How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE.
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 21 April 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
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Summary
Elon Musk, who’s taking his chainsaw to the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore’s BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.”
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to the political scene. |
| 0:07.0 | I'm David Remnick. |
| 0:08.3 | Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. |
| 0:15.8 | This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. |
| 0:23.1 | Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It may take us many years to |
| 0:29.0 | understand fully what's happening in America right now. This attempt by Donald Trump, as well |
| 0:34.8 | as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, the authors of Project 2025, and so many others |
| 0:39.3 | to radically reshape this country and its institutions as quickly and as brutally as possible. |
| 0:46.6 | We've been talking a lot on the radio hour about the colossal upheaval of the first hundred |
| 0:51.8 | days of the Trump administration, and what could be more |
| 0:54.9 | important. But today, the subject that we're going to drill down on is an appraisal of Elon Musk and his |
| 1:01.2 | vision of our future. Of the many politicians who have tried to position themselves as Trump's |
| 1:07.7 | heir and closest advisor, really only Elon Musk rivals the boss. And in some ways he |
| 1:14.4 | exceeds him. There's that astronomical untold wealth. There's his delight in trolling his enemies and his |
| 1:21.1 | contempt for government and its rules. And there's a deep belief in him that what's good for Elon Musk |
| 1:27.3 | is precisely what matters. |
| 1:30.6 | And yet the thing is, Elon Musk is not just a chaos agent, as he's sometimes called. |
| 1:35.9 | He's driven by a distinct ideology, or at least a clear set of obsessions. |
| 1:41.6 | And to find out more about this, I called up Jill Lippoor, the best-selling author |
| 1:46.0 | of These Truths and other works of history. And I called her because she's written about Elon Musk |
| 1:51.2 | for The New Yorker, and she's also produced a podcast about him called X-Man. She's a professor |
| 1:57.3 | at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker. |
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