The Evening Rocket: Robin Hood
At the start of 2021, Elon Musk briefly became the richest man in the world. The global pandemic was a boom time for American billionaires, many of whom saw their…
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Elon Musk’s visions of the future all stem from the same place: the science-fiction he grew up on. To understand where Musk wants to take the rest of us – with his electric cars, his rockets to Mars, his meme stocks, and tunnels deep beneath the earth — Harvard professor and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore looks at those science fiction stories and helps us understand what he’s Musk missed about them.
The Evening Rocket explores Musk’s strange new kind of extravagant, extreme capitalism — call it Muskism — where stock prices are driven by earnings, and also by fantasies.
Most Recent Episode
The Evening Rocket: Robin Hood
At the start of 2021, Elon Musk briefly became the richest man in the world. The global pandemic was a boom time for American billionaires, many of whom saw their…
The Evening Rocket: Baby X
The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel adore often concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful and often immensely rich men colonize…
The Evening Rocket: Iron Man
How Silicon Valley capitalism is as much about narrative as the bottom line. In 2008 when Tesla Motors launched their first car, the completely electric Roadster, Tesla was a great…
The Evening Rocket: Planet B
Why does Elon Musk believe he can save the world by colonizing Mars? When PayPal was bought for $1.5 billion, Elon Musk and other company founders made huge personal fortunes.…
The Evening Rocket: Dimension X
Jill Lepore untangles the strange sci-fi roots of Silicon Valley’s extreme capitalism - with its extravagant, existential and extra-terrestrial plans to save humanity. In this world, stock prices can be…
The Host
Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes about politics,…
