SpaceX cometh (bundled with World Baby and Sanctions)

Some recent interviews and articles

As you may have heard, SpaceX will go public tomorrow at a projected valuation of $1.78 trillion. This will be the largest IPO in history, raising between $75 and $80 billion, making SpaceX the 6th or 7th largest company in the world overnight, and likely making Musk the world’s first instant trillionaire. NASDAQ has changed its rules to fast-track SpaceX stocks into people’s pension funds, turning Musk into even more of a load-bearing pillar of the financial economy.

This is all contrary to the fact that the company makes nowhere near enough money to justify the valuation and rests on entirely untested and non-existent technology—including Mars colonization and data centers in space. Meanwhile, Musk is ramping up his xenophobic and transphobic rhetoric on his social media platform X (which merged with SpaceX earlier this year), agreeing recently that we “over corrected” on racism and supporting demands such as “remigration” that are further to the right than parties like the AfD and the Brothers of Italy. He has also reiterated the demand for preemptive violence he expressed in his remarks to the Unite the Kingdom rally in 2025.

How can we understand this bundle of contradictions? How has Musk mastered the hype cycle—and the global investor class down to public pensioners—regardless of all headwinds, outburst of self-destructive behavior, and what seems like common sense?

My co-author Ben Tarnoff and I have done some writing and talking around this problem since Muskism was published last month. I’m including some links below alongside some other pieces of mine that have appeared after long gestations.

(p.s. The book has already received some great reviews. The Economist chose it as one of the Best Books of 2026. Pick up a copy at your local bookstore or here.)

Was lucky to spend an hour talking with the legendary Jon Stewart:

And had a segment on the indispensable Democracy Now:

We also had a great in-depth chat with Grace Blakeley who pushed us on the final theoretical points. Foucault mentioned.

Ben and I published this in The Atlantic:

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Non-Musk Content Follows

I’ve been working on this piece for a while which came along with a conversation with Hito Steyerl, an artist and writer I have admired for many years.

And a review of Eddie Fishman for the New York Review of Books on the US (over)reliance on its economic weapons—and how this might be making it weaker.

There are many more pieces which I may post later but that should suffice for now!

Follow Ben Tarnoff and I on Bluesky for further updates.