Dimension X from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story

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Pushkin Industries

Society & Culture, History

4.6 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 March 2025

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Elon Musk is reinventing himself as a kingmaker for the United States and the world. He wants to shape the future. But in this episode, Jill Lepore goes back to his past — to his childhood, his strange family history, and his fascination with Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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0:00.0	Pushkin.
0:10.7	Elon Musk is the richest person on the planet.
0:16.9	Long before Donald Trump appointed him to run Doge, a department of government efficiency,
0:22.9	Musk had plans, plans to save the world from climate catastrophe, with electric cars and solar
0:28.9	panels and underground tunnels, plans to colonize Mars, plans to build chips to put in people's brains.
0:36.2	He is followed by more than 200 million people on social
0:39.5	media. He has two ex-wives and 11 children, including a son named X. The bare facts of Musk's
0:47.6	life, the way they're usually told, make him sound like a fictional character, a comic book
0:52.9	superhero. But what's the real story,
0:56.0	the actual history behind the comic book?
1:03.8	Welcome to X-Man, the Elon Musk origin story. I'm Jill Lepore. I'm a professor of history and law at Harvard. For a long time,
1:14.2	I've been studying the relationship between technological and political change. I'm fascinated by
1:19.9	visions of the future, in political discourse, in literature, in science fiction, and even comic books.
1:27.2	This series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism I call muskism.
1:32.4	Extravagant, extreme capitalism.
1:35.5	Extraterrestrial capitalism.
1:37.5	Where stock prices are driven by earnings, but also by fantasies.
1:42.1	Fantasies that you can find in blockbuster superhero movies,
1:45.7	but that come from science fiction, some of it a century old.
1:52.6	Elon Musk runs a rocket company.
1:55.2	It's called SpaceX.
1:56.6	His artificial intelligence company, X, AI.
	...

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