Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

by Jacob Silverman

** 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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Technology, Audiobook, Economics, Journalism

337 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 7, 2025

Reviews

[Sindu · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading this I can hate Elon Musk and his ilk with even more specificity.

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Silverman writes about the tech bro scene that revolves around Musk, and he doesn't take a systematic approach, but looks at individuals and their aims - which means that on the one hand, he offers a lot of journalistic research about who met whom and who said what (although this is a far cry from Patrick Radden Keefe-adjacent investigative journalism), but there's also a deeply held belief that Musk & Co are just vain men who who want to do as they please - and while I think there is certainly something to it, that's a little weak as an explanation for all of their actions. These are truly innovative inventors AND enemies of democracy, there's a lot of complexity here - but Silverman undermines his own points by turning parts of this text into a pamphlet, as if the facts weren't bad enough.

Curtis Yarvin is only mentioned in passing, Nick Land isn't mentioned at all, René Girard and Thiel's fascination for him are mentioned, but the author does not take the next step: That apart from wanting money and recognition, these people have a political agenda that goes beyond that, that they are driven by ideas about a future society they want to build just as they built rockets and electric cars. Sure, Musk wanted Twitter to secure a platform that idolizes him via algorithm, but he also knows Antonio Gramsci and his theses about how to win a culture war. It's not just rage, it's also ideology, and this ideology as well as the systematic implications are not investigated thoroughly enough.

So a little too much rage from the author and a little too close to paint a whole picture, but still interesting.

[Benjamin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A solid work on all the weirdness of the last decade. We are living in Elons world unfortunately.

[Ted · Rating 2 out of 5]

Could have been a decent read with superior editing; it often felt like a series of blog posts stitched together and featuring noticeable redundancies.

Also:

1. Difficult to trust anyone who would willingly be employed by Ramaswamy. Perhaps he should have used his investigative skills to get that scammer locked up instead of passing days at a desk with a meaningless title.

2. The Great Replacement is a "false conspiracy." If this holds true, why have so many internationalists and liberals openly said they have such a goal?

3. Similarly, there is an abundance of information on the pizza scandal if you check Bitchute. Brushing it off without serious examination doesn't help Silvermam's case as a rigorous researcher.

[Allyssa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well if I wasn’t depressed before, I sure am now.

[Raghu Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

California's political landscape is predominantly liberal. The population here supports Democratic candidates and progressive social causes. The Bay Area (Silicon Valley) is a microcosm of this ethos. Since I came here in 1993, I have found the place to be leaning towards environmental care, universal healthcare and education. However, there is also a libertarian tilt, which is seen in anti-regulation. Silicon Valley has also seen an enormous rise in wealth in the past three decades. It impacted the consciousness of the people living here. Given such stratospheric wealth, the Bay Area shifted politically rightward during the past decade. This book details Jacob Silverman’s analysis of this shift’s roots along with those who cause it. Silverman argues that, despite the prominence of culture wars since Trump’s presidency, they are not the primary driver of the right-wing trend in Silicon Valley. Rather, it is the end of cheap money and the desire to reduce or evade regulation and taxes, and resistance to antitrust enforcement. Having amassed immense wealth in the past decade, the elite wants to gain political control, dismantle government oversight of technology’s direction and progress. They want to experiment with authoritarian governance models. Silverman blames Elon Musk and Peter Thiel for masterminding this trend, charging they have a deep-rooted ideological belief about their own supremacy and a desire to maintain unconstrained wealth.

The book paints a group portrait featuring the Silicon Valley venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Peter Thiel, Vice-president JD Vance, and the former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt. This is a slice of what President Joe Biden described as the tech industrial complex. Silverman points to the year 2022 as the turning point when the near-zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) ended. This ended the era of free credit, causing crypto markets and growth stocks to decline. For once, billionaires faced real limitations after years. Rather than adapting to the new reality, they looked for a political guarantor to restore conditions for making unconstrained profit. The Biden administration secured some tax enforcement measures and specific tax increases on corporations through legislation, apart from proposing significant tax increases on corporations and individuals earning over $400,000. This was anathema to the elite, and they channeled their political funding to lawmakers who would defeat such measures.

Elon Musk bought Twitter shares at a low price without disclosing his holdings in a timely manner. It violated securities law, and the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) sued him multiple times. States and advocacy groups filed lawsuits, challenging the legality of Musk’s actions within federal agencies. It had to do with dismantling USAID and accessing sensitive Treasury data. Peter Thiel’s Palantir secured government contracts with the IRS, ICE, and the Pentagon. This drew criticism from advocacy groups and lawmakers, raising concerns about mass surveillance. Under the Biden administration, Lina Khan, chair of the FTC, pursued an aggressive antitrust agenda that included suing Amazon for monopolistic practices. Despite these actions following established legal precedent, the billionaire class, accustomed to minimal oversight, saw this as an existential threat. All this scrutiny made them realize they needed to buy influence in the government so that they could deregulate industries and dismantle agencies like the SEC and the DOJ. The goal was always to keep capital cheap and to keep regulation and oversight minimal.

The right-wing tilt of Silicon Valley that Silverman notes is not sudden or unexpected. Several indicators have pointed toward a preference among the wealthy for a kind autocracy run by technocratic experts instead of a people's democracy. The signs of capitulation to the Federal government and wealth have always existed since 2001. An early sign of actions from large tech corporations, with massive financial implications, emerged during the first Obama administration. In 2009, Big Tech complained to President Obama about China’s industrial espionage on their servers to steal the secrets of their technologies. But the companies declined to provide details when President Obama wanted the tech companies to give proof of the espionage. The reason was that China would realize which companies complained against them and hence would retaliate against them, affecting their access to the vast Chinese market. It would hurt their bottom line and the interests of their shareholders. It showed that the Silicon Valley companies would side with shareholder interests and profits above those of US national interests.

A second warning came in 2013. After 9/11 happened, the Bush administration applied pressure on all the tech companies to part with their customer data so that they could do surveillance on them. The tech companies complied without informing their customers. It was Edward Snowden who exposed this collusion between the Bush administration and the tech companies in June 2013. Snowden said only Yahoo and Twitter resisted, but major tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and AT&T shared customer data with the intelligence agencies. They had been doing it for a decade without informing their customers. It alerted civil liberties advocates about how businesses would act when billions of dollars are on the line, despite their professions of a liberal ethos.

Many venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Marc Andreessen, are admirers of the ideas of the far-right influencer, Curtis Yarvin. They are supportive of his anti-democratic governance models, though they have not endorsed Yarvin’s defence of slavery and inherent racial IQ differences. Andreessen approves Yarvin’s ideas, saying one can read him without becoming a monarchist. Vice-president J.D. Vance has cited Yarvin as an influence and praised his ideas of purging the civil service. Elon Musk embraced Yarvin’s principle of efficiency over democratic processes. The way he carried out his DOGE suggests he tried to follow Yarvin’s ideas of the ‘Butterfly revolution’. Yarvin proposed an anti-democratic strategy for a reboot of the U.S. government, replacing it with an autocratic, corporate-style dictatorship led by a “CEO-monarch”. It advocates dismantling existing democratic institutions and the rule of law. Peter Thiel has long expressed the view that “capitalism and true freedom conflict with democracy.” He believes that the technocratic elite has a legitimate right to rule and that capitalism and economic freedom must prevail over democracy. The venture capitalist class views democracy as leading to woke politics and dysfunction overall.

After reading the book, one highlight for me was how angry the billionaire class seems to be. They enjoy immense wealth, exceeding what one might imagine, along with global success. Yet, they are angry. Silverman reckons with this anger and calls it ‘the Gilded Rage’. He says this class shares a lot of the recent years’ anti-woke grievances. The tech critics and regulators incur their ire, wounding their feelings. They attempted to build a world, which they felt lacked sufficient public appreciation and gratitude. Sometimes, it’s also personal. Bill Ackman blames Harvard for turning his daughter into a Marxist. Elon Musk blames the woke mind for his child coming out as trans.

Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman believes that despite their long-standing prominence and wealth, these individuals may feel they are past their best. Their anger could stem from this. Silverman agrees and finds the idea intriguing. He recognizes this group gambled heavily on crypto, suffering poor results. Even Peter Thiel talked about AI as the only thing remaining. That might point to their poverty of imagination and fuel their anger.

Silverman’s categorization of Silicon Valley is analogous to an investment company facing the end of easy profits and increased auditing and oversight. Instead of changing or adjusting its leveraged business model, it buys the stock exchange and appoints its own regulators. This would ensure the rules are bent in favor of high-risk, high-reward trading. Certain conclusions of Silverman are not satisfactory or convincing. For example, Silverman says Silicon Valley’s achievements are due more to market manipulation than genuine innovation. If he means ‘financial engineering’ by ‘market manipulation’, then there is some truth in it. But no one can deny the valley’s path-breaking technological achievements. Another charge from Silverman is that it was tech money that decided the 2016 election in Trump’s favor. It sounds similar to the Democrats’ charge about Russia and Cambridge Analytica defeating Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s campaign and supporting groups spent twice the amount of money ($1.2 billion) that Donald Trump’s campaign and his allies ($600 million) did during the 2016 general election. This means that something beyond money is involved.

This is a timely book, looking deep into the innards of Silicon Valley and its leading lights and their connections to immense wealth and political power. Silicon Valley is no longer the ‘innocent technological hub’ that it was before the rise of the internet in the mid-1990s.

[Ally · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting enough, probably could have done with some more editing and refining; lots of strange repetition—the same people get reintroduced several times, I’m reading the book, you can refer to them because we’ve read it before!—and doesn’t go the extra mile in terms of analysis or cohesiveness. I think this is largely due to Silverman’s background as a journalist, the book almost works better as a series of articles than as one narrative. I guess I was expecting more of an academic text. Not that it’s bad: it’s a great intro to this world! But if you have the misfortune to already know what a charter city is or know what Marc Andreesen looks like, there’s nothing groundbreaking in here. The book gets sidetracked talking about SBF going down, but major points for the clearest explanation of the FTX/Alameda debacle that I’ve seen to date LOL. Was disturbed to look at the bibliography and it’s all web links. That’s not right! Those links are not stable man!!!!! Who approved that???

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If wars are how Americans learn geography, then elections are how they learn about plutocracy.” That’s a pithy quote from this book that I jotted down in my notes. It packs a lot into a handful of words.

Will Americans actually learn about plutocracy, though? Or will our country, a nation of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” as they say, ever learn? Will we ever care? We’re the country that brought you the prosperity gospel, after all. And corporate personhood. We’re the country that worships the golden dollar like the psychopaths at Galt’s Gulch. We think so highly of businessmen that we give them the nuclear codes.

So forgive me for being cynical, but I don’t think we’ll ever learn. Nevertheless, hope springs eternal. You should read this book. You should let your friends borrow it when you’re done. Hell, you can have my copy. Pass it around. It’ll make your blood boil. Hopefully it will inspire you too, though.

Decline is a choice. Like a nation of Ebenezer Scrooges, though, we may yet have the capacity to change. May it not require an intervention from the spirit realm for us to get our shit together.

4.5 stars. Knocking off a half star for some clumsy editing.

[Abigail · Rating 4 out of 5]

“If wars are how Americans learn geography, then elections are how they learn about plutocracy.”

Extremely enlightening and upsetting. A really solid and through portrait of the people driving this burning bus into the pit of techno-fascism. There's so much to chew on in here from the enormous influence of Saudi Arabia in Silicon Valley (and by extension, on Capital Hill), to the profile of the spineless VC puppet JD V*nce -- every chapter equally revolting and fascinating. Already relevant but will become an increasingly valuable reference point for those of us trying to keep up with and understand whatever the absolute fuck is going on in the world right now.

Almost five stars but the overall structure was a little disorganized which made the through line a little hard to follow. You should read it any way though.

[Leann · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most important book to read now.

Thoroughly researched and informative, the author describes in detail the rot underlying the rot tech industry and venture capital. Realizing the extreme amount of foreign investment and interests in American political, media, technology sectors was equally troubling. Scary & sickening to know authoritarian regimes are influencing our media and political systems.

[Breann Hunt · Rating 3 out of 5]

basically the structure of Furious Minds (breaking down component parts of a movement and explaining their ideological origins) combined with at times insufferable lib style writing (i'm sorry!). bonus points for the good boots on the ground reporting Silverman has done in the tech industry for so long.

[Joe · Rating 2 out of 5]

Long on anecdotes. Short on analysis.

[riti aggarwal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very clunkily written tbh and repetitive as well but succinctly captures the current technocratic zeitgeist in all its immature, tantrum-throwing nonsense

[Julie Knudsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

En bog der kommer virkelig vidt omkring, hvilket bogen desværre også bærer præg af da det er svært at holde overblikket over det hele. Virkelig mange vigtige emner, og det overordnede indtryk handler også om at de her mennesker har fingrene i mange områder. Men vildledende at det handler om Elon Musk, for det handler lige så meget om alle de andre olligarcher. Dog tre stjerner da den berører et meget vigtigt og farligt emne.

[maxine :-) · Rating 4 out of 5]

So goooood. So good. Please read this. Gave it 4 stars bc I think the publishers made him add the Elon musk thing for relevancy, I think most of the book wasn’t about Elon musk BUT books need to sell so. I really really enjoyed this and learned so much, please read!

[Thief of Pages (Ty) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a chilling and rather disturbing read. But an excellent and important one. What this book reveals should terrify and anger everyone. We get a crystal clear picture on why all these evil ultra rich elites view democracy as a threat to their ability to accumulate more wealth and power. There is no longer any debate whatsoever about who has taken over this country and is now running it. It’s the tech billionaires and the influence they harness poses monumental and immediate danger to our democracy. That can’t be stressed or emphasized enough. What I appreciated most about this book was how the author constantly exposed the underlying rot of the tech industry and venture capitalism. Two toxic parasitic soul sucking machines. The damage and infectious disease these two entities have inflicted cannot be ignored. They destroy lives and companies while lengthening the income & wealth gap. And if all that isn’t horrifying enough, this book also showcases and highlights all the extreme amount of foreign investment and interests in American political, media, and technology sectors. Why is this equally as disturbing? Because authoritarian regimes are now fully influencing our media and political systems. I mean just look at our current administration and our main stream news outlets. It’s all connected and it’s unsettling. This book is absolutely a must read. Can’t recommend it enough. Happy reading!

[Doug · Rating 3 out of 5]

For an inveterate podcast freak like myself this book didn’t really offer a ton in the way of new information about the march of the far-right crypto denizens through the halls of power. Still quite grim to have it all laid out so succinctly.

[Keely · Rating 5 out of 5]

it’s such a pleasure to read a book written by a friend and to see their genius in action!

well-written and exhaustively researched, rather depressing because the state of our democracy is depressing, this book details the failed techno-utopian dream of silicon valley and the rightward radicalization of the billionaires who shape our apps, global economy, public policy, and (downstream of all that) our daily lives. various chapters focus on notable dramatis personae like sam bankman-fried, the rise and fall (and rise again) of crypto, the libertarian desire to establish unregulated fiefdoms in the form of charter cities and ZEDEs, the shifting political winds buffeting tiktok, and culminate at the end in several chapters describing how all of the previous topics influenced(/decided) the 2024 presidential election. elon musk sits at the center of the narrative, but he’s just one representative from the class of angry, reactionary, biblically greedy moguls described.

the overlapping spheres of interest detailed in the book were often hard to follow (by design!! the shady, double-dealing VCs made it murky and hard to understand on purpose!), which occasionally made me feel a bit out of my depth, but i still marvel at how jacob was able to make such opaque topics generally intelligible to a tech/finance neophyte like myself. deft work, done well!

[Emma Olson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Super insightful and very well researched. I was particularly shocked to learn about the ZEDEs in Honduras and aspirations for corporate towns by many of the Silicon Valley CEOs. This book left me uneasy as many of the figures and ideas discussed reminded me of the dark predictions of the Parable of the Sower series.

[Ariqa Herrera · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fine, not exactly what I was expecting. It really focused on the last 5 - 10 years and felt more like the rise of the tech oligarchy than how they became radicalized. I was surprised that Curtis Yarvin was only mentioned a handful of times despite being someone who has greatly shaped how Peter Thiel and JD Vance think and want to reshape the US. Lots of really interesting information though and makes me hate our tech oligarchs even more

[June · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn't help reading through in fewer sittings, to make up my lapse over habitual scorn of the news channels and social media.

Crowned to be a clown,
I shut off the noise around;
Tantrums of a baby,
I relent to let today be.

[Claire Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciated another review that said, “after reading this I can now hate Elon Musk and his ilk with even more specificity.” This is definitely an echo chamber of a book, as I doubt anyone not already anti-tech-billionaires would read it.

There is simply too much news out there, and corporate malfeasance and headlines every hour. This book was helpful to lay out the major players of the tech billionaire/VC world and how their fringe ideas were allowed to become more mainstream.

From a book perspective, the first few chapters were a bit disjointed, but the final 2/3 flowed well into each other. It was disheartening to read how the same actions are allowed to persist again and again, but I now feel more informed to understand the industry and major players.

[Cyndi T · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little too detailed for me, but overall a good documentation of the influence of the mega rich on our government. The amplification of political corruption with a leader who is interested in selfish benefits over policy that would benefit an average American citizen.

[charley]

I’m just not strong enough.

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to come

[Christopher M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A well researched and detailed expose of the evil that rich men do with their wealth, but I found it a bit too dispiriting reading more than one chapter at a time.

[McKenna Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very info dense, but good 😭 ugh, I hate it—I hate THEM

[Joshua Rosati · Rating 4 out of 5]

We are SCREWED!!!

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breathless reporting of these frickin’ guys. A bit tedious for anyone as online as I am but a good reference to have in one book.

[Bryson Boddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of very good journalism done here. Seriously good work. The author is openly biased and I have no issue with it because of his transparency. However, he’s constantly shooting at a moving target. Elon is one of several main characters he’s targeting throughout. It leads to a messy and blurred timeline with constant directional shifts. It’s also a serious downer.