"We Don't Know What Crazy Means": Quinn Slobodian on Musk, the AfD and How to Understand the Modern Far Right

Historian Quinn Slobodian spoke to HEIST about his books Muskism, Hayek's Bastards, and the intellectual lineage of the modern far right.

Peter Matthews

July 22, 2026

Quinn Slobodian is one of the thinkers most attuned to our present moment - and his new book on Elon Musk has a particular resonance in Berlin. Not only was part of it partly written here, but its focus on the meaning of Musk gives us an insight into someone who has, unfortunately, set his sights on this city. His Gigafactory (where efforts to unionise have been repeatedly frustrated) sits outside Berlin in Grünheide, and Musk has made no secret of his ambitions to interfere in German politics, repeatedly endorsing the far-right AfD.

Slobodian's work frames this within a longer story. How Musk's "fortress futurism" grew out of his personal history in apartheid South Africa, and the far right's own ideas of inbuilt inequality are not, as is often assumed, formed in reaction to neoliberal thought, but grow from within it.

This interview was recorded live at Chapters, the English-language bookshop in Moabit. It is also available in audio form as episode four of the HEIST podcast

Your books try to understand Elon Musk not as a person but as a system — as something emblematic of a particular moment in capitalism. What is Muskism?

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