Status Updates From Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and ...

"[Silicon Valley elites'] worldview upheld the pretense that creative destruction and technological innovation were synonymous with progress. If expertise were worthless--because the experts themselves represented the corruption of the ancien régime--then tech was salvific force. And the people leading the tech vanguard were the ones doing the saving." pg. 37

"If billionaires weren't elites, or if managers and stewards of capital weren't much different from you and me, then real power distinctions wouldn't exist." pg. 30

"A general lack of class consciousness meant that some still subscribed to the fiction that a tech billionaire could be a populist threat to the establishment, just as Trump supposedly was." pg. 30-31

"Andreessen didn't consider that the archetype he most despised--unelected technocrats remaking the world in their image from a luxurious hilltop redoubt--might have been an accurate description of Silicon Valley venture capitalists." pg.27

"The billionaire CEO who didn't like "a lords and peasants kind of thing" gave himself the title of Tesla's Technoking and fought for a $50 billion-plus pay package. Tesla fought unionization efforts at factories in California and New York. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) charged that the company used illegal union-busting tactics. Its relationships with European unions were similarly adversarial." pg.25

"these men had acquired their tremendous wealth precisely because they put their monetary interests and will to power at the forefront of every pursuit."

These guys have a problem because listening to a friend tell you about the anime you missed and its random facts on a vacation before going to bed is much more satisfying than making more money. Assuming you are not in deep financial trouble and somewhat stable.

"[The billionaires] will sell the venture to the public under the mantle of charity, civic progress, or as Musk called it, "extending the light of consciousness" to the red planet" pg.24

"They're less important as individuals than as representatives of a rising sociopolitical class of venture capitalists and financiers. On core matters, their fortunes are linked: they're friends, they invest in the same companies, they donate to the same political candidates, they party together on private islands where visitors have to sign NDAs."

''"you need people like me who are sick in that way and who don't lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom."' Palmer Luckey, co-founder and CTO of Anduril, a military-minded startup founded by five young tech entrepreneurs.' pg.18, 19

these guys seem to think they are in the right instead of just another group that's been categorized as something harmful many times throughout history.

"[Schmidt] thinks the tech industry should help ensure that the US remains the world's preeminent military power. And like many in the Valley, he appears to think that the tech industry should be unfettered by regulation, left to innovate to its delight." pg.11

"On July 10, 2008, President Bush signed a law retroactively granting immunity to telecoms companies that assisted the government in its warrantless wiretapping program." pg.9

"While nominally a liberal, Schmidt's politics, like many of the tech leaders discussed in this book, are better understood along the axes of authoritarianism and the fusion of corporate and state power." pg.11

"On March 19, 2020, Musk, who had said that "coronavirus panic is dumb," predicted that Covid would be gone by the end of April."

"On October 7, 2016, the Washington Post published a video of Trump bragging about assaulting women...Eight days later, Thiel donated $1.25 million in support of Trump's campaign." pg.3