Elon Musk needs no introduction. He is one of the leading capitalists of our time. Unlike many in tech, he gets down and dirty with the physical world (or rather, his employees do), building cars and rockets, digging tunnels, even implanting chips in people’s brains.

He is also a master of hype, making ludicrous claims that never come to pass. That hype aside, he has achieved a lot. And yet he has used his fame, his money, and his X platform to promote a politics that, it is no exaggeration to say, is white supremacist and exterminationist.

Musk’s businesses include Tesla, the car company; SpaceX, the rocket company; X, formerly Twitter, and xAI, the artificial intelligence enterprise of which Grok is the face; Neuralink, the maker of chips implantable into human brains so they can talk directly with computers; and Boring Company, which drills giant tunnels to create subterranean highways. Of these, only Tesla and SpaceX are profitable. The current profits of the two combined are around $12 billion.

These are the financial base of his fortune, estimated by Bloomberg at $655 billion, with most of it coming from SpaceX and Tesla stock. The latter is traded publicly and is valued at 372 times the company’s profits. SpaceX is expected to go public soon. To the tune of something like a $2 trillion valuation, that would be 250-times profits. These valuations are, by any conventional measures, completely insane, but investors believe in Elon’s magic.

For the Jacobin Radio podcast Behind the News, Doug Henwood spoke to historian Quinn Slobodian and technology writer Ben Tarnoff about their new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the conversation here.