waddell. “They were more interested in focusing on what he has to offer to us, today.”

Recognising Orwell’s weaknesses is not just more interesting but more respectful to his memory than canonising him as The Man Who Was Always Right. He could be petty, unfair and emotionally tone-deaf. Some of his generalisations and prescriptions, notably in ‘Politics and the English Language’, don’t hold up to scrutiny. He had numerous blindspots, from feminism to cinema to the importance of establishing the NHS. Anthony Powell remembered that Orwell could be enthralling company when a subject interested him but when it didn’t he would turn away, “like a horse refusing an apple it suspects of sourness”. “His mind was limited, but he knew his own limitations,” Powell wrote. “Inside those wide limits it was a first-rate mind.”

Orwell is adored in England for his lancing insights into the national character (although Cohen suggests that his portrait of a sensible, pragmatic nation has taken “a hell of a pounding” in recent years). His clear-sighted integrity and intellectual doggedness have also made him an international figure. While western apologists for communism were trying to tear holes in Nineteen Eighty-Four, readers behind the Iron Curtain were weeping with amazed gratitude over a book that explained to them the surreal nightmare in which they lived. Ece Temelkuran, the Turkish journalist and author of How to Lose a Country, recalls seeing the 1954 animated movie of Animal Farm shortly after her country’s 1980 military coup. She was seven. “I remember my ‘defeated’ leftist mom and dad watching it with me, feeling overwhelmed,” she says. “As if it was a secret sign for resistance, after the final defeat, that reminds them they still exist. This is Orwell at his purest, I guess. The man knows how to remind humans of their basic dignity.”

Like many of Orwell’s admirers, Temelkuran draws inspiration from his personality as much as his writing. More than any individual book or essay, she respects his punishing work ethic, his vigour, and his resistance to comforting illusions. “I do believe in pessimism,” she says, “because those of us who see the evil clearly actually contribute to humankind more than the shiny happy people.”

The pessimism of Nineteen Eighty-Four is immortal because, in trying to illuminate the reality of totalitarianism in the 30s and 40s, Orwell revealed timeless truths about the psychology of power, deception and self-deception. While undertaking the first new Russian translation since the 1980s, Bloomberg columnist Leonid Bershidsky was informed by recent developments such as Putinism, Brexit and resurgent nationalism: “None of that background was there in the 1980s, but it’s what went into my translation.”

This is why Nineteen Eighty-Four has lived far beyond 1984. The same is true of many of his essays. ‘Antisemitism in Britain’ still helps to explain how people excuse or deny their own bigotry. ‘Notes on Nationalism’ delineates the phenomena that we would now call confirmation bias, filter bubbles and groupthink. ‘Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dalí’ remains one of the clearest accounts of the problem of separating the art from the artist. Reading Orwell does us the immense service of reminding us that the dilemmas of our time aren’t new. “Orwell lasts because he taps into something eternal: the struggle to bear an honest witness when it’s difficult,” says Cohen. “Trying to tell the truth about what you see and what you believe matters and it has always mattered. These are battles that never end.”

For Temelkuran, “Orwell is like a flag waved when the need occurs.” Many writers, some more talented than him, are still enjoyed but Orwell has the rare distinction of being needed. Seventy years after his death, he is still the voice in our ear saying: Think again. To assign to him opinions he never stated about events he never lived to see may be a cheap trick but you could do a lot worse than to ask yourself, when the going gets rough, “What would George do?”

Inspirational books

Ten great non-fiction books WHICH have influenced my own writing.

John Bew — Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (riverrun, 2016)

Sarah Churchwell — Careless People: Murder, Mayhem and the Invention of The Great Gatsby (Penguin, 2014)

Masha Gessen — The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (Granta, 2018)

John Higgs — The KLF: Chaos, Magic and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds (W&N, 2013)

Florian Illies — 1913: The Year Before the Storm (Melville House, 2014)

Dave Itzkoff — Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies (Times Books, 2014)

David Margolick — Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song (Ecco, 2001)

George Packer — The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013)

Rick Perlstein — Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Scribner, 2009)

Claudia Roth Pierpoint — Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books (Jonathan Cape, 2014)