Chartbook 381 Trumpite futurism Part 2: Taking Musk's "space junk" seriously.
As Elon Musk’s period at the court of President Trump appears to be coming to an end, the gloating commentary will not be long in the waiting.
Ed Luce at the FT sets the tone in typically fine style:
What began with a chainsaw is ending in a whimper. Elon Musk’s looming exit from Washington brings the oddest chapter of Donald Trump’s presidency to an early close. By his own metrics, Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency has failed. … Two Musk gains can be spotted in the rubble. The first is the psychic value to him and Trump of harming their enemies. The cliché about an expensive divorce being worth every penny applies. Musk’s net worth has fallen by about $130bn since Trump’s inauguration. Yet he has instilled fear into the bureaucracy from the CIA to the Department of Education. …. Musk’s second upside could take a while to register. Trump’s “Golden Dome”, which aims to replicate Israel’s “Iron Dome” for all of the US, could be one of the biggest taxpayer outlays since Ronald Reagan’s strategic defence initiative, better known as “Star Wars”. In dollar terms Trump’s dome may even rival Nasa’s Project Apollo, which cost $280bn in today’s money. Since the missile shield would need to rely on swarms of satellites, Musk’s SpaceX would be the largest beneficiary. The company has formed a Golden Dome consortium with Palantir and Anduril, which are run by his Big Tech friends. Musk’s lasting impact on Washington may thus be to divert a big chunk of US taxpayer money to his empire. As leaving gifts go, this one would be very nice. Whether it would enhance US national security is someone else’s problem. Ditto on whether Golden Dome contracts qualify as waste, fraud or abuse. When only one company can fulfil the project’s biggest functions, there is little prospect of an open bidding process.
The line here about the Golden Dome project taking “a while to register” is very apt. We in the skeptical commentariat have a hard time taking space, rockets and “golden domes” seriously. Indeed, we have a hard time taking Elon Musk seriously at all.
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor in their anatomy of what they call “end times fascism” in the Guardian start with the lunacy of seasteading and “pro-business “freedom cities” such as Próspera, a glorified gated community combined with a wild west med spa on a Honduran island” before moving on to the feud between Bannon, “a proud nationalist and populist” and the technofeudalists, Kristi Noem posing in front of Salvadorean cages, Hegseth, Huckabee, the Christian zionists … and Musk.
The Guardian url puts it more succinctly. It reads simply: “https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk”
On the topic of Musk, this is what Klein and Taylor have to say:
But you don’t need to be a biblical literalist, or even religious, to be an end times fascist. Today, plenty of powerful secular people have embraced a vision of the future that follows a nearly identical script, one in which the world as we know it collapses under its weight and a chosen few survive and thrive in various kinds of arks, bunkers and gated “freedom cities”. In a 2019 paper titled Left Behind: Future Fetishists, Prepping and the Abandonment of Earth, the communication scholars Sarah T Roberts and Mél Hogan described the longing for a secular Rapture: “In the accelerationist imaginary, the future is not about harm reduction, limits or restoration; rather it is a politics driving toward an endgame.” Elon Musk, who dramatically grew his fortune alongside Thiel at PayPal, embodies this implosive ethos. This is a person who looks up at the wonders of the night sky and apparently sees only opportunities to fill that inky unknown with his own space junk. Though he burnished his reputation warning about the dangers of the climate crisis and AI, he and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) henchmen now spend their days escalating those same risks (and many others) by slashing not only environmental regulations but entire regulatory agencies, with the apparent end goal of replacing federal workers with chatbots. Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space – now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession – beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence. Kim Stanley Robinson, the author of the sci-fi Mars Trilogy that appears to have partially inspired Musk, is blunt about the dangers of the billionaire’s fantasies about colonizing Mars. It is, he says, “just a moral hazard that creates the illusion we can wreck Earth and still be okay. It’s totally not true.” Much like religious end-timers who long to escape the corporeal realm, Musk’s drive for humanity to become “multiplanetary” is made possible by his inability to appreciate the multispecies splendor of our only home. Evidently uninterested in the vast bounty that surrounds him, or in ensuring Earth can continue buzzing with diversity, he instead deploys his vast fortune to bring about a future that would see a handful of people and robots eke out survival on two barren orbs (a radically depleted Earth and a terraformed Mars). Indeed, in a strange twist on the Old Testament tale, Musk and his fellow tech billionaires, having arrogated god-like powers to themselves, aren’t content to just build the arks. They appear to be doing their best to cause the flood. Today’s rightwing leaders and their rich allies are not just taking advantage of catastrophes, shock-doctrine and disaster-capitalism style, but simultaneously provoking and planning for them.
My hunch is that the slap down has to be as hard as this, because, otherwise, we would have to face the fact that the figure of Musk and his prominence in the Trump team poses a real problem for the broader thesis, namely that Trump and the American far-right are negating the future in favor of a neofascist preoccupation with “end times”.
The slap down has to be so hard because otherwise we might actually need to deal with the fact that Musk did what we in the progressive camp would actually love to be able to do, namely to imbue a physical project of transformation with cultural and political heft. As one perceptive recent commentary has argued, he embodies a corporate populism. One might also say, a technological populism. It is Musk, this highly unappetizing specimen, who made the mass produced, battery powered EV not only real, but cool, and, for a time at least, even profitable.
Musk has not only changed the world materially, he has also demonstrated an uncanny ability to do something that the left dreams about but is far from having been able to deliver on. He has turned objects and a businesses associated with them into a cause. Musk has produced a populist cult around his twin projects of the Tesla EV and his rocket program.
You might say that Steve Jobs, years ago, did the same thing to Apple. But backing Apple has generally not been countercultural. Note how LIFE magazine placed Jobs opposite MLK, Mother Theresa, Gandhi, Hitler, Ophrah Winfrey and … Jesus.
The mass of retail investors that have flocked to Tesla are not merely speculators. They certainly hope that Elon will “take them to the moon”. But that is far more than merely a business calculation. It is a material wager on a logic of history. They believe in Musk’s capacities and in his model of change. They see him as a man of destiny and one who embodies a powerful politics of the future in the sense expounded by political theorist Jonathan White.
The future forms the basis for a critique of the status quo and its encrusted corporate culture.
A shared view of the future forms a community of the faithful.
A shared view of the future inspires the willingness to take real material risks. Not because you abandon the future but because you believe in it. In the same way that Musk got real and put hundreds of millions of dollars behind Trump, retail investors have skin in Musk’s game.
We have to face the fact that “Californian ideology” has real effects - he says, stroking his beard whilst typing on his Apple keyboard.
Before Musk it was Californian consumers who made the first big market for Toyota’s Prius, the breakthrough new energy vehicle.
California today has a renewable electricity generation share comparable to European countries.
The slap down of Musk’s futurism has to focus on terraforming Mars as hard as Klein and Taylor do, to avoid facing the fact that Tesla was merely the opening gambit. Musk’s truly staggering innovation is in space launch.
Below you see the graph of satellite launches since Sputnik was put into orbit on October 4 1957. The diminutive flat blue and grey lines are the satellites launched by the combined might of the Soviet Union, the United States and the European Union. The vertical red line represents the launches by Musk’s SpaceX since the first 60 Starlink satellites were put into orbit in May 2019.
Source: Economist
In the first half of 2024 SpaceX launched seven times more tonnage into space than the entire rest of the world put together, including the combined space effort of China and Roscosmos.
And as Space.com reports, SpaceX is already planning to reinforce its dominance.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has granted SpaceX permission to fly 12,000 Starlink satellites, and the company has filed paperwork with an international regulator to loft up to 30,000 additional spacecraft. To put that into perspective, as of Nov. 7, 2022, only 14,450 satellites have been launched in all of history with 6,800 currently active according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
Source: Bloomberg
To equate this with the trivial “exit politics” of seasteading, or the ravings of a Bannon is to mistake the wood for the trees.
Musk is transforming the economics and politics of space launch and satellites. This has huge implications for global communications and geopolitics and may also add further to his already gigantic wealth. On the geopolitical side, the big news about the space-based interceptor vision of Golden Dome, at least according to Trump’s Congressional Budget Office, is that Musk and SpaceX are what make it affordable. Most of the cost of a space-based interceptor system is in the highly complex interceptors themselves. But before SpaceX transformed the space business, launch costs added 40 percent of total costs. Allowing for the huge savings enabled by SpaceX, the costs for a maximal system with 2000 interceptors are cut by 35 percent.
Source: CBO
No doubt, the Golden Dome project will turn into a juicy military-industrial boondoggle. The title advertises the intention. But if we dismiss these massive material realities as nothing more than cronyism and “space junk”, how can we claim to be talking seriously about the future and its politics?
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Starlink is quite literally turning near-earth space into a junkyard. How Musk truly values space exploration is seen in DOGE's vicious budgetary and personnel cuts at NASA.
Your analysis is excellent on what it covers but very few people focus on xAI. Many commentators seem to think that Musk is leaving government with his tail between his legs. On one level, his "power" has been diminished. However, he has left his minions in place throughout most, if not all, agencies; has numerous, large contracts already in place or in process (in fact, I would be willing to bet we don't know a great deal of what his companies have garnered; and, most importantly, aggregated government data into a "master" database using many of xAI technologies and on private servers. Most analysts have focused on what the government is doing with the data. I believe the focus should be on what Musk is doing with the data. It is well understood that LLMs need massive amounts of data and processing power to be competitive (see analyses of Musk's huge data center being built and expanded in Indiana, with of course numerous issues surrounding lack of compliance with environmental regulations, etc.). Certainly, the US government's databases provide a huge leg-up to the AI company able to gain access to them, which Musk certainly has. I am not sure why more people aren't very, very concerned about this, most particularly since recent analyses point to a major increase in capabilities at the same time as an acceleration of error rates and "hallucinations." I for one am terrified of what he will do with the information at his company and what the Trump regime will do with the master database to further its fascist agenda.