Elon Musk Is a Symptom / Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff

The starting point of our book is trying to take a depersonalized approach to Musk. The thing that you get when you try to step back from the kind of outrageous behavior and statements of the man himself and try to think about him more broadly is that he actually becomes this really powerful teaching tool where from the vantage point of his life and career, racking it over the decades, you can actually tell a different story about the last 40 to 50 years of global capitalism. These different inflection points in political economy and in particular how they stitched together into a kind of ensemble help explain our present moment.