Will the broligarchy save the world or destroy it?
Elon Musk and Gen X's eschatological dilemma
What is going on with Gen X men? In the lead-up to the election, I kept asking myself this question. Figures like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Bill Ackman, Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Marc Andreessen — all Gen X men — threw their weight behind Trump with unapologetic fervor. They reminded me of myself in 2016. Back then, I was swept up in the early Trump movement, full of conviction, memes, and startup lingo about “disruptive innovation” yet blind to the deeper implications of Trump’s character flaws.
Gen X supported Trump more than any other generation. The so-called broligarchy, a jokey term for the Silicon Valley billionaires backing him, is made up almost exclusively of Gen X men. On paper, the incoming administration is led by a boomer President and a Millennial VP. Yet this feels very much like a Gen X political moment. To understand it, we must first unpack the cultural programming of this subset of Gen X men I am calling “the broader broligarchy” and, specifically, their relationship with existential risk.
Born between 1965 and 1980, Gen X now finds itself squarely in middle age, with members in their late 40s and 50s. As a young Xer and someone adjacent to the broligarchy, it is both thrilling and unnerving to see my cohort stepping further into the arena. While their ascent is promising in some ways, it also feels fraught with danger. In my view, the broader broligarchy is flying too close to the sun — like Icarus, but with rockets, advanced AI, DOGE, and Mar-a-Lago selfies. Just as Icarus was blinded by his ambition and hubris, perhaps we are too.
The mindset of these Gen X American men combines a hero complex, techno-optimism, political cynicism, and go-for-broke entrepreneurial ambition. I don’t mean to overlook Gen X women or non-Americans, but the psychographic I’m describing is distinctly male, American, and rooted in Silicon Valley culture. The “bro” in broligarchy is no accident.
The rise of the broader broligarchy will bring a heightened focus on tackling existential risks and pursuing ambitious projects — because, in their view, the future of humanity is at stake. I’ve half-jokingly started calling them “Gen Eschatology” for their obsession with existential threats and humanity’s destiny. This mindset stems partly from living in an era where the power to destroy the planet is within easy reach and transformative technologies like AI seem poised to surpass human control. But it also reflects a unique cultural programming that blends Cold War fears, Silicon Valley optimism, and Nirvana-era angst. At its worst, Gen Eschatology comes off as grandiose and reckless; at its best, heroic and inspiring.
No one embodies the qualities of Gen Eschatology more than Elon Musk. And, few people have done as much to push humanity forward technologically. Musk’s ventures — Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and now X (formerly Twitter) — are driven by his desire to save humanity from what he sees as its pressing existential risks: climate change, dependency on Earth, censorship, and even the constraints of human biology. The recent SpaceX mission to rescue astronauts on the Crew Dragon flight represents the best of Musk — an achievement nothing short of heroic.
Yet, his approach often mirrors the high-risk, high-reward ethos of a race-car driver: floor it and hope for the best. Musk’s appetite for risk, combined with his planetary-scale ambition, is both thrilling and scary. It reminds me of the story of when he crashed his million-dollar McLaren F1 in 2001. Musk, ever the daredevil, had decided to floor it to show off the car’s capabilities while riding with Peter Thiel. He famously walked away from the accident unfazed, reportedly laughing and saying, “You know, I didn’t have insurance.” The story feels like a cautionary metaphor: Are Gen X broligarchs destined to crash the world like a supercar on Sand Hill Road, then walk away as others deal with the remnants? Or, should we never bet against Elon because his track record of flooring it against the odds seems to pay off?
This duality — between hero and villain, between saving the world and destroying it — is characteristic of the broader Gen X broligarchy. You can see the fusion of Musk’s “floor it” and eschatological mindsets in his approach to the recent election. He painted the election with existential stakes, warning that a Trump loss could be “the last election,” and then went all in. His mindset echoed Michael Anton’s 2016 essay, “The Flight 93 Election.” Anton, another Gen X man from California, framed the stakes of that election as existential, writing: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway... but if you don’t try, death is certain.”
At this stage of my evolution, Musk’s political instincts strike me as immature, naive, and even sinister. He is reminiscent of red-pill bros of 2015, except now he owns the platform and wields enormous influence over the terrain of discourse. His attacks on the deep state and mainstream media often feel blunt and reactionary, veering into adolescent, scorched-earth territory. His tweets reveal a trolling mentality and gullibility in addition to a high-stakes strategy mind. As with Trump, I question whether the medicine Musk offers is worse than the disease he seeks to cure.
When I reflect on my own cultural programming, it makes sense why these guys have a save-the-world, eschatological worldview. As boys, we were steeped in Reagan-era narratives of good versus evil, insurgents versus authoritarians, the free world versus communism. Our heroes were Luke Skywalker, Rocky Balboa, and the A-Team. We imagined ourselves as insurgent saviors, scrappy outsiders and underdogs ready to fend off evil empires and existential threats. I remember fighting imaginary commies in elementary school and genuinely fearing global thermonuclear war in a way Millennial and Gen Z minds could never comprehend.
In the 1990s, this programming collided with the techno-optimism of the Internet boom and the neoliberal optimism of end-of-history geopolitics. The ascendant Silicon Valley ideology fueled our grandiosity as much as the Cold War did. Instead of fighting communists, we would get them on the World Wide Web. Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Jerry Yang, Pierre Omidyar, Larry Page, and Serge Brin — all Gen X men — were “golden geeks” ushering in an Internet revolution. With “dot-coms,” we could “get big fast” and build “the new economy” and “connect every human.”
Our timing in American history made us old enough to absorb Cold War programming, young enough to embrace the tech heroism implicit in Silicon Valley ideology, and independent enough to dissent and rebel, thanks to our divorced parents and free-range upbringing.
I felt these forces collide when I was at Stanford in the late-90s. It is not surprising that several broligarchs came out of The Stanford Review, the rightwing newspaper Peter Thiel started there in the ‘80s and that I edited in the late ‘90s. Our campus culture wars over woke excess (then “multiculturalism”), disdain for legacy establishment institutions, and impulse to forge our own paths in technology and entrepreneurship were, in hindsight, early indicators of today’s political dynamics.
Today, Gen X men often see themselves as modern-day Wolverines from Red Dawn, battling existential threats. To those on the right, the threat is a hegemonic liberal establishment that undermines human progress and is blind to its own authoritarianism. To those on the left, Trumpism embodies a neofascist menace and instead of Russian invaders we have Tulsi Gabbard saying aloha as DNI, justifying equally existential resistance. Both camps are animated by a sense of mission, grandiosity, and moral urgency.
As Gen X men, we like to think of ourselves as cool, independent, and free of the narcissism that defined the “Me-Generation” of baby boomers. But I call bullshit. Writing this essay forced me to realize that Gen X is some respect more grandiose than boomers. Boomers wore pinstripes and chased greed through finance deals in Dallas or Atlanta. Gen X wears jeans and t-shirts while plotting to “save humanity” through scalable technology solutions and new Manhattan Projects. The scope of our ambition is much greater than that of boomers, and boomers didn’t think in eschatological terms as we do. We view ourselves as techno-ubermensch of Fukuyama’s end of history and prefer to work from home or walk to work, whereas boomers focused on owning three cars and a big house in north Dallas. I’m grossly stereotyping here, but I think Gen X grandiosity was our answer to boomer self-absorption. In other words, Gen X narcissism is a middle-child narcissism — cleverly disguised but raging beneath the surface. And we lack self-awareness about it.
Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto is illustrative of Gen X zealotry. He declares that “no material problem... cannot be solved with more technology.” While his manifesto exudes the heroic optimism of our youth, it also feels reductive, self-interested, and blind to valid concerns about the downside risks of unmitigated techno-acceleration. He seems to overlook the criminal uses of crypto his venture fund champions, just as he overlooks his geopolitical compromises despite having a practice focused on “American Dynamism.”
Peter Thiel, a longtime friend, represents the most sophisticated version of the Gen Eschatology mindset. In a recent podcast fittingly named “Apocalypse Now,” Thiel frames existential risks in stark terms: “I don’t want Armageddon, and I don’t want Antichrist,” he said, comparing the risks of an authoritarian one-world government versus the unchecked power of technologies like AI and nuclear weapons. “I’d like to find some narrow path between the two.”
To Thiel, the challenge for humanity is to navigate through a Scylla and Charybdis of numerous risks, referring to the proverbial rock and hard place from The Odyssey. He sees risks from multiple directions, which I appreciate, even though we may weigh these risks differently. At one point he says: “If we were to convene all those worried about existential risks — nuclear weapons, AI, bioweapons, climate change — they’d have to fight it out to prioritize, and the scary answer is: there’s truth to all of them.”
Ultimately, the Gen X relationship with existential risk is a double-edged sword. On one hand, our hero complex drives us to tackle humanity’s greatest challenges. On the other, our generational grandiosity blinds us to unintended consequences and leads us toward recklessness.
The stakes today are undeniably high — climate change, advanced AI, bioweapons, Trump, geopolitics. But broligarch boldness and braggadocio alone won’t save us. Navigating existential risk demands something more: humility to recognize our limitations, collaboration to bridge divides and reveal blind spots, and courage to confront the unintended consequences of our own ambitions.
As Gen X broligarchs flex power, the future hinges on whether we can transcend our hero complexes and embrace these traits. If we’re not careful, the drive to save humanity could become the wrecking ball that destroys it.
Special thanks to for the amazing feedback.
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…such an interesting observation…it makes me want to dig even deeper into the effects of pop culture on out leaders…musk and trump are such standouts here…musk was so obsessed with becoming the king of all memes that he bought a meme factory to run and concurrently some say Trump’s initial idea to run for president was spurred from the failed negotiations of another apprentice season…as a straddler millenial gen-xer i worry not only about the existentialism but also the nihilism…i feel like we have spent three decades playing “nevermind”…even the new alternative radio station on every FM dial continues to play decades old grumbly flannel songs…are we fighting for our future or against it?…with Elon i continually wonder…if the goal is to save mankind on mars because the earth is in danger why wouldn’t we try and save earth instead?…great read Jeff!!…
Hi Jeff, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this. It’s very well written and had me captivated the entire time! Not surprisingly this topic has been on my mind a lot. Many people around me seem to think that this is just politics, it’ll swing back around again soon enough, but I wonder at what point we might risk catapulting out of this normal pendulum trajectory, causing lasting damage / hurl towards the ‘end of the world as we know it’. (I’m a bit ashamed of doom and gloom thinking like this, the world will always be changing to be different than we know it of course, hopefully also for the better, but still). In any case, what an enjoyable read, thank you for that!