In retrospect, it was inevitable.’ The line appears early in Faiz Siddiqui’s Hubris Maximus, but its tone, half tongue-in-cheek Silicon Valley smugness, half resigned fatalism, encapsulates the mood of the book. It is a story of inevitability: not the inevitability of greatness, as Musk’s fans might have it, but of capture. The story of how one man, high on his own propaganda, colonised not just the worlds of transport, energy and communication, but the American state itself, with the explicit endorsement of its new Caesar—Donald J. Trump.
This is not a biography in the Isaacson or Vance mould. Siddiqui is not interested in Elon the boy-genius or the troubled visionary. He begins with the assumption that Musk is no outlier. His central thesis is bracing: that Musk’s erratic, authoritarian, and frequently deranged behaviour was never a deviation from the norm, but the logical result of a system that rewards impunity, hollows out public oversight, and replaces the state with the ego of the billionaire class. “The best way to understand what he’s going to do next,” Siddiqui writes, “is to look at how he’s wielded his power all along.”
We begin with an almost cinematic moment: Musk watching coverage of the SEC announcing charges against him for the infamous “funding secured” tweet, laughing hysterically. As officials laid out the gravity of his offence, securities fraud, manipulation of public markets, a potential ban on serving as a corporate officer, Musk sat among his engineers cackling. “All Musk did was laugh. Maybe he knew something his employees didn’t?” Siddiqui suggests. He did. He knew the rules didn’t apply to him. They never had.
What emerges across the book’s seventeen chapters is a chillingly detailed anatomy of unaccountable power. The title refers not only to Musk’s personal arrogance but to the structural hubris of a society that has repeatedly surrendered its public functions to private actors. The book begins and ends not with rocket launches or product demos, but with statecraft. As Siddiqui notes in his Author’s Note, as the book went to print, “Elon Musk has taken the reins of the newly created U.S. DOGE Service and appears to have carte blanche from the Trump administration to remold the federal government as he sees fit.” He is now not just a CEO, but a state actor: slashing agencies, gutting public programmes, deploying shadowy operatives to federal departments under the pretext of “efficiency” and “modernisation.” The chilling detail: “Some have even refused to identify themselves at times; Musk has suggested that identifying those working for him would be a crime.”
Whether the DOGE Service is literal or hyperbolic, it functions as a parable of Musk’s long-term trajectory—from businessman to warlord. Siddiqui’s thesis is that Musk has always treated institutions with contempt: “A true-to-life hero from an Ayn Rand novel,” he writes, “a man with little regard for the consequences of his actions, for the minor aftereffects one might describe as fallout—as long as he was convinced that he was on the true and correct path.” In this telling, Musk is not a rogue operator. He is the archetype of the capitalist as sovereign: unaccountable, paranoid, obsessed with meritocracy and grievance, and fundamentally hostile to any form of collective oversight.
Impunity Engine
The most compelling chapters are not about Tesla’s product pipeline or SpaceX’s orbital milestones, but Musk’s confrontations with regulators. Siddiqui covers the Walter Huang crash in 2018 in forensic detail: the Apple engineer killed when his Tesla Model X veered into a concrete barrier while in Autopilot mode. When investigators at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) tried to coordinate with Musk, he exploded. In a remarkable exchange, Siddiqui recounts how “Musk had fumed, protested, threatened to sue, and abruptly exited the conversation when safety investigators refused to bend to his will.” He was furious that the agency wouldn’t let him preempt the investigation with his own PR spin. When told he was being removed from the process, Musk hung up the phone.
One detail in particular leaps out: the NTSB had relied on Tesla to decode proprietary crash data, no one else had the keys. “Investigators were helpless… without internal assistance,” Siddiqui writes. In other words, Tesla had effectively privatised the crash investigation system itself. You could only hold the company accountable with its permission. When that permission was revoked, the state backed down.
But Musk’s most effective weapon isn’t his companies. It’s his platform. After the Twitter/X takeover, his ability to direct harassment campaigns toward anyone who challenged him became central to his political strategy. The case of Missy Cummings, a former fighter pilot and academic appointed to NHTSA, is emblematic. After news broke of her appointment, Musk tweeted: “Objectively, her track record is extremely biased against Tesla.” Within days she was receiving death threats. “We know you own LIDAR companies and if you accept NHTSA adviser position we will kill you and your family,” read one email. She fled her home.
Platform Power
These threats weren’t coincidental. They were a feature of what Siddiqui calls Musk’s “toxic digital persona,” honed in the reactionary culture war crucible of X. “Women tended to suffer the most severe effects of his Twitter targeting… the harassment unleashed by Musk’s army of fanboys was far from organic.” The implication is clear: Musk doesn’t merely ignore democratic oversight. He actively punishes it,
There are flashes here of what Gramsci might call passive revolution: the state retreats, and private power fills the void. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Siddiqui’s treatment of Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems. Despite repeated fatal crashes, and repeated warnings from safety officials, Tesla has refused to geofence or restrict the use of its software to appropriate environments. Siddiqui quotes Musk’s own utilitarian logic: “At the point of which you believe that adding autonomy reduces injury and death, I think you have a moral obligation to deploy it even though you’re going to get sued and blamed by a lot of people.” Here, as throughout, Musk sees legal constraint as an impediment to progress. What matters is the purity of his belief, not the consequences of the rollout. As Siddiqui puts it, “Those who opposed his vision of the future were roadblocks to progress.”
Much has been written about Musk’s management style: the arbitrary firings, the 3am emails, the cult of burnout. Siddiqui acknowledges this, but locates it in a broader political economy. Musk’s rule isn’t eccentricity. It’s method. “So many became all too comfortable with problem-solving approaches that were far from rigorous, blindly following as if Musk’s edicts were dogma,” he writes. Tesla’s investors, regulators, and engineers all convinced themselves that genius justified chaos. The result: “A trail of disappointed acolytes—philosophical allies who were caught flatfooted by the inconsistency of Musk’s positions, investors who grew exhausted by his impulsive behaviour, former employees who were lured in by his high-flying promises to change the world and then found themselves on the wrong end of tough business decisions.” Musk’s power lies not only in his resources but in his ability to enchant—to convince others that chaos is innovation, that volatility is genius, and that obedience is loyalty to a higher cause.
State Capture
And then there’s Twitter, now X, perhaps the most spectacular monument to Musk’s hubris. He paid $44 billion for a platform already in decline, fired 75 percent of its staff, replaced moderation with meme warfare, and adorned its San Francisco HQ with a seizure-inducing neon X. He turned it into a direct line to his base, a clearinghouse for grievances, threats, half-baked policy proposals and war-on-woke rhetoric. Siddiqui writes of Musk’s takeover: “He had never been a conventional CEO, but at his most powerful, he was completely unbound from the rules of society.”
If Isaacson framed Musk as a mercurial genius undone by impulse, Siddiqui shows how every supposedly erratic move forms part of a larger logic of dominion. Musk’s self-appointment as a political actor wasn’t a pivot, but a culmination. By the time he rebrands Twitter as a platform for “free speech,” he is already functioning as a media baron, election influencer and de facto party operative. Siddiqui notes that by late 2024, Musk’s influence was no longer constrained by shareholder revolt or reputational risk. X’s role in Trump’s re-election had paid dividends. The state, once his adversary, now operated at his request.
The DOGE Service, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, is no allegory. It exists, and Musk has been placed at its helm. Siddiqui plays it straight, but the absurdity is hard to overstate. What might have read as satire in another era now operates as administrative fact: Musk as de facto civil service czar, tasked with remaking the federal government according to his whims. He deploys “deputies” to slash budgets, dismantle departments, and redraw federal mandates in the name of innovation. Some enter agencies without identifying themselves. Others refuse to comply with existing rules or disclose their authority. It is tech solutionism as governance. A chilling reminder of how quickly “efficiency” becomes authoritarianism when wielded by capital, and how willing the American state is to serve not the people, but the billionaires who claim to save them.
Hubris Maximus ends not with a fall, but with a consolidation. Musk, Siddiqui reminds us, didn’t lose. He recovered his valuation, recovered his power, and now directs it at the very institutions once meant to contain him. “Can anyone get through to him before the fallout of his decision-making unleashes even more severe consequences?” Siddiqui asks. “Is it already too late?”
The answer, by the book’s close, is obvious. The structures meant to check men like Musk. The regulators, courts, public scrutiny, have all been outmanoeuvred or neutered. Musk’s rise is not a fluke but a case study in how liberal states fold under the weight of market absolutism. His empire. Of cars, rockets, satellites, memes and ministries—stands as both a monument and a warning: what happens when society trades public accountability for private charisma, and then wonders why it has no say in the outcome.
Siddiqui’s book is not a takedown. It is an autopsy. Not of a man, but of the state that let him happen. And what he shows, in quietly devastating prose, is that there’s no mystery to Musk. He is what capital looks like when no one tells it no.
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