Greetings from Read Max HQ! Today, to round out December before our annual year-end post, a podcast with John Ganz on the ascension of Elon Musk to shadow-president-via-shitposting.
For obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking about the tech right a lot lately. I got swept up in Luigi-mania and neglected to promote it in a timely fashion, but I had the pleasure of guesting on TrueAnon last week, talking about the bro-military wing of new tech right (what Sam Biddle has called “The Military-Zyndustrial Complex”) with Liz Franczak. Both podcasts end up revolving, at least in part, around Elon Musk’s singular role in American culture, politics, and finance, articulated well in Liz’s excellent recent newsletter:
Not that Elon collapsing would be a good thing for America. We got into this a little bit in the Tesla series, though I'll admit at that point I still hoped there was a point of safe return. Looking back through our old notes from those episodes, it felt like Tesla was a way to unlock something essential about the American economy: taking over a company and remaking it in your own twisted image, leveraging state tax credits into production theater just to facilitate securitization and lever up on the stock market through social media pumped vol plays and an MLM populist-affiliate network. Whew. It's almost quaint now that fully maturated markets are structured similarly, whether it's the various appendages of the social media influence machine or microblogging networks, obviously crypto. Theres even a new book coming out on a similar phenomenon. Tesla really is everything. I have this from our old notes:
At this moment, the Middle-Class-Tesla-Owner subject arises out of the awakening of social media and its attendant revenue networks. These wars between the bulls and the bears, the shorts and the longs, play out on cable financial news networks and blogs and among social influencers driven by their own fantasies of big clout paydays. The polarization of these factions and the ensuing content mine are a necessary byproduct of the drive for cheap profits. The volatility, whether in the financial or content marketplaces, is what fuels the quick gains. It's a dizzying cacophonous symphony orchestrated by a truly phenomenal maestro, each successive movement crescendos into larger and larger payouts—so long as the band can keep playing on.
Even I must admit that he's basically figured it all out. Tesla is still doing weird shit and it doesn't matter. Elon hacked the system and generated a self-reinforcing valuation loop. Tesla's most profitable product is its stock and the stocks most valuable asset is Elon. Warren Buffet, but slopified. And now $TSLA has institutional protection, guardian angels in the form of asset management stewards with their own agendas in maintaining the stock price and overseeing the world's capital flows.
It no longer seems much of a stretch to identify Elon Musk as die Weltsee in einem Cybertruck.
Some of the posts discussed in this episode:
We also talked about the following books:
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