Ben Tarnoff – författare

"Muskism cuts straight to the core of the man and the moment, explaining how a mercurial, conspiracy-prone, vicious bastard can inspire loyalty and billions in other peoples' money, and the nightmare world he wants to build with those billions." –Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification

A New Yorker Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Financial Times Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of the Year • A Kirkus Most Anticipated Nonfiction Book of Spring 2026• A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year

A pyrotechnic examination of Elon Musk as a symptom and avatar of our postliberal age

Everyone’s got an Elon take. He’s a messiah. A menace; a genius; a clown. The verdicts differ, but they share one theme: they treat him as an individual.

Muskism argues otherwise. Elon Musk isn’t a glitch in the system—he is the system. His worldview promises sovereignty through technology: plug in, power up, and become self-reliant. But the more you connect, the more he owns you.

If Fordism defined the capitalism of the twentieth century, Muskism may define the twenty-first. Fordism helped build the welfare state. Musk undoes it. He thrives on dependence while preaching freedom. His cars run on subsidies; his satellites run the battlefield; his social networks train the AI that trains us.

Muskism sells itself as the future but entrenches age-old hierarchies. It offers autonomy for some and exclusion for others. It’s pro-natalist but anti-immigrant, futurist but reactionary. It speaks of humanity but warns against empathy.

Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff cut through the hype and the hate to reveal what Musk really represents: a new political economy, where to be “free” means to serve a Technoking. Muskism isn’t about the man. It’s about the machine that made him—and the world he’s making next. To read Muskism is to understand the machinery that made the man, and the world he’s making next, based on his philosophy of power in the spheres of:

An unprecedented dive into the tech industry, featuring anonymous interviews with workers at all levelsIn Voices from the Valley, celebrated writers and Logic cofounders Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff conduct unfiltered, in-depth, anonymous interviews with tech workers at all levels, including a data scientist, a start-up founder, a cook who serves their lunch, and a PR wizard. Weigel and Tarnoff open the conversation about the tech industry at large, a conversation previously dominated by the voices of CEOs. Deeply illuminating, revealing, and at times lurid, Voices from the Valley offers a vital and comprehensive view of an industry that governs our lives.FSG Originals × Logic dissects how technology functions in everyday life. The titans of Silicon Valley, despite their utopian imaginings, have never really had our best interests at heart, as recent threats to democracy, truth, privacy, and safety have shown. This collaboration features four provocative forays into the tech industry''s many worlds, aspiring to incite fresh conversations focused on nuanced and accessible explorations of the emerging tools that reorganize and redefine life today.

As Ben Tarnoff reminds us in this entertaining narrative history, get-rich-quick schemes are as old as America itself. Indeed, the speculative ethos that pervades Wall Street today, Tarnoff suggests, has its origins in the counterfeiters who first took advantage of America''s turbulent economy. In A Counterfeiter''s Paradise, Tarnoff chronicles the lives of three colorful counterfeiters who flourished in early America, from the colonial period to the Civil War. Driven by desire for fortune and fame, each counterfeiter cunningly manipulated the political and economic realities of his day. Through the tales of these three memorable hustlers, Tarnoff tells the larger tale of America''s financial coming-of-age, from a patchwork of colonies to a powerful nation with a single currency.