How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE

The Political Scene | The New Yorker

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Obama, News, Wnyc, Washington, Barack, President, Lizza, Wickenden

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.”

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Transcript

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0:00.0	eBay, it's the place to fall in love with new, pre-loved vintage and rare fashion over and over again.
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0:10.0	Yeah, eBay. Things people love.
0:18.8	You're listening to the political scene.
0:21.8	I'm David Remnick.
0:27.3	Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:35.5	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:38.9	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:39.9	I'm David Remnick.
0:45.9	It may take us many years to understand fully what's happening in America right now.
0:51.5	This attempt by Donald Trump, as well as Elon Musk, Stephen Miller, the authors of Project 2025, and so many others, to radically reshape this country
0:56.1	and its institutions as quickly and as brutally as possible. We've been talking a lot on the
1:02.6	radio hour about the colossal upheaval of the first hundred days of the Trump administration
1:07.3	and what could be more important. But today, the subject that we're going to drill down
1:12.1	on is an appraisal of Elon Musk and his vision of our future. Of the many politicians who have
1:19.0	tried to position themselves as Trump's heir and closest advisor, really only Elon Musk rivals the boss.
1:29.6	And in some ways, he exceeds him. There's that
1:36.1	astronomical untold wealth. There's his delight in trolling his enemies and his contempt for government and its rules. And there's a deep belief in him that what's good for Elon Musk is precisely what
1:43.0	matters. And yet the thing is, Elon Musk is not
1:46.9	just a chaos agent, as he's sometimes called. He's driven by a distinct ideology, or at least a
1:53.4	clear set of obsessions. And to find out more about this, I called up Jillipur, the best-selling
1:59.7	author of these truths and other works
	...

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