The

The Hello and welcome to behind the news. My name is Doug Henwood.

In what should not be confused with

the sign of impending apocalypse, a departure from normative structure, two guests by one topic,

Elon Musk. Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnaff are just out with a book called Muskism, a guide for

the perplexed, published by Harper. Elon Musk, as they used to say in Vegas, needs no introduction.

He has one of the leading

capitalists of our time. Unlike many in tech, he gets down and dirty with the physical world,

or at least his employees do, building cars and rockets, digging tunnels, even implanting

chips in people's brains. But he's also a master of hype, making ludicrous claims that

never come to pass. But all that hype aside, he has achieved a lot.

And on yet another hand, he's used his fame, his money, and his ex-platform to promote a politics

that it is no exaggeration to say, put one in mind of Hitler, white supremacist, and exterminationist.

Musk's businesses include Tesla, the car company, SpaceX, the Rocket Company, X and X-A-I, the first

formerly known as Twitter, and the second, the artificial intelligence enterprise of which

GROC is the face, NeuroLink, the maker of chips implantable into human brains so they can talk

directly with computers, and Boring Company, which drills giant tunnels to create subterranean highways.

Of these, only Tesla and SpaceX are profitable. The current profits of the two combined are

around $12 billion. These are the financial base of his fortune, estimated by Bloomberg

at $655 billion, with most of it coming from SpaceX and Tesla's stock.

Tesla's stock is traded publicly, It's valued at 372 times the company's profits.

SpaceX is expected to go public soon, to the tune of something like a $2 trillion dollar valuation.

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