He merges his identity with his machines. This is presented as vision. It is also a brand.
Literal meaning: Cyborg Musk describes Elon Musk’s deployment of cyborg imagery — through Neuralink’s brain-computer interface, SpaceX’s “multi-planetary species” rhetoric, and his self-presentation as the leading edge of human-machine fusion — as a personal brand and ideological position.
Origin: The term was developed within Project Digitale Alertheid as an analytical object: the name Musk has used for himself on Tesla documentation is “Technoking,” and his public persona consistently positions him at the human-machine boundary. Neuralink’s stated goal is to merge human cognition with AI. The language is explicitly posthumanist — drawn from science fiction and from Haraway’s cyborg tradition, but evacuated of its political content.
The appropriation of Haraway’s cyborg metaphor for a personal and commercial brand — where the boundary-disrupting figure becomes a marketing identity.
The Appeal: The cyborg mythology is compelling. The idea of a human being who is also something more — faster, smarter, transcending biological limits — has deep cultural roots. Musk’s deployment of this mythology is effective: it positions him as visionary, as posthuman avant-garde, as someone operating at a scale of ambition that ordinary frameworks cannot contain.
The Friction: Haraway’s cyborg was a figure of boundary disruption that challenged hierarchies of gender, race, and species. Musk’s cyborg is a figure of enhancement that concentrates power. Cyborg questions the naturalness of the human/machine boundary; Cyborg Musk uses that boundary as a brand distinguishing those who have merged (the visionary tech elite) from those who have not (everyone else). Muskism — Slobodian & Tarnoff’s 2026 characterisation of Musk’s governance model — is what Cyborg Musk is the personal embodiment of: the same framework applied to states and markets. Transhumanism is the ideological ecosystem: the aspiration to transcend the human is dressed in cyborg imagery but serves a quite specific set of interests. Digital Libertarianism is the political foundation: the state should not constrain the posthuman.
Why This Matters: Cyborg Musk makes visible a general mechanism: critical vocabulary can be adopted while its critique is discarded. The aesthetics migrate; the politics do not. Once you see this move, you can identify it wherever it happens — in corporate “disruption” language, in Silicon Valley “moonshot” rhetoric, in any use of countercultural aesthetics in the service of power concentration.
Related terms: Cyborg · Muskism · Transhumanism · Digital Libertarianism · Cyberfeminism · Situated Knowledge · Technofeudalism
Read more:
- A Cyborg Manifesto — Haraway, D. (1985). Socialist Review — later in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (1991), Routledge
- Muskism — Slobodian, Q. & Tarnoff, B. (2026). The Guardian