The Dogefather from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story
The Last Archive
Pushkin Industries
4.6 • 1.9K Ratings
🗓️ 29 March 2025
⏱️ 28 minutes
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Summary
In 2021, Elon Musk started calling himself The Dogefather to signal his support for Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency based on a joke meme about a dog. That dog is now wagging the tail of the world’s economy. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at Silicon Valley's cryptocurrency craze through the lens of some very old science fiction. Like everything else about Muskism that purports to be futuristic, this idea is a relic, whose history serves as a warning.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:08.9 | The COVID-19 pandemic was a boom time for the world's billionaires, who gained nearly |
| 0:17.1 | $2 trillion of wealth in 2020 alone. |
| 0:21.1 | As CNBC reported at the height of the pandemic, |
| 0:24.3 | one of those billionaires was fast climbing the list |
| 0:27.0 | of the world's richest people. |
| 0:29.2 | Elon Musk just passed Bill Gates to become the second richest man in the world |
| 0:33.6 | with a fortune of over $128 billion. |
| 0:37.5 | For a while, he jockeed for the top place with other tech giants. |
| 0:41.9 | Altogether, the worth of those on the list is $13.1 trillion, up from $8 trillion last year. |
| 0:49.0 | The rise occurring as most the world was shut down during the pandemic. |
| 0:58.4 | By the end of that year, Elon Musk had become the richest man in the world. |
| 1:04.3 | It was also during the pandemic that Musk underwent a political conversion, moving to the right. |
| 1:08.1 | By 2024, he'd become one of Donald Trump's closest advisors. |
| 1:10.5 | Take over, Elon, yes, take over. Elon Musk is taking over with an act to government spending in a newly created |
| 1:16.3 | Department of Government Efficiency or Doge, which is also the name of a cryptocurrency |
| 1:21.9 | inspired by a dog meme. |
| 1:24.6 | Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, staffed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and |
| 1:29.9 | engineers, hoping to make use of artificial intelligence to reinvent American government. |
| 1:37.3 | Welcome to X-Man, the Elon Musk origin story. I'm Jill Lepore. I'm a historian, a professor at Harvard. This episode is the |
| 1:45.7 | fifth in a series I've been hosting about a new kind of capitalism called muskism. Extravagant, |
| 1:51.5 | extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, a form of capitalism influenced by fantasies |
... |
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