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Ahead of the initial public offering for SpaceX, we speak with historian Quinn Slobodian, author of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. He says Elon Musk is “creating a situation where he becomes deeply reliant on state contracts” as the U.S. government then becomes reliant on Musk. “It’s not about demolishing the government,” Slobodian says of his work with DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency that Musk led for the Trump administration. “It’s about making the government more compatible, ready for the kind of products that Musk offers, and to make him then an indispensable part of the infrastructure.” Slobodian goes on to warn that Musk’s wealth is helping to fuel his anti-immigrant, racist political ideology. “We really should be worried about the possibility of those things to live together: tech-driven prosperity and radical right-wing racist politics.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

On Friday, dozens of activists with student, labor and community groups with the Stop Funding Billionaires campaign protested in front of Nasdaq headquarters here in New York to protest the upcoming SpaceX IPO. They chanted and held signs that read “No Nazis on Nasdaq.”

Quinn Slobodian now joins us. Quinn is a professor of international history at Boston University. His new book, co-authored with Ben Tarnoff, is Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed.

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What concerns you most about this IPO offering and Musk being on the brink of becoming a trillionaire, Professor Slobodian?

QUINN SLOBODIAN: Well, there’s a whole lot of things that concern me about it, but one of the things I find most striking is the way his relabeling of himself as the “techno-king” of Tesla in 2021 is now becoming somewhat more of a reality at a larger scale through the SpaceX IPO. What I mean there specifically is he’s really bending and reshaping corporate governance as a whole around his individual personality. The movement of his companies from Delaware to Texas means that he’s not held accountable to shareholders in the way he would have been before. The creation of a whole share structure so that he has 85% of the shares that would be required to vote him out of a leadership position means that he’s produced a kind of ironclad, almost monarchical position inside of this company that actually completely short-circuits the whole idea of the public company, which is that there’s supposed to be a kind of a “shareholder democracy,” quote-unquote, that can hold leadership accountable. In this case, if you look at that SpaceX IPO, it says that the key person risk, meaning everything hangs on Musk’s shoulders, is so great that even if he dies, there actually isn’t even a succession plan. It would be in a completely unprecedented zone. So, the degree of influence being centralized in one extremely erratic and often dangerous personality is something that seems to be of great concern.

Also, I think that there are a couple of other things we talk about in the book that helped to get a handle on some of the stuff that Eric was explaining so well. One of the things we talk about in the book is something called attention alchemy. So, Musk has been very........

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