Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

In this incisive account, journalist Silverman (Terms of Service) tracks the rise of reactionary conservative politics among Silicon Valley billionaires, culminating with their enthusiastic support of Trump’s 2024 reelection bid. Silverman traces how the likes of Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and Peter Thiel spent the presidential campaign and its lead-up spreading “wackily conspiratorial” views on finance, deregulation, and anti-woke ideology, and installed one of their own—former venture capitalist JD Vance—in the vice presidency. The author delineates the contradictions in these figures’ positions—they are libertarians who support the military industrial complex and free-speech warriors who help foreign governments surveil dissidents—and covers well-known incidents like the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX and Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But the book’s most fascinating segments focus on local San Francisco stories that reveal the power amassed by Silicon Valley elites; these include venture capitalist David Sacks’s overweening participation in several recall campaigns and the bizarre venture capital–funded “California Forever” project, which aims to transform local farmland into “an entirely new city” and whose leaders have been suing landowners who won’t sell. Silverman persuasively lays out how Silicon Valley found in Trump both a mirror image of their own pseudo-populist resentments and a politician who was willing to reconsider policy for a price (Silverman cites Trump’s sudden shift on crypto). The result is an ominous window into the extremism, accelerationism, and “fusion of corporate and state power” at the highest levels of U.S. politics. (Oct.)