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

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https://english.elpais.com/opinion/2025-04-20/elon-musks-less-than-original-measures-developing-the-ideas-of-his-grandfather-joshua-haldeman.html

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

SOLEDAD GALLEGO-DÍAZ
APR 20, 2025 - 00:00 EDT

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.

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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.

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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).

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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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(Also annexing Canada and Mexico…)