Elon Musk’s less than original measures: Developing the ideas of his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman

Elon Musk’s less than original measures: Developing the ideas of his grandfather, Joshua Haldeman The magnate’s ancestor was one of the leaders of the political technocracy movement Khanate is a word that describes a political entity governed by a khan, a leader of Turkish-Mongol origin. Similarly, the term “technocracy” referred in the 1930s in the United States to a potential country governed by technicians or technocrats . This story is relevant because some analysts believe that Elon Musk does not represent anything new, but rather brings back a movement that existed between the Great Depression of the 1930s and the successful arrival of Franklin D.

Roosevelt’s New Deal. Musk, who presents himself as a futurist obsessed with Mars and algorithm technology, is, according to these analysts, the worthy successor to his grandfather, a man named Joshua Haldeman, one of the leaders of the political technocracy movement that enjoyed certain prominence in those unstable years of American history. The technocratic movement and its relation to the coveted “American Dream” were studied in a book published many years ago by a professor at the University of Berkeley named William E.



Akin. The book has recently been revisited and critiqued, particularly by Jill Lepore, an American History professor at Harvard University, who is behind a curious BBC podcast titled X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story . Akin recalls in his book that technocracy had a brief but brilliant moment of glory, advocating that the manufacturing and distribution of products was a technical problem that needed technical solutions.

For every problem in social life, there was always a suitable technical answer. For a very brief period, this technocracy occupied more front-page news in the U.S.

than socialism, communism, or fascism. “For a moment in time, it was possible for thoughtful people to believe that America would consciously choose to become a technocracy,” writes Akin. Between November 1932 and March 1933, The New York Times published 100 articles on this movement, as Lepore points out.

Lepore is astonished by how unoriginal Musk’s proposals and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are when compared to those of his grandfather (who emigrated from South Africa, where Elon Musk was born). The technocrats of that time believed that all civil servants and elected political representatives could be replaced by engineers and technologists, to create a kind of technocracy where everything would function, and prosperity would flood every corner of the country. Some of the technocrats of the 1930s also thought it would be a good idea to incorporate Mexico and Canada as new States in the Union (Greenland was still largely unknown back then).

Lepore’s work is full of fantastic anecdotes. In the technocracy imagined by Haldeman, individuals would not have names but numbers. One could be called, for example, 1x1809x56.

Musk is so influenced by what he was told or discovered about his grandfather Joshua that one of his own children is named, theoretically, X Æ A-12 (who knows what his mother or teachers call him). The technocrats of the 1930s believed that democracy was a failed political system, and it doesn’t seem that Musk holds it in high regard either (remember his Nazi salute, with his raised arm). That technocratic movement eventually disappeared, mainly because the liberal Democrat F.

D. Roosevelt came to power and quickly launched the New Deal, which brought hope to the classes most affected by the Great Depression. Roosevelt and his Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, implemented new labor legislation, including a minimum wage, unemployment aid, and support for farmers burdened with mortgages and loans, along with new fiscal and financial regulations.

In other words, pure politics. It is well known that President Roosevelt signed 99 executive orders in his first few days, a record that Donald Trump , who seems obsessed with destroying everything that symbolized Roosevelt’s presidency, has sought to break not only with new proposals but simply by repealing orders made before his arrival at the White House. Another anecdote shared by Professor Lepore: Haldeman, born in Minnesota, but who grew up in Canada where he got involved in politics, was once denied entry to the United States for being “an alien whose entry would be contrary to the public safety.

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