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Darryl Cunningham’s “Elon Musk – American Oligarch” gets English edition

By John Freeman on May 9, 2025 • ( 0 )

Seven Stories Press has announced it will publish Elon Musk – American Oligarch by Darryl Cunningham in September, updated from the French edition released by Éditions Delcourt.

Elon Musk – American Oligarch by Darryl Cunningham (Seven Stories Press, 2025)

Darryl Cunningham’s graphic biography of Elon Musk is a riveting deep-dive into the audacious mind and tumultuous journey of the world’s richest man. Using his signature pictographic style – clean lines, vivid colours, and lean panel compositions – Cunningham peels back the layers of myth around Musk to deliver a timely portrait that is provocative and informative.

Spanning several generations, the book traces Musk’s journey from his family roots in apartheid South Africa and his grandfather’s role in the Technocracy Movement to his current position at the apex of tech power and far-right politics. From Musk’s early education and influences, the creation of PayPal, and the meteoric rise of Tesla and SpaceX thanks to millions in government handouts, to his ascension as a “dark MAGA” influencer and kingmaker, Elon Musk: American Oligarch captures the tension, tumult, and chaos in which oligarchs thrive today.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter by Darryl Cunningham

Cunningham’s award-winning clarity and style sparkle as he presents freewheeling financial and engineering concepts used by startups and tech companies. This fast-paced biography reveals the complex interactions of visionary ideas, relentless drive, and unyielding ambition.

Elon Musk: American Oligarch offers a fresh, unvarnished look at Musk’s rise, aggressive leadership style, and appetite for risk-taking that have propelled him into a unique position as an unelected private business owner with unprecedented access to political power.

Darryl Cunningham is the cartoonist/writer of Psychiatric Tales, Science Tales, Supercrash, Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful, and Putin: The Rise of a Dictator. All are factual based books that explore subjects as diverse as mental health, science, economics and politics. Before becoming a full time cartoonist he worked in mental health for many years. In 2018 he was awarded an Honorary MA from Leeds Arts University, UK. He lives in Yorkshire, England.

An exhibition of prints from his book, Psychiatric Tales, is currently running at Wakefield’s Mental Health Museum.

Founded in 1995 by Dan Simon, and named for the seven authors who committed to a home with a fiercely independent spirit, Seven Stories Press publishes uncompromising political books, fiction, and poetry; works of the human imagination – sometimes in the form of fiction and literature, sometimes in the form of political nonfiction and sometimes in a hybrid form that has elements of both.

• Darryl Cunningham is online on Patreon | Instagram | X

• Elon Musk: American Oligarch is published by Seven Stories Press on 9th September 2025 | Print ISBN: ISBN: 9781644215227 | ebook ISBN: 9781644215234

• Elon Musk – Enquête sur un nouveau maître du monde | French edition, published by Delcourt | ISBN: 978-2413086123 | AmazonUK Affiliate Link

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.