It has long been a cliche of American conservatives, particularly in their current MAGA iteration–and more center-left thinkers as well–that the economic success of the United States over its 250 years of existence– and especially in the 80 years since the end of World War II–has been entirely due to the genius of individual entrepreneurs and technological innovators. 

These innovators and entrepreneurs have succeeded–the thinking goes–because US governmental agencies have given them freedom in their activities. Any attempts by the government to intervene in a “free market” driven by these economic and technological geniuses can only have negative effects, sapping their drive toward innovation (and job creation).  In the Bircher worldview of leading conservative commentators today, even the slightest government involvement in economic activity is highly dangerous, potentially being a slippery slope toward the establishment of Stalinist totalitarianism or the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. 

The reality is a little different than that presented by this picture.  For it is a fact that, since the end of World War II, US economic innovation in technology like computers, the internet and AI has been spearheaded in large part–not by rugged individualist inventors tinkering alone with machines in garages–but  by the US federal government–especially the Pentagon’s Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The internet is a major example: DARPA funding and oversight of research in universities and private companies in the 1960s and 70s  created the internet: the internet was taken over by the US government’s National Science Foundation (NSF) in the 80’s; on April 30th 1995, the NSF fully divested itself of the internet’s “backbone” and handed it off to the private sector, more or less for free.

This is not to downplay the achievements of individual scientists who–with ample taxpayer funding and encouragement–were to achieve real breakthroughs in high tech advancement without much support from a private sector which has traditionally been wary of the lack of short term profit in investing in the early stage R&D of high tech inventions. 

This fact of crucial government involvement in the development of advanced American technology is little known publicly and certainly the titans of Silicon Valley don’t do much to publicize it–although, at times, they have quietly acknowledged it. For example, in a 2015 interview with The Atlantic, Bill Gates explained that: “since World War II, US government [funded] R&D has defined the state of the art in almost” every sector of US high tech industry. Gates referenced DARPA’s role in the creation of the internet. Similarly, in his 2025 book The Technological Republic, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, wrote of the crucial role of taxpayer investment in funding the technologies that made Silicon Valley oligarchs like himself rich. 

In a speech at Stanford University in 2003, Elon Musk also referenced the important role of the federal government (through NASA) in creating the space exploration technologies that laid the foundation for his own riches through his company Space X:

“Where just as DARPA served as the initial impetus for the internet and underwrote a lot of the costs of developing the internet in the beginning, it may be the case that NASA has essentially done the same thing by spending the money to develop some of the fundamental technologies in the beginning. And then once we can bring [the] commercial free enterprise sector into it, then we can see the dramatic acceleration that we saw in the internet.” 

This Musk quote (and the Karp book reference) come from an important new book Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Boston University history professor Quinn Slobodian and left wing tech writer Ben Tarnoff. The authors place Musk’s modus operandi as a businessman as part of a broader tendency of Silicon Valley oligarchs towards “state symbiosis”–a major tendency of which is to rely on taxpayer funded R&D to develop the technologies that have made them billionaires. 

The authors write that Musk has indeed relied on technology created by government funding–including the internet– from his early days as a relatively modest internet entrepreneur. In the 90’s he co-created a website called Zip2 which was an online directory of businesses in the Bay area supplemented with driving directions. Musk and his partners acquired digital maps for the website from Navigation Technologies which in turn relied on a constellation of GPS satellites–GPS and the satellites both being creations of US taxpayer funded R&D. The authors write that Musk made $22 million when Zip 2 was purchased by Compaq in February 1999–even though Zip2 was losing money at the time. 

For the authors, the “symbiosis” between Silicon Valley oligarchs and the US government is not merely related to reaping mega profits from publicly funded R&D–oligarchs like Musk and Peter Thiel (the cofounder of Palantir) are deeply dependent for their wealth on contracts from the US federal government (and governments around the world). 

As an example of the importance of Musk’s dependence on his role as a government contractor for his wealth, the authors point to the award by NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation services (COTS) of a $278 million contract to Space X in 2006. They comment that “the infusion of funds couldn’t have come at a better time. So far the company had brought in less than $50 million in revenue and spent nearly all of it. Musk was running out of his own cash to keep the lights on.” They quote former Space X president James Maser as stating that absent this contract, “you could debate whether Space X would have survived or not.” 

Musk in the Broader Context of 21st Century Capitalism 

Shortly before the publication of Muskism in April, Matt McManus wrote a review of it in Jacobin, offering some praise while criticizing it for being “squarely focused on ideology, obscuring the broader economic and political forces working behind the scenes…[the book] would benefit from situating Musk in the broader nest of institutions and practices that have allowed him to flourish.” 

I’m not completely sure what McManus is talking about. It seems to me that “situating Musk in the broader nest on institutions and practices which have allowed him to flourish” is precisely what the book does. In their portrayal of Musk the authors paint a compelling picture of a broader 21st century American state capitalism: the country’s most powerful economic sector (high tech) and that sector’s wealthiest oligarch (Musk) are joined at the hip with the American state. 

The authors reference how Musk was able to benefit from the quantitative easing and near zero interest rates during the 2010s –and how he has adroitly positioned himself and his companies to benefit over the years from the varying agendas of successive presidential administrations. They show how Musk and Space X were there to benefit when Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld greatly increased Pentagon reliance on private contractors. They describe how Tesla was able to open its first factory in Freemont, California with a $465 million loan from the Obama administration–and how Musk used the selling of electric vehicle production credits authorized under California state law (the Zero Emissions Vehicle Mandate of 1990) to the point where by “2024, about 40 percent of Tesla’s net income came from selling credits–an indirect but essential subsidy.” Finally, they describe how Musk further advanced his “state symbiosis” with the US federal government during the operation of DOGE–Musk used this period to push the use of his companies’ technologies and expertise to enhance the Trump administration’s surveillance of unwanted populations–undocumented immigrants first and foremost. 

Overall Muskism is a highly engaging book–and a relatively quick read. It shows that for how much Silicon Valley billionaires like Musk and Peter Thiel rail against the horrors of socialism and “big government,” they have been heavily dependent on that government for financial aid, funding R&D for new technologies and serving as a market for their contracting services. The book reminds us that most titans of industry like Musk and Peter Thiel –as well as their MAGA allies in government–aren’t actually against “big government”–they are fine with it so long  as it funnels public wealth and power to themselves. One can see this dynamic at work in the fervently anti-socialist Trump administration  buying US government stakes in over 30 companies (under the guise of protecting national security). In his wide-ranging path of destruction while heading DOGE, Musk was careful to not excessively harm areas of US government operations which enhance his own personal wealth. 

There are aspects of Musk’s career-including DOGE–which receive relatively incomplete coverage in this book. For example, the authors describe one important element of what they call “Muskism”: “financial fabulism”– Musk’s overselling of the potential of his products to investors–whether it be putting a man on Mars, self-driving cars or the creation of underground tunnels to solve Los Angeles’s traffic problems. McManus, in his above mentioned review, astutely compares this aspect of Musk to Trump’s “Think Big” hucksterism described in The Art of the Deal. But Slobodian and Musk only briefly reference these examples of overselling by Musk–or not at all, such as in Musk’s claims about the underground tunnels to be built by his Boring Company, in-depth coverage of which can be  found in left wing tech writer Paris Marx’s recent book Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation. 

The authors clearly intended this book as one of sober journalism and refrain from offering any prescriptions for addressing the ills caused by Musk and his wealth. In a previous book (reviewed by me here), Tarnoff has argued for one possible solution: placing the internet under local, publicly owned, democratic control.  Indeed, the Slobodian/Tarnoff book implicitly raises an important question in envisioning a post-capitalist future: if the federal government is so heavily involved in fueling the wealth of private sector titans like Musk in ways described above, shouldn’t American taxpayers have much more direct control (at the expense of Musk’s control) over the ways such wealth is utilized?

(This article is a review of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, HarperCollins, 2026.)

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