Last week, Belfast was twinned with Mars. The wormhole through which they were connected is Elon Musk’s ability to fabricate fantasies from his own dark materials. He simultaneously helped foment a pogrom and hoovered unprecedented sums of money from investors mesmerised by his vision of humanity’s future.This is new. Henry Ford, for example, was a rabid anti-Semite who promoted anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. But he was long dead before Ford became a public company.Yet even if we could, for the sake of argument, imagine Ford promoting the poisonous fakery of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the same week as his car company was launching its initial public offering of shares, it wouldn’t be the same as what Musk did last week. Investors might reasonably have felt that Ford’s vile ideas were separate from his genius for making automobiles.What’s different about Musk acting as a far-right agitator while sucking in $75 billion in an IPO that valued SpaceX at $2 trillion is that there is no such separation. As one investment banker told the Financial Times, SpaceX became the largest IPO in history because “there’s no other company that can turn fiction into fact”.Turning fiction into fact is what Musk the mogul does. It’s also what Musk the incendiary does. There is no wall of separation between the fairy tales Musk spins for gullible investors and the horror stories he lobs into anti-immigrant riots in Ireland and Britain. The utopia he sells to frenzied speculators maps directly on to the dystopia he is helping to create on our side of the Atlantic.Musk was by far the single most influential voice calling young men out on to the streets of Belfast and Glengormley to attack foreigners and the police. The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) counted 115 million views on X egging on the rioters. Musk accounted for 64 million of those – 55 per cent of the total.He posted his own call to arms (“Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change”) but, more importantly, he amplified inflammatory posts by the hooligan and fraudster Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (whose preferred pronouns are “Tommy” and “Robinson”) and the Restore Britain MP, Rupert Lowe. In replies to this trio, CCDH logged more than 3,900 comments advocating lynchings and other violent crimes against immigrants in Belfast. [ SpaceX is not just too big to fail. It is too essential to be allowed toOpens in new window ]This sordid thuggery may seem light years away from the trippy language of the SpaceX prospectus: “We believe that our current space efforts will catalyse transformative breakthroughs that could reshape terrestrial industries and lead to the emergence of new trillion-dollar markets on the moon, Mars, and beyond. In particular, we believe our goal of establishing a lunar presence will ... serve as a stepping stone to establishing a civilisation on Mars.”Investors flicked past the small print: “Many of our initiatives described above under ‘Our Growth Strategies’, including those to ... establish a lunar economy, transport humans and cargo to the moon and Mars ... involve significant technical complexity, unproven technologies or technologies that do not exist, and such initiatives may not achieve commercial viability ... you may not realise a return on your investment within the time frame you anticipate, or at all.”In his seminal essay On Bullshit, the philosopher Harry Frankfurt pointed out that it is not the same as lying. The liar cares about the truth enough to deny it. But the bullshitter “is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.”This indifference is not harmless. We are used to thinking of the kind of hokum that investors paid $75 billion for last week as mere spoofery – and accomplished spoofers inspire a certain admiration for the boldness of their effrontery. But the astonishing success of the SpaceX fantasia demonstrates the collapse of scepticism. Musk, in his own weird way, seemed impelled last week to remind us what this collapse looks like. The same transformation of fiction into fact that was making him the planet’s first trillionaire is at the heart of 21st-century techno-fascism. The dazzled corporate investor and the boy throwing bricks in Belfast are swept along in the same current of toxic gullibility.The SpaceX IPO marked the definitive launch of a new form of capitalism, based entirely on storytelling. Capitalism has always relied on belief – the ship is going to come in laden with lucrative spices, the next car model is going to be more profitable than the last one.But this new form is based, not on belief, but on the suspension of disbelief. No one really thinks Musk is going to found a new civilisation on Mars. But, as in a theatre audience, everyone goes along with it because everyone else is going along with it.Ditto the racist pogrom. No one really believes that Northern Ireland, which is 97 per cent white, is being overwhelmed by dark-skinned foreigners. But just as Musk conjures a fantasy for Wall Street, he summons a nightmare for Newtownards Road. [ Beware ideas that offer a pseudointellectual cover for racist riotingOpens in new window ]Musk’s head may be on another planet but his feet have to be on the broken-glass-strewn ground. The more outlandish and unreal the vision he sells, the more it has to be underpinned by the dirty realism of street violence. The whole $2 trillion edifice is built on the idea that Musk has the power to make wild things happen. If Musk can get a child in Belfast to throw a brick at a house, maybe he can have children born on Mars. If he can spur the self-destruction of a real city in Ireland, maybe he can conjure a “self-growing city on the moon”. If he can project his power 7,500km from Texas to Belfast, perhaps he can project it 320 million km into space. If he can destroy civilisation on Earth, surely he can create it on Mars.