Some have called Elon Musk a visionary, praising the head of President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency as a creative crusader against government bloat, trying to solve the country’s problems with data-driven solutions for a leaner bureaucracy.
But historian and Harvard Law Professor Jill Lepore says Musk’s ideas are anything but new. In fact, much of his philosophy is taken from the thinking of his grandfather Joshua Haldeman, a farmer, chiropractor and conspiracy theorist known for the now-discredited Technocracy movement of the 1930s. That movement, Lepore explains, maintained that democracy had failed, and that, among many solutions, was dismantling and replacing numerous government departments.
Lepore explores it in a new podcast series, “X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story.” She joins Here & Now‘s Robin Young to talk about Haldeman’s influence on Musk.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misstated Joshua Haldeman’s contributions to Technocracy.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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