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Peter Theil is certainly one of the leading American oligarchs, but, to my mind, Elon Musk is in many ways far more important in this moment than Theil. Musk is far more ambitious about creating and controlling the future, not through politics, with which we have grappled for centuries and know something about, but through the control of the technologies and technological approaches we can take to our future -- as well as control over the future of the mass messaging that Rupert Murdoch so brilliantly captured within the last mass messaging revolution. Musk’s “long term is” is extremely dangerous because he doesn’t care about short-term “setbacks” for people or planet. It’s all about marshaling the forces, both material and ideological, to dominate our national (if not global and certainly interstellar) visioning and aspirations.

Elon Musk’s megalomania is at the scale of Peter the Great, et al, while Theil’s is merely pedestrian Trumpian authoritarianism. “Muskism” is the far more dangerous of the two.

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Musk is most certainly dangerous and we're watching in real time as he's kind of joining the fray and the Far Right. Thiel right now is the politically motivated, focused one, and I think his part in building this movement and funding it is going to, unfortunately, pave the way for Musk and probably others to join.

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Yes, totally agree. I think Musk is such an interesting case because he has morphed, at least in public, from this obsessively driven technocrat with visions of saving humanity from the natural limits of earthly life, to being now clearly consumed by his newly adopted, more sinisterly ideological motivations, that are evolving in real time before our eyes. This is the guy who leads the companies that are at the forefront of many key technology sectors AND of many key “aspirational” public policy endpoints.

I think Musk’s “radical” conversion out of this base in some of our highest tech and aspirations into a sort of self-anointed Messianic pathos is likely one of the “big tells” in this moment and requires close monitoring to see whether he is a loner in this, or whether there is a similar shift among other leading oligarchs. Is this Ayn Randian (a group shift) or is it Dr. Strangelovian (a one-off nut case)? Or something else?

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