Hi, my name is Eleanor Penny, welcome to Navarra FM and welcome as well to the first week of President Donald Trump's second term in office at the helm of the American Empire.

As we record, the inauguration was two days ago on Monday the 20th of January 2025. His cabinet features a historic number of multi-millionaires and

billionaires and one of them kicked off this second term in horrifying style at the inauguration

with a gesture that looked uncannily exactly like a Nazi salute. Certainly a load of Nazis seem to think so. That man's name is

Elon Musk. He's a billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX. He's a self-styled tech messiah and in a

dense field, one of the worst people on the internet. He's more recently known for buying up Twitter,

as was, and cosying up to the

international far right and spreading right-wing conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement,

and he is who we will be talking about today. Unsurprisingly, we're not going to be doing

a breathless hagiography of the man and talk about him as a troubled genius who is going

to save humanity by taking us to

Mars and we're not going to be speculating too much about whatever personal demons may or may not

be keeping him up at night. Rather, the trajectory of someone in this position of economic,

political and cultural power can tell us a lot about the fortunes of modern capitalism

and its relationship to the state. And what, if anything, we might be able to do about it?

To tell us more about this strange moment in history, I'm joined now by Quinsler Bodian,

who's a professor of international history at the Frederick S. Pardy School of Global Studies

at Boston University.

His books include crack up capitalism, market radicals and the dream of a world without democracy,

and coming up very soon, high ex-bastards, race, gold, IQ, and the capitalism of the far right.

Quinn, welcome to the show.

Good to be here.

...