The most powerful CEO in history is barely a person anymore, but it's not just his ex-addled brain that has transformed him.

Elon Musk has subsumed himself into the cyborg collective, full of bits of information,

electrons, batteries, fantastical promises, financial systems, bots and memes, a world he's

made for himself and which he now resides inside.

He's no longer a person.

He's more of a system.

Quinn Slavodian and Ben Tarnoff are the authors of Muskism,

a guide for the perplexed, which is a whistle-stop tour through the worlds that made Musk

from apartheid South Africa to the financial

fabulism of the Bay Area and of course the world that Musk is making for the rest of us.

Now, they told me about what they see as Musk's ongoing land grab in space, what Musk's real

plans are with brain implants. How our supposed climate

saviour became obsessed with the end of the world and how Musk came to define an entirely new way

of making technology. Or not making it, but at least seeming like you might. This episode loops back over some of the

same parts of the map as the Susanna Glickman episode. That episode was about the military

industrial complex and its changing shape, how the primes are being outcompeted by smaller firms

like Andrewill, Palantir, and indeed SpaceX.

After all, why wouldn't it loop back? It's all part the same giant system.

When we first started this show, I promised you that we were making a map of everything that

had ever mattered and everything that ever will, and that's exactly what we're doing now. I'm posting

parts of the map on X, one of the many platforms discussed in this episode. And as we get more

eyes on this show, I will be posting more and more. So if you want to see the full map,

...