Gilded Rage
Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
** A PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BEST BOOK OF 2025 **
** A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK OF 2025 **
'Lively and provocative.' FINANCIAL TIMES
'Makes a convincing case for how tech became radicalized.' BLOOMBERG
'Revelatory.' THE BULWARK
'sharp and ominous...an essential unmasking of the growing extremism among America's wealthy.' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What happens if the world's richest and most powerful men decide to dismantle democracy?
In Gilded Rage, New York Times bestselling author Jacob Silverman takes us inside the surreal, high-stakes world of Silicon Valley. This is the story of the political awakening and radicalization of a cabal of tech billionaires and their descent into ideological extremism. Flush with cash from the zero-interest era, addicted to their own mythology, these men have began reshaping the world in their image -- and it should terrify us all.
At the center is Elon Musk, the mogul whose obsession with the "woke mind virus" has turned him from a tech innovator to an ideological crusader. But Musk is just the beginning. Silverman maps a sprawling network of radicalized elites - from Peter Thiel and JD Vance to the financiers bankrolling Donald Trump's return - who are using their platforms and their money to ensure a political revolution that's already underway.
This is not just a book about tech. It's about power. We meet the billionaires funding life-extension labs and embracing apocalyptic visions of AI. We examine the populist rhetoric that is leading to the ruthless dismantling of democratic norms. And we enter the strange, darkly comic world of the tech-oligarchy where libertarian dreams meet authoritarian impulses, and where the people with the most influence over our lives are the least accountable.
Silverman travels from San Francisco to Miami, New York to DC, following a movement that's rewriting the rules and oftentimes fighting a war against reality itself. With sharp reporting and a cast of extraordinary characters, Gilded Rage is a gripping, essential dispatch from the front lines of the billionaire revolution.
If you want to understand who is trying to control the future, and why, then this is the book you need to read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
