In our cynical times, most people are familiar enough with doublespeak to understand that anything called a "freedom city" is likely to be the opposite. It's a sign of the delusional self-confidence in their own mendacious powers that the tech oligarchs who are financing this idiotic idea insist on going with that branding anyway. Investigative reporters Vittoria Elliott and Caroline Haskins published an in-depth report on this scheme for Wired earlier this month. What immediately becomes clear is that what the Silicon Valley billionaire class considers "freedom cities" is simply neo-feudalism, a plan to end the concept of citizenship and make every working person a serf whose entire life is controlled by the whims of their boss.
The possibility that his reckless actions cause social, economic and governmental collapse doesn't bother Musk, because in the ideological waters he swims in, destroying it all so it can be rebuilt as a tech-dystopian dictatorship is very much the point.
By design, the details of how "freedom cities" would be established are laden with legalese like "federal enclaves with special economic and jurisdictional zones" or "interstate compacts." In practice, the plan is straightforward. Advocates want the federal government to set aside land to build cities exempt from federal and state laws. Instead, the cities would function as mini-dictatorships, where the CEO of each town runs everything, and the people who live and work there are subject to the boss's whims. It would be like being an employee of a controlling company, except you don't clock out at the end of the day or have a life — or rights — outside of what the boss allows you.
"These are going to be cities without democracy," journalist Gil Duran told Wired. He's spent years documenting how the Silicon Valley elite — along with politicians like Vice President JD Vance — have pushed the idea that democracy should be ended and replaced with governments run by all-powerful businessmen. "These are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power." In the tech bro world Elon Musk comes from, the definition of "freedom" is that rich people get to treat everyone else however they like, without that pesky government coming in to protect people's safety, autonomy or civil rights. As Duran explained in his newsletter, "These cities will be controlled entirely by tech billionaires and corporations, operating outside of U.S. laws."
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It sounds too preposterous to believe, but Musk's close friend Peter Thiel has been spending lavishly on organizations designed to make it a reality. Pilot programs have begun to create artificial islands where the rich owners rule like kings. One such corporate city, named Próspera, has been built in Honduras, though the government is currently trying to kick them out, disagreeing that the city's owners get to reject any national laws they don't like. And, of course, Donald Trump loves the idea of creating cities that exist outside of federal authority, putting out a video in 2023 promising to give over federal lands to oligarchs to begin their mini-dictatorships. Tech executives, fueled by their ill-gotten crypto gains, are heavily lobbying congressional Republicans right now to make this dystopian dream happen.
In the tradition of reactionaries everywhere, including his "buddy" Trump, Musk tends to project his sins onto people he dislikes. So it's telling that he has a particular obsession with demonizing progressives, journalists, and pro-democracy activists as feudalists. He painted Tesla, a company he famously rules with nearly an iron fist, as an egalitarian workplace with "no lords and peasants," because there's no "special elevator only for senior executives." Tesla factory employees, however, make 30% less than autoworkers represented by unions, which Musk has aggressively opposed. He even joked openly with Trump about using illegal tactics to union-bust. Musk accused unions of creating "a lords and peasants sort of thing," as if allowing workers bargaining power turns executives into serfs. He even griped in 2022 about then-Twitter having a "lords & peasants system for who has or doesn’t have a blue checkmark," referring to their system of marking "verified" users like journalists and politicians, who had proven their identity to the company. Instead, he's replaced it with a pay-to-play system that turns blue check users into "lords" whose subscription fee gives them perks like being at the top of mentions and being promoted in the algorithm.
All of this helps illuminate the ideology fueling Musk's war on the federal government, and propping up his faith that he, an unelected billionaire, should have the right to nullify any federal agency or policy created through the democratic process. It also helps explain why he is happy to go along with Trump's tariffs and other assaults on the economy, even though the chaos is causing the stock market to crash and executives at his own company, Tesla, to panic about the future of the business. The possibility that his reckless actions cause social, economic and governmental collapse doesn't bother Musk, because in the ideological waters he swims in, destroying it all so it can be rebuilt as a tech-dystopian dictatorship is very much the point.
As Kyle Chayka explained in February for the New Yorker, "Silicon Valley is premised on the idea that its founders and engineers know better than anyone else," and "they must be able to govern better than politicians and federal employees." The tech right believes, therefore, that they must destroy "the existing order to create a technologized, hierarchical one with engineers at the top." It's a lot of five-dollar words, but it can be boiled down to the view "dictators good, working people bad." Musk even went so far on Thursday to repost an X user who claimed, "Stalin, Mao, and Hitler didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector employees did," implying that everyday people were working on their own against the will of their dictators.
Engaging in blunt apologetics for Hitler is quite a follow-up performance for a man who caused a "debate" over whether his stiff-armed salute at a Trump rally should be interpreted as the "sieg heil" it looked exactly like. But this goes deeper than making references to Nazis to troll the liberals. The ideology Chayka labels "techno-fascism" that fuels Musk, Thiel, and their fellow tech billionaires rests on the assumption that the only functional form of governance is strict top-down hierarchies. One of the favorite pseudo-intellectuals of the movement, Curtis Yarvin, sneeringly calls it "dictator phobia" to argue that government should depend on the will of the people, dismissing democracy as outdated and inefficient.
If one believes dictators are good and democracy is bad, however, it's hard to reconcile that with the long history of dictators sowing destruction, ordering genocides, or getting embroiled in unnecessary wars that lead, as happened under Hitler, to much of their countries being blown to bits. Actual dictatorships are messy and chaotic, not the smooth, efficient states of the techno-fascist imagination. And, of course, there is no moral justification for the untold amount of human suffering they cause. So instead of dealing with the cognitive dissonance, Musk is burrowing himself in this fantasy that the problem with Nazi Germany, Maoist China, and Stalinist Russia is not too little democracy, but too much of it. It's a fantasy too stupid to need debunking. The fact that he went there shows how hard he is clinging to any justification for his destructive behavior, even if it's as pathetic as it is evil.
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