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How Science Fiction Led Elon Musk to DOGE

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Manage episode 478199486 series 3399207
Content provided by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, WNYC Studios, and The New Yorker. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, WNYC Studios, and The New Yorker or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://staging.podcastplayer.com/legal.

Elon Musk, who’s taking his chainsaw to the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore’s BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.”

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155 episodes

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Manage episode 478199486 series 3399207
Content provided by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, WNYC Studios, and The New Yorker. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by WNYC Studios and The New Yorker, WNYC Studios, and The New Yorker or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://staging.podcastplayer.com/legal.

Elon Musk, who’s taking his chainsaw to the federal government, is not merely a chaos agent, as he is sometimes described. Jill Lepore, the best-selling author of “These Truths” and other books, says that Musk is animated by obsessions and a sense of mission he acquired through reading, and misreading, science fiction. “When he keeps saying, you know, ‘We’re at a fork in the road. The future of human civilization depends on this election,’ he means SpaceX,” she tells David Remnick. “He means . . . ‘I need to take these rockets to colonize Mars and that’s only going to happen through Trump.’ ” The massive-scale reduction in social services he is enacting through DOGE, Lepore thinks, is tied to this objective. “Although there may be billions of [people] suffering here on planet Earth today, those are miniscule compared to the calculation of the needs of the billions of humans that will one day ever live if we can gain escape velocity from planet Earth. . . . That is, in fact, the math that lies behind DOGE.” Lepore’s BBC radio series on the SpaceX C.E.O. is called “X-Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.”

Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

  continue reading

155 episodes

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