FOR MOST AMERICANS, perhaps the most surprising feature of the 2024 election was not the return of Donald Trump, nor even the flailing of Joe Biden or the frailty of Kamala Harris’s campaign. It was instead the rightward lurch of Silicon Valley—all those tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who raced to back Trump’s campaign and became his biggest boosters.
From the outside, this shift appeared both swift and shocking. After all, it was only a few years ago that figures like Elon Musk were feted as liberal darlings, ushering in a cleaner, more connected future for all mankind. Authors of some of the greatest technological shifts of the twenty-first century, these titans of Silicon Valley were hardly political radicals or partisan bomb-throwers, preferring exactly the kind of milquetoast, centrist liberalism that many corporate heads before them espoused.
By 2024, though, something had clearly changed. Musk had transformed into an almost unrecognizable figure: Addled by the conspiracies he amplified with his takeover of Twitter, he was miles away from the visionary impresario he once appeared to be. Venture capitalists who had formerly preferred lower profiles, such as investor David Sacks, suddenly burst forth as rancorous partisans, injecting themselves into discussions—about fiscal decisions, about Russia policy—about which they clearly knew nothing. Previous unknowns, like Vivek Ramaswamy, began outlining new political trajectories, using their wealth as a means to launch themselves to political power—and, it almost went without saying, enrich themselves and their friends in the process.
The flip of Silicon Valley tycoons into fetid, frothing pro-Trump voices was sudden enough to cause whiplash. And it raised a host of questions: Why? What happened? And how had Americans missed this stunning shift?
These are the very questions that journalist Jacob Silverman attempts to answer in his rangy, revelatory new book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Tracking the story from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia, Silverman focuses on a cohort of men—and they are, to be sure, all men—who have receded so far into their own bubbles, surrounding themselves with ever more yes-men and hangers-on, that they have lost all sense of proportion and become disconnected from reality. Buoyed by wealth that few of us will ever know, these oligarchs have spun out of control and become handmaidens to authoritarianism.
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GILDED RAGE IS, AS SILVERMAN WRITES, a “group biography with a shifting cast of characters, but they are all headed in the same troubling direction.” He should know. Silverman cut his teeth by diving into the morass of social media (the subject of his first book, back in 2015), but he is perhaps best known as the coauthor (alongside Ben McKenzie) of the acclaimed 2023 book Easy Money, pulling back the curtain on the fraudsters and hucksters at the heart of crypto. Both of those earlier books proved ahead of the curve, defining the rot at the center of both industries. “Having written about the politics of tech for a decade, and having spent a few years immersed in the world of crypto fraud, illicit finance, and political influence operations, I thought I had some understanding of the dramatic transformation underway,” Silverman writes. “But I had no idea how far it would go.”
Some of the names Silverman details are now familiar. There is Ramaswamy, a “young oligarch on the make” for whom Silverman once worked as a ghostwriter—a period that opened Silverman’s eyes into “how the ruling class reproduced itself and who they decided to draft into their networks.” There is Peter Thiel, the investor who has not only helped outline the tech right’s anti-democratic turn, but used his money and influence to become, as Silverman describes it, “tech’s most influential authoritarian.” And, of course, there’s Musk, standing at the vanguard of these forces and playing many roles: the money-man propelling Trump, the head conspiracist running Twitter, the arsonist tearing the federal government apart limb by limb.
But Gilded Rage isn’t simply a rehash of existing reportage. What separates Silverman’s book from other writeups, and where his book truly shines, is in his attempt to get at the root of Silicon Valley’s anti-democratic lurch.
As Silverman sees it, the reasons for this heel turn are twofold. On the one hand are elements particular to Silicon Valley that arise directly from the specific situations these tech entrepreneurs found themselves in. Take San Francisco, a town that helped birth many of the fortunes associated with Silicon Valley but had become for these oligarchs a symbol of American decline or even collapse. The city’s prosecutorial reforms, efforts to push more equitable teaching of American history, policies of treating homelessness as a social issue rather than a crime—all of it was front and center for figures like Musk, Sacks, and others. And all of it was evidence of liberal politics and pieties run amok—and of a movement that must be stopped, at all costs.
But it would take more than strongly worded tweets to derail the liberals running San Francisco. As Silverman shows, these tech figures unleashed a flood of “dark money” into the city’s politics, hoping to transform it, in the words of the nonprofit Phoenix Project, “into a city that prioritizes the needs and desires of developers, corporations and the wealthy.” It was a model the oligarchs soon took nationwide.
“I thought I was covering how this billionaire/millionaire group was going to try to take over San Francisco and use that as a template for the rest of the country,” one analyst told Silverman. “I figured it’s going to be important in the future. Well, the future is now.”

It wasn’t just San Francisco politics that drove these tech tycoons further and further right. As Silverman details, these oligarchs, even in their liberal heyday, spent years abroad courting foreign despots, most especially in Saudi Arabia. It was a transformation that most Americans missed (and that will be the subject of my own forthcoming book). Quite usefully, Silverman tracks how figures like Musk, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and others opened their doors to a floodtide of Saudi investment, allowing tyrants in Riyadh to sink their teeth into the American economy. Silicon Valley venture capitalists “served as laundromats for a class of kleptocrats, princelings, and other global elites, who could funnel their fortunes into one of America’s most celebrated industries,” Silverman writes. Silly things like “human rights” or “democracy” were no match for the billions of dollars Saudi thugs poured into these tech oligarchs’ businesses.
Nor was it just about the money. Partnerships with the Saudi kingdom—to say nothing of partnerships with other kleptocratic regimes in places like China, the UAE, and elsewhere—revealed just how much these figures lust for a Saudi-like regime in the United States. Maybe not as theocratic, per se—but certainly as despotic.
“Silicon Valley [venture capitalists] and their foreign investors often shared a general disregard for democratic governance,” Silverman correctly notes. “In the Saudi crown prince, they saw a counterpart who demonstrated the same benevolent authoritarian style that they enacted in their business lives—but on an even grander scale, with unchallenged power.” Few things sum up this ethos better than this mewling, cringeworthy quote from Horowitz in 2023: “Saudi has a founder. You don’t call him a founder. You call him his royal highness.” Saudi’s paid-off propagandists couldn’t have said it better.
THE SECOND REASON FOR THE ANTI-DEMOCRATIC SHIFT that Silverman identifies is the age-old animus of wealthy elites for regulations, restrictions, and higher taxes. In this sense, Silicon Valley’s tech oligarchs are not so different from tycoons throughout American history, seeking to protect their piling wealth from the grasping hands of government. As Silverman writes, these men constitute a “class involving people who, since they stand atop the economic pyramid, don’t wish to acknowledge its existence.” They enjoy all the economic benefits—all the tax breaks and offshoring opportunities, all the access to power and helpful assistance that comes with it—that the rest of us will never know. These men are convinced that they achieved such staggering financial success by their own force and wisdom, rather than through a shattered economic model that boosts the wealthiest and smothers the rest.
And when Trump came along—a fellow oligarch, looking to use the power of the American presidency to enrich himself and his cronies as much as possible —these figures jumped at the chance to share in the spoils. “Once Trump and his MAGA movement moved the window of acceptable political opinion firmly to the right, a wealthy class already predisposed to authoritarian beliefs readily followed,” Silverman writes. Americans were shocked (but shouldn’t have been) that billionaire after billionaire in Silicon Valley raced to Trump’s side, revealing an oligarchy hiding in plain sight. “If wars are how Americans learn geography,” Silverman writes, “then elections are how they learn about plutocracy.”
There is, however, one key difference between the oligarchs of now and the plutocrats of yore. Their pursuit of “power for its own sake” was a “step-change in American politics,” Silverman writes. “Once, corporate titans built libraries, museums, and universities; now, they build political and media operations designed to propagate their influence.” The Carnegies, the Vanderbilts, the Stanfords, the Rices—they may have all been loathsome figures who manipulated American politics to their own ends, but at least they left a legacy that benefited others. The Gilded Age may have revealed the excesses of an unchecked oligarchy, but at least it left behind centers of learning, culture, and philanthropy.
Today’s roster of plutocrats, though, seems uninterested in leaving behind libraries, museums, universities. Instead, they’re mostly leaving behind one thing: their rage, unabated and unending, which we’ll be dealing with for years to come.
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