The Peculiar Political Background of Elon Musk

I don’t generally pay much attention to individual players in the ongoing dramas of the world. No surprise, I am drawn to more macro, structural matters.

But a recent essay by Jill Lepore¹ in the NYTimes “The Failed Ideas That Drive Elon Musk” on 4.4.2025 caught my attention. She reports that Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman was a proponent of technocracy back in the 1930s and ’40s.

“Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins²of Mr. Musk’s strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck by how little of what Mr. Musk proposes is new and by how many of his ideas about politics, governance and economics resemble those championed by his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a cowboy, chiropractor, conspiracy theorist and amateur aviator known as the Flying Haldeman. Mr. Musk’s grandfather was also a flamboyant leader of the political movement known as technocracy.”

………

“Leading technocrats proposed replacing democratically elected officials and civil servants — indeed, all of government — with an army of scientists and engineers under what they called a technate. Some also wanted to annex Canada and Mexico. At technocracy’s height, one branch of the movement had more than a quarter of a million members.

Under the technate, humans would no longer have names; they would have numbers. One technocrat went by 1x1809x56. (Mr. Musk has a son named X Æ A-12.) Mr. Haldeman, who had lost his Saskatchewan farm during the Depression, became the movement’s leader in Canada. He was technocrat No. 10450-1.”³

Here is a link to Lepore’s podcast, “X-Man: the Elon Musk Origin Story”  – I have not listened to this 7-part series. But, based on earlier work by Lepore I am sure it is well researched and provocative.

1. Harvard historian and author of a readable revisionist history of the US, THESE TRUTHS: A History of the United States. S.l.: W W NORTON, 2019.
2. This links to a 2021 story on Musk and other tech billionaires  by Lepore in the NYTimes
3. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/opinion/elon-musk-doge-technocracy.html