It has often been noted that Elon Musk and Henry Ford have much in common. Both were hailed as technological geniuses who made breakthroughs in production processes and consumer products. Both were politically conservative. And both espoused reactionary views through their personal media outlets, with Ford famously publishing a series of antisemitic articles in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, and Musk using Twitter, later X, as a megaphone to express his hostility to non-white immigrants. Yet as we began our recent book about Elon Musk, we quickly realized that parallels between Musk and Ford are not primarily about personal biography. They are about what kind of societies their versions of political economy produce—and require.
Soon after Ford’s autobiography My Life and Work was published, the German economist Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld coined a lasting term with his 1926 book Fordism. What he suggested was that Fordism was bigger than Ford the man; it involved a reconfiguration of social relations. He called it “the dictatorship of technical reason.” The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci picked up this theme in his prison writings. Among other things, he argued that the introduction of the assembly line within the factory required a more disciplined, “rational” worker, whose social reproduction and “psycho-physical” stabilization took place within the heterosexual nuclear family.
In the 1970s, a group of French theorists revived the category of Fordism in what became known as the Regulation School. They suggested that every historically defined phase of capitalist growth consisted of two main elements. The first was what they called a regime of accumulation: how is money being made? How is the labor process organized, how are production and consumption structured, how is the social surplus distributed? The second was what they called a mode of regulation. Following Gramsci, they asked what kind of social mores and legal codes, both written and unwritten, were indispensable for stabilizing the potentially disruptive effects of new economic models. A mode of regulation encompasses the network of institutions that regulate or “regularize” a regime of accumulation by managing its contradictions. It is how a society keeps crises, to which capitalism is perpetually prone, at bay.
For the Regulationists, Fordism was the political-economic order that defined advanced industrial capitalism in the middle of the twentieth century. Its regime of accumulation centered on mass production, while its mode of regulation was characterized by mass consumption. Mass production involved the large-scale industrial manufacture of consumer goods, in which a new technical and social division of labor facilitated rapid productivity growth. Mass consumption was facilitated by higher wages, which created a consumer base large enough to absorb all the cars, radios, and refrigerators being churned out of Fordist factories, thus creating a virtuous cycle of economic growth.
More broadly, mass consumption rested on what the economist Michel Aglietta, one of the founders of the Regulation School, called “a social consumption norm,” sustained by the institutions of collective bargaining and the Keynesian welfare state. In Aglietta’s telling, these institutions channeled the intense class struggles waged by the American working class in the 1930s and 1940s into a new social compact in which workers forfeited their more ambitious aspirations—such as meaningful control over the process of production—in exchange for the relative economic stability enjoyed by the white male breadwinner household in the postwar period.
Significantly, the Regulationists were theorizing Fordism in the rearview mirror. Aglietta’s A Theory of Capitalist Regulation, the founding text of the Regulation School, appeared in 1976, by which point Fordism was clearly in crisis. A sharp decline in the rate of profit, stagflation, the oil shock of 1973, and a new cycle of class struggles both within workplaces (primarily in the form of wildcat strikes) and from new social movements were putting pressure on the prevailing political-economic paradigm. The accumulation strategies of Fordism were breaking down, as were its mechanisms for maintaining social peace.
But if Fordism was coming apart, what would follow? Aglietta speculated about the emergence of what he called “neo-Fordism,” or what the British economist Robin Murray later called “post-Fordism,” a term that eventually stuck. Post-Fordism would be premised on new possibilities of globalization and outsourcing, as well as what became known as “just-in-time” and “lean” manufacturing strategies. While Fordism tended to centralize production within a single firm, post-Fordism prioritized the assembly of the final product out of parts sourced from a set of independent suppliers linked through global supply chains. Falling transport costs, the diffusion of information technology, and changes in international economic law meant that things could be produced in bits and pieces all over the world, and capitalists could go hunting for the lowest labor costs.
If flexibility was the watchword of the post-Fordist regime of accumulation, its mode of regulation pointed in two directions. On the one hand, individuals were promised an expanded palette of personal self-expression, largely to be fulfilled through their consumer choices. Under Fordism, consumption had taken a “mass” form; under post-Fordism, the market began to disaggregate into niches and segments. But this tendency toward specialization was accompanied by what scholars called “responsibilization”: the offloading of risk to workers and households. People were required to take increasing responsibility for their own care and reproduction as the welfare state grew weaker, the labor movement declined, and the workplace became fragmented through the proliferation of subcontracted, temporary, and part-time work. The winners of post-Fordism were not wage-earners but asset owners, as governments increasingly turned to asset price inflation as an engine of wealth creation. While this move mostly benefited the very richest in society, it also enrolled a new “mass affluent” class of homeowners and retail investors into supporting an ever-greater financialization of the economy.
Financialization eventually proved to be post-Fordism’s Achilles’ heel. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the Great Recession that followed set in motion a slow unraveling of the political-economic order. Diminished economic dynamism in the West raised concerns about the viability of the post-Fordist growth model, and facilitated the rise of new anti-establishment political currents broadly glossed as “populist,” particularly in the form of a rising far right. At the same time, the emergence of the tech giants posed new questions about the relationship between capitalism and digitization. Finally, the Covid-19 pandemic and rising geopolitical tensions pushed companies and countries to reconsider the wisdom of a fully globalized economy.
Post-Fordism was in crisis, but what would take its place? A range of competing visions and frameworks have been proposed. We have heard of state capitalism, disaster capitalism, platform capitalism, chokepoint capitalism, vulture capitalism, spiderweb capitalism, archipelago capitalism, asset manager capitalism, surveillance capitalism, and even crack-up capitalism. Theorists have suggested that we live in an age of neofeudalism, techno-feudalism, techno-libertarianism, techno-authoritarianism, techno-populism, techno-fascism, end times fascism, neofascism, neoliberal fascism, post-neoliberalism, paleo-populism, neopatrimonialism, hyperpolitics, and geoeconomics.
We want to propose another possible successor to post-Fordism: Muskism. We believe that this concept helps ground some of the vagueness found in other proposed terms, which too often rely on evocative metaphors or historical precedents that struggle to capture what is genuinely new and still emerging. As with the interpreters of Fordism in the last century, who drew their analytic material from the life and work of Ford, the starting point—although not the endpoint—of understanding Muskism is the life and work of Musk himself.
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The first step to extrapolating Muskism from Musk is to counter the most common misreadings of the man and his ideas. One of the easiest to dispel is the notion of Musk as a libertarian. In fact, a core principle of Muskism is public-private fusion; the use of the state as funder, enabler, and backstop for high-risk, high-reward ventures—what we call state symbiosis. One can see this clearly in SpaceX, Starlink, and Tesla. Musk is a stalwart critic of bureaucracy and certain kinds of regulation but certainly not the state as such. On the contrary, he has consistently instrumentalized the state as a source of power and profit. He does so by promising to help governments fulfill their sovereign functions through reliance on his infrastructures: a dynamic we describe as sovereignty-as-a-service.
Another misconception is that Musk’s most high-profile company, Tesla, primarily sells a consumer car product similar to Ford’s—the Model Y as an electrified Model T. In fact, Tesla is not about cars. It’s about a vision of electric autonomy in an era of natural disasters, wars, and social instability. Musk has been able to capitalize on a period of global skepticism about the virtues of interconnected supply chains and offer a scalable model of sovereignty from the nation down to the individual in the home. The move from the Roadster to the Cybertruck tracks a shift from a bright green future of zero-carbon consumerism to a dark green future of climate breakdown and survivalism. At its most successful, Muskism taps into a desire for territorial hardening to external shocks, enemies, and undesirables. In a world of reshoring and rearmament, Muskism offers global infrastructure for national projects.
This worldview is also reflected in his embrace of vertical integration, an industrial model that is uniquely suited to our deglobalizing era. For decades, Musk has attempted to concentrate production as much as possible within his firms and to reduce his reliance on outside suppliers. Under Muskism, the factory is not a node within a global production network but an enclave. This strategy defied the conventional wisdom of the 2000s, the decade when Musk founded SpaceX and became CEO of Tesla, but would look prescient in the 2020s, as “a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics… laid bare the risks of extreme global integration,” to quote Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s remarks at Davos earlier this year.
Another common misconception about Musk is that he is distinct from other tech billionaires because he is more interested in hard engineering and the creation of stuff than the airy immateriality of websites and platforms, as embodied by someone like Mark Zuckerberg. There is reason to grant Musk this status: after all, he oversaw the creation of reusable rockets, filled the sky with satellites, mainstreamed the electric vehicle, built brain-computer interfaces, and puzzled over the challenges of digging giant tunnels to defeat traffic congestion.
Yet Musk’s own attention has been increasingly drawn to the online world and what he calls its “cybernetic collectives.” Beginning around 2015 and accelerating rapidly since his acquisition of Twitter in 2022, Musk has framed what is happening online as not merely a reflection of the offline world or a distraction from it, but rather as the central battleground for humanity’s future. Far from being a sober materialist in these affairs, he has uncritically embraced a maximized belief in the power of memes and counter-memes to guide all human action. Since 2023, this impulse has also governed his growing desire for an AI that would be cleansed of what he calls the “woke mind virus.” Because the “intelligence” of large language models is drawn from the corpus of data that they have been trained on, trying to tune their outputs to align with a particular political viewpoint can be difficult. With Grok, Musk’s line of “anti-woke” AI models, he has tried a number of approaches, from integrating Grok with Grokipedia—a right-wing version of Wikipedia—to hiring human annotators who guide the model toward giving his version of the politically correct responses.
Musk’s startlingly literal belief in the power of the internet reflects a kind of memetic determinism. The internet does not just reflect the world: in the last decade, for him, it has become the world. Offline processes are downstream from things that happen on the web, and specifically on the platform that Musk himself owns and frequently manipulates toward his own political preferences. This point of view is not pure delusion. One similarity between Musk and Ford is the extreme illiquidity of their personal wealth. Almost all of Ford’s fortune was in his Ford stock, which was privately held until almost a decade after his death. Unlike other tycoons like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew S. Mellon, Ford was not diversified, and remained distant from Wall Street, seeing it as the domain of parasites—and, notably, he believed, Jews. Musk is similarly idiosyncratic in the structure of his wealth. It is almost entirely held in the stock of his own companies. As he put it in an interview, “if Tesla and SpaceX went bankrupt, I would go bankrupt too immediately.”
This is key to understanding the political economy of Muskism. Musk’s business model is built not around steady production or long-term profitability, but around the continuous projection of outsized promises—of pending technological breakthroughs, planetary salvation, and financial windfalls. These claims generate asset price inflation through the harvest of attention. Because stock price is only ever the price that people are willing to pay on a given day, it can change very quickly—as Tesla’s often does, swinging 10 percent or more from day to day. The bubble needs to stay inflated. Over time, this strategy matured into an outright control of the means of narrative production: Musk eventually acquired a global media platform to propagate belief in his own future lucrativeness.
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In broad strokes, these are some of the main elements of the Muskist regime of accumulation. Fuse with the state by becoming a monopoly provider for essential functions. Concentrate production while prioritizing resilience, independence, and control. Sell technology for national and individual self-reliance in a hostile world filled with racialized others. Accelerate digitization to make everything programmable, including and especially the human brain.
But what about the mode of regulation? What social contract is offered by Muskism? What is its equivalent to the “chicken in every pot” and intergenerational upward mobility promised by Fordism? Or to the offerings of post-Fordism, such as the endless remixing of consumer identity and the adrenaline-fueled cycles of hope and despair in a winner-take-all financialized economy?
One of the aspects of post-Fordism inherited by Muskism is the opportunity to participate, in a Lilliputian way, in the enrichment of capitalists by holding stocks in your retail portfolio or pension fund. Tesla investors are notoriously loyal to both the brand and Musk himself. Their devotion is expressed online, where slavish reply-guys line up to offer praise for the master’s insight or post the latest news about the success of his ventures. Since Musk’s purchase of Twitter and its transformation into X, a paid subscription comes with the blue check once reserved for journalists, politicians, brands, and others. It has become a symbol of dedication to Musk, for which they are rewarded by having the algorithm boost their posts. Subscribers can also earn money from their feeds. Retweets and view counts are not just good for endorphin hits but are also literally monetized. Musk’s most devoted supporters regularly boast of their monthly income netted through sycophancy. One can play along and seek inclusion in the inner or even outer circles of the Musk fan community.
In place of the social contract, in short, Muskism offers a fan contract. By entering the Musk fandom, one gains access to a privileged layer of amplified and monetized communication. But how far can this scale? The fan contract has limited appeal. It is not a mode of regulation comparable to those presented by Fordism or post-Fordism. If we think of Musk’s plunge into high politics with the DOGE initiative in early 2025 as a kind of trial run for the Muskist mode of regulation, the outcome was not encouraging. Musk came to Washington with the conviction that the codebase of the federal government was riddled with bugs in need of deletion. His solution was mass firings and the haphazard decimation of “woke” agencies and programs. But Muskism ran aground when it contemplated an assault on Social Security and Medicare. Musk absorbed the public outrage and left Washington. As a mode of regulation, Muskism was not ready for the national stage.
Absent the capacity to persuade others in society that his rising tide will lift their boat too, Musk has opted to hysterically warn them about the tsunami of outsiders coming to swamp them. Themes of European demographic decline and “white genocide” are the drumbeat of Musk’s daily and often hourly posts. This is the clearest site for the construction of a quasi-coherent ideology, and it is largely borrowed from the language of the European far right. The non-white world is both villain and pawn. Its members are seeking entry into the North Atlantic in order to plunder “our” goods and defile “our” women—and they are being encouraged to do so by the center and center-left parties of the West, which are importing future voters as part of a so-called Great Replacement. In response, Musk calls for “remigration,” the mass deportation of non-white residents.
This is the other side of the Muskist mode of regulation: a vision not of shared prosperity but of violence. The fan contract for those inside the walls of a fortified West, and expulsion for those marked as illegitimate. After both the models of Fordist industrialism and post-Fordist outsourcing and globalization have receded, Muskism holds out the prospect of a purified community of survivors.
Here, too, however, Muskism has struggled to obtain wider support. Musk himself has been surprisingly ineffective in his political interventions outside of the United States. Even his alliances with far right parties in Europe are strained. It is difficult for parties like France’s National Rally, the Brothers of Italy, or even the Alternative for Germany, defined by the language of sovereigntism, to express too much fidelity to a foreigner seeking to interfere in domestic politics. When Musk sidled up to Nigel Farage in the UK, Farage shrank away.
Another source of friction for Muskism is popular organization of the kind seen recently in Minneapolis. In many ways, the ICE incursion was Muskism in action: heavily armed agents equipped with data analytics dashboards and facial-recognition software, using high technology to purge those migrants deemed out of place and punish their “woke” enablers. The communities of Minneapolis mobilized in response and, at great personal risk, successfully obstructed the operation. “Protect our neighbors,” read one popular slogan. This is an idea of sovereignty completely foreign to Muskism, where it is not about the number of rockets, gigawatts, or gigabits at one’s disposal but the collective expression of a shared future.
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For the Regulation School, class struggle was the engine of history. It drove capitalism from one stage of development to the next. As the working class resisted exploitation, capitalists were forced to find new methods for securing consent. This is how successive modes of regulation were born: as efforts at compromise and co-optation that arose in response to upsurges of social conflict.
Musk and his colleagues have the good fortune of living in a moment when there is no structural actor capable of challenging their dominance. The working class has virtually ceased to exist as an organized force. Absent pressure from below, political parties themselves offer no meaningful opposition to Muskism. The effect is paradoxical. On the one hand, the lives of capitalists are made easier when they can intensify the exploitation of their workers and purchase influence in politics with little resistance. But it also means they have no incentive to restrain their most antisocial impulses or consider the long-term consequences of their actions.
Muskism typifies this tendency: if Fordism and post-Fordism were both, in different ways, organized to secure social peace, Muskism is oriented toward social war. The relative thinness of the Muskist mode of regulation is symptomatic: the working-class antagonist is so weak, the social war so asymmetric, that there is no need for a negotiated peace. At the moment, the strategy seems to be working. Musk, already the world’s richest man, is projected to become the first trillionaire as soon as next year.
Capitalism without constraints is not always good for capitalists, however. Throughout its history, capitalism has continuously transformed nature and society. This generates enormous upheaval. Yet businesses also need an orderly and predictable political environment in which to operate. An important Regulationist insight is that working-class resistance has, paradoxically, served to stabilize the accumulation process by compelling the creation of such an environment. Without a counterparty to force concessions, capitalists can make so much chaos that they undermine their own capacity to accumulate. If Muskism is class rule in triumph, it may come to be a triumph that devours itself.
