The Gilded Rage of Tech Billionaires w/ Jacob Silverman

0:00 They were told throughout this era of the 2010s that they deserved all this money and that they were brilliant and that the decisions and bets that they were making were the right ones. And that's, I think, where our worldviews start diverging, perhaps, between this kind of business overclass and most people, frankly.

0:41 Jacob is an independent journalist based in New York and the author of Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Now, this is a book that I have been looking forward to for quite some time, so I was really happy to have Jacob back on the show to dig into it to discuss different aspects of what he reported on and what he laid out in this book because I think it is a really good encapsulation of the moment that we are in.

1:06 And at a time where there is so much happening, seeing it all laid out I think is really helpful because there's probably pieces of this story that we have forgotten about, or maybe that we just missed because there is so much information flooding out there at the moment. But Jacob really pulls it all together and creates a narrative through lines through it.

1:26 So we can really understand how we got to this moment, you know, and maybe how we start to change it as well. So obviously, you know, we're talking about Donald Trump, we're talking about some of the tech billionaires who are shaping so much of our lives at the moment, but we're also going back and looking at how we got to where we are today, some of the events and moments in time that really set us on this course to this alliance between the extreme right and the billionaires of Silicon Valley, and then also the ways that they have worked to kind of cement that power over time.

1:59 So it's a fascinating conversation, you know, exactly the type of thing that I'm sure you will enjoy if you listen to this show. And I will just say before we get into it that this interview was initially recorded for 92NY, based in New York. Basically, they were interested in having a conversation with Jacob about the new book.

2:17 I was invited to do that interview, and I figured if Jacob is going to come on the show anyway, why would I interview him twice about the exact same subjects instead of just reusing an interview that we're doing anyway? So I would imagine that many of you have not watched that original interview, so this will be completely new to you, but I just wanted to give you that context, especially if you hear mention of 92NY in the audio of this episode.

2:42 And while I'm quite certain that 92NY did not edit out any parts of our interview, this episode was made with the original recording files, so even if they did, you know, this is how Kyla, our producer, put it together. And I know someone online pointed out that 92NY is apparently an organization that supports the Israeli government.

3:02 If that's the case, it's not something that I was aware of before doing this interview. I was asked to do it to support Jacob. So just so you have that context, if you were wondering about it. So with that said, if you enjoy this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star view on your podcast platform of choice.

3:17 You can share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making tech won't save us every single week, so we can keep having these critical, in-depth conversations into the many ways that the tech industry is shaping our lives and affecting our societies, while getting ad-free episodes of the show, and even stickers if you support at a certain level.

3:37 You can join supporters like Ryan from Gig Harbor, Washington, Corey and Albuquerque and Francois in Toronto by going to patreon.com slash techwon'save us, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. To get started, Jacob, I was wondering, there are many different things that you can write about that you do write about, of course.

3:56 Why did you decide to write this book and why now?

3:59 Well, I believe it was late 2023. I mean, I've written about the politics of tech for a number of years, and I I started to think ahead more towards the 2024 cycle. And I had just written about San Francisco and specifically the role of David Sachs and some other tech millionaires and billionaires in the various recall elections there and kind of moving San Francisco politics to the right.

4:20 Of course, it's San Francisco, so it's a little different than a lot of other big American cities, but it was clear that there was a reactionary tilt kind of to a lot of these tech billionaires today, and that something was changing in how they were putting their money and their efforts into politics.

4:35 A lot of them had been donors and sort of casually involved in one way or another. Certainly there are people like Peter Thiel, who were political animals through and through for a long time, but it seemed to be spreading more among the executive and VC class. Anger about COVID, quarantine efforts, anger about various social movements, about me too, about BLM.

4:57 And I started wondering, you know, what is going to happen to this group of people, especially in the next election cycle. So I started talking to an editor at Bloomsbury, and we we thought, you know, maybe there's a book here. I remember we had a conversation, my editor and I, I said something like, uh, I think Elon Musk might get involved in the next election.

5:14 And uh, you know, that was almost naive on my part. So, you know, it was based on this recent track record of behavior and and changing politics that they had shown, but also a little bit of a hunch, like maybe there's something to chronicle here going into what was going to be for sure a pretty crazy election cycle.

5:29 Yeah, and Elon Musk uh getting involved is almost an understatement at this point. It's very prescient, right? And there are so many different things that you chronicle in this book that give us a really detailed picture of what these tech billionaires, what these tech executives have been up to over the past number of years, but also this kind of transformation that we have seen in their politics, the way that we act.

5:52 You know, obviously you talked about how someone like Peter Thiel has long been vocally active on the political right, but some of these people, you know, have been less so. And this feels like a more recent thing for them. And so I feel like there are many moments that we can point to that explain the politics of Silicon Valley more broadly, you know, whether it is what's happened in the past few years, going back to the late 90s and the early 2000s, or even, you know, casting way back to World War II and the Cold War and what was happening during those, you know, that period of time.

6:21 I wonder for you, is there one of those periods that stands out as the most illustrative of what we've seen recently? Or does that just kind of add different layers to a very complex picture when we look at, you know, this region and the politics that have emerged from it?

6:35 Well, that's interesting. Uh the book is is really about the last 10 years or so, but there is a deeper history there of conservatives in Silicon Valley, of relationships with the state and the national security establishment. And I make some reference to that, but I don't necessarily go deep in the book.

6:52 But, you know, I do think in some ways we're returning to early political alignment between Silicon Valley and what you might call the military-industrial complex or the state. 50 or 60 years ago, you had early chip companies building microprocessors that were going in Minuteman missiles very famously here in the US.

7:09 Of course, we know the internet came out of DARPA and national security investments. And in a way, we're returning to that era, I think, but with a lot more money at stake and a lot more just in general at stake, perhaps. Recently, there's a guy named Sean McGuire, who's a major VC at Sequoia, and I write about him a little bit in the book, and I've written about him elsewhere.

7:30 He is very kind of proudly, self-consciously a right-wing figure now, and one of these people who says that he was anti-Trump and kind of a centrist, but the media lied to him about Trump, and he's very open about this. Well, I remember a month or two ago, he posted on X a link to this video on YouTube and something like the hidden military history of Silicon Valley.

7:51 And it's a lecture that goes around. I think it was done by an academic, I think, and it's good and it's pretty standard history. People often share it to show, like, look, actually, you may not know about this hidden military history of Silicon Valley. He shared it because he was very proud of it, um, which I thought was an interesting kind of shift.

8:09 For some people, it's like, oh, well, here's this sort of whiff of almost scandal or like morally weighty history that we need to reckon with, perhaps. He shared it because he was very proud of that. And he wants, that's what he and a lot of his allies, especially in companies like Andres and Horowitz or elsewhere, want to return to is they want to build stuff for the military and for the intelligence community.

8:32 And so that I thought embodied just as one small example, embodies the kind of attitudal and political and ideological shift that's going on here. It's like, okay, they're not ashamed to be part of the military-industrial complex anymore. A lot of these guys, they they want to do it and they're proud of it, and they're nationalistic and even jingoistic about it, and they see a lot of profit in it.

8:51 Yeah, it has been fascinating to watch that shift. And I want to come back to that just to talk a bit about what we have seen recently, right? But I feel like, you know, you were talking about how the book is primarily about the past 10 years, but I feel like there's, you know, kind of an event just before that that, of course, you talk about in the book that really sort of sets up part of what you're talking about here, right?

9:09 Which is, of course, looking at the way that the tech industry engaged with, you know, the government and, as you say, the military-industrial complex in, say, the kind of post-9-11 era, you know, during the war on terror with George W. Bush and later with Barack Obama. And I feel like that kind of history is often left out of the story that we often tell about Silicon Valley and what it is and its political development.

9:32 And I wonder in looking at that period, what you saw in, you know, kind of informing maybe something that we're seeing today with these uh tech billionaires and tech executives that was maybe not picked up on as much at the time or picked up on briefly, but then, you know, we kind of forgot about it as you know, the kind of exciting moment of the 2010s came and there was so much growth and excitement.

9:52 So I wonder what you take from that period.

9:54 Yeah, I think that's a good point that, and I write about this some in the book, is that while I may have some focus of kind of the Trump era and tech, uh a lot of this certainly uh precedes that. And the post-9-11 era is a good marker. Certainly after 9-11, you had a major growth in domestic surveillance.

10:12 And I mean, now we take a lot of these things for granted, but kind of internet-based surveillance, using you know, the vast amount of telecommunications and internet data to surveil the whole populations. And so after 9-11, the Bush administration realized it needed the cooperation, uh, legally compelled or otherwise, of big parts of the tech industry and also the tech and telecommunications companies that kind of formed the backbone of the internet and of global communications.

10:39 So, one important event that happened after that was you had the it's often described as the retroactive immunization of the telecommunications companies for participating in warrantless wiretapping, which was supposed to be a scandal when it was revealed here in the US. And then there was a bill passed to basically immunize them against all that.

10:56 Going into the Obama era, I would say you had more of intensification of those trends, of that fusion between the Silicon Valley telecommunications companies and the national security establishment. And again, you had some challenges to it, and but often these companies were receiving secret court orders that they couldn't reveal to anyone, or maybe even only a few people at the company might know.

11:20 Uh, there were some lawsuits at the time, or but they didn't have a lot of choice. But I think also in the tech industry, you started to see that shift again, where some people thought, well, hey, this could be a good partnership for us. And one of the figures I do talk about, who's not often or maybe not mentioned enough in this context, is Eric Schmidt, the former CEO and chairman of Google.

11:40 I say he's a Democrat in a lot of ways and sort of his electoral politics, but I think he's he's almost a supernational figure. And he's also more usefully seen as this kind of oligarch and authoritarian personality, I think. And he's someone who certainly in the war in Ukraine, hit his drone company that he doesn't talk about very much, is involved there.

12:01 And he very eagerly kind of embraced the national security role of the tech industry. He was one of the most frequent visitors to the Obama White House. And one thing that has been talked about a little bit more is that there was this revolving door of personnel between the Obama administration and Silicon Valley.

12:18 I mean, some of that was at companies like Uber and Amazon, but it was also kind of the National Security Directorate and the National Security Divisions of these tech companies, which were hiring lawyers and former personnel from the FBI and CIA and NSA and elsewhere. And uh at the top of that was Eric Schmidt.

12:35 So I think that stuff cannot be forgotten. And yeah, the this deeper history, you know, goes back to early Cold War, but the one we're talking about right now really does start after 9-11 and owes a lot to the developments of that era and kind of the things we still haven't reckoned with from that era in terms of mass surveillance.

12:53 I think that's a really important point. And I'm happy that we were able to dig into a bit of that history because I feel like it, you know, sets the stage for the story that you're really telling here, right? And trying to have us understand what these tech executives and these tech billionaires are up to today.

13:07 I want to also try to understand the nature of these people and the nature of this industry as well, right? That that sets them up to be these powerful people who they are today and who can wield this influence, right, politically in the way that we've been seeing. And so one of the key aspects of this that you describe in the book and that certainly many people have commented on, is this notion of basically how the low interest rates through the 2010s really helped to create a particular industry and also to shape the way that some of these powerful figures really thought about their role in the economy.

13:40 And so I wonder if you could talk a bit about what we saw through the 2010s, how these companies grew and these venture capitalists became really wealthy as a result, and then how that starts to set us up for the power and influence that they're able to wield in the 2020s.

13:54 So some folks may have heard of the ZERP era or the zero interest rate policy era, which is basically after the 2008 great financial crisis, the Fed lowered interest rates to zero or practically zero. And money was very cheap to borrow for a long time. I mean, it helped contribute to the recovery of the economy, but also on a larger level, and certainly on the level of venture capitalists and the tech industry, it meant that money was very cheap to borrow in huge quantities.

14:20 And so you started to see more speculative bets and also started to see venture capitalists in some cases have a lot more money at their disposal, making much bigger investments, you know, not just a few million dollars, but maybe a few billion dollars in some of these companies. Uh, along with that, you had the entrance of sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, elsewhere that um started just pumping more capital into Silicon Valley.

14:46 Uh, a few years ago, the Wall Street Journal reported that the government of Saudi Arabia was the biggest funder of US startups. So there's just all this money sloshing around and billions of dollars going to companies like WeWork that never really work out. And at the same time, you also see a lot of speculative investments in crypto and Web3, as they called it for a while, things that I already don't have a strong economic foundation or even much cash flow associated with them, or really ability to produce cash flow or something real.

15:15 So there was, I think, besides all this money being risked that wasn't necessarily their own, but there was kind of this hallucinatory quality to the economy then. And I think people saw this a lot during COVID when we did learn a lot about who was essential to the running of the economy and who wasn't.

15:31 And we learned that so certainly if we didn't know before, that venture capitalists and and tech executives aren't necessarily essential. But again, this was the peak of kind of an earlier crypto boom. And it was a very odd time, I think, because you had these millionaire and billionaire executives saying that you need to invest in NFTs or kind of goofy crypto tokens when you know people were struggling economically, people were struggling to not get sick or to take care of themselves and the people around them.

16:00 And this gap, I think, started to show between, you know, not just this upper class and everyday people, but also how they viewed the world, what they expected out of the economy. And I think one other factor that you have to talk about is that when you have that much money at your disposal, billions of dollars worth of capital, it helps breed a certain sense of entitlement.

16:21 And I think a lot of these people had that already. And this is a book mostly, frankly, about white men, mostly American, a few South Africans. And they already kind of come with a great deal of privilege, but they were, you know, told throughout this era of the 2010s that they deserved all this money and that they were brilliant and that the decisions and bets that they were making were the right ones.

16:43 And that's, I think, where our worldviews start diverging, perhaps, between the this kind of business overclass and most people, frankly.

16:52 Really well said. And that's described so well in the book. And right, and there's so many things that you said there, like so many questions I can ask based on what you've described. I want to go in two different directions with it, right? And so the first is the role of Saudi Arabia and to a lesser degree, these other kind of Gulf sovereign wealth funds and governments in Silicon Valley is something that is really important for us to understand and is maybe underappreciated, right?

17:15 You know, the role that they played, even when you say, I think they are in the interview, that Saudi Arabia was one of the biggest funders of US startups. I think a lot of people would probably be surprised to hear that, right? You know, it's not something that we often talk about, it's not something that we often discuss, but this also has serious repercussions for the ways that these companies work and the influence that the Saudi Arabian government can have.

17:37 Can you talk a bit about that and you know the work and reporting that you've done in understanding the influence that Saudi Arabia has been able to exert within the American tech industry?

17:47 Yeah, I've written about the Saudis and the tech industry a fair amount because I think it's important and I also think it's very illustrative of the geopolitics of tech, uh, the essentially authoritarian alignment of the tech industry and its leaders right now, which has effects in politics, but also just kind of in how they view their customers too, and how they view all of us.

18:06 Ben Horowitz, for example, is uh he's the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz. He he came out last year as a very prominent Trump supporter, kind of radicalized from the center left. And I think he's an interesting example. Just there's a there's a quote from him that I believe I mentioned in the book where he was at a conference with Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, or forgive me, I'm not sure if MBS was actually there, but with some Saudi officials, and he said, Um, you know, Saudi Arabia has a founder.

18:35 You just don't you don't call him a founder, you call him your highness. The dictator is founder, it's uh one of the things that and you know he may have been referring to the first king of Saudi Arabia, but even that, you know, that's from the 1940s, and we're still just talking about a dictator, a monarch, a king.

18:51 But he said it half as a joke, but half to show sort of like their affinity. And I think that that really is revealing. There's this the similar kind of authoritarian, the founders in charge of everything mindset. And we certainly saw that happen after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. The tech industry hardly blinked, and the relationships with Saudi Arabia and with Saudi money continued because it's essential to kind of how the industry operates and what it's gotten used to.

19:20 What the Saudi government does is it just to be clear, is it puts in billions of dollars to various venture capital firms through various means, but especially through the PIF or the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund. There's also a division called Santa Bill, which is kind of the Saudi VC firm. Uh, what they also do is sometimes, you know, they'll give money to um something like Softbank, which has billions of dollars worth of Saudi money, which will then, of course, invest in other funds or in companies directly.

19:48 So there are a lot of streams of Saudi cash coming in. And at the same time, there are things that the Saudi government expects. And my big case study, basically, in the book is Twitter, which the Saudi government ran aspiring. We know about this because someone went to prison about 11 years ago during kind of the an earlier regime of Twitter.

20:07 And we don't need to go through it all, but basically they use that access to customer data to uncover people in Saudi Arabia who were tweeting pseudonymously or hiding their identity. Some of those people were arrested, some of them were executed, some of them are still in prison. Um, this was a big deal, or should have been.

20:24 And one thing I write about in Kind Document is that the Saudi relationship with Twitter continued when Musk acquired it because uh Saudi Arabia is a key funder of Musk's various companies, especially now that he has an AI firm. As you well know, they're they're they devour money and capital, their insane expenditures.

20:42 And Saudi Arabia is stepping up to help fund XAI too. So it's an important through line of what's sustaining technology, the tech industry these days. And I think even again, to go back to someone like Ben Horwitz, um, another thing he does now is apparently he's been giving technology from portfolio companies, as in companies he's invested in, to the Las Vegas Police Department.

21:04 Uh so you know, he's not just giving donations to a police department, which rich guys have done for a few decades now at least. He's going to his portfolio companies and saying, okay, this drone company I invest in, let's either give or buy some of their stuff and give it to the Las Vegas Police Department.

21:19 That's not necessarily something that his relationship with Saudi Arabia or these other authoritarian governments has caused, but you know, it's a it's a similar attitude, I think. It's a and it's an authoritarian mindset that these guys just think that they can they can run things uh for us or that they are fit to you know make these kinds of decisions.

21:36 I think people need to pay more attention to not just say, like, okay, these guys seem a little iffy on the concept of democracy.

21:42 Yeah, and we've certainly seen that very clearly quite recently. Picking up on what you were saying there about Saudi Arabia and the influence that it has, and Elon Musk, you know, who has obviously been a very prominent character when we've been paying attention to the tech industry for some time now, but especially in the past few years, when we've seen the influence that he's weakened.

22:00 It was really interesting to me to read in the book about how you got the uh the list of investors in his version of Twitter or what he now calls X unsealed. How did that inform you about the influence that different players have on a company like Twitter and potentially Elon Musk himself? You know, obviously Elon Musk is this very wealthy figure.

22:20 It would seem as though he has an immense amount of power and and that nobody could really influence him, but he still relies on money from other people from time to time. So, so what did you take away from that? And who are the kinds of people who are invested in this company that is so influential in the public conversations that we have?

22:38 So last year, uh summer of 2024, someone told me, hey, X actually was in a lot of lawsuits, first of all, because I mean all big companies face a lot of litigation, but no one more so than Elon Musk. And when he took over Twitter, a lot of people sued him, including employees who were fired because some of them didn't get paid.

22:57 And this is from the former CEO, Purog Aguirral, on down, and various other labor law violations mostly. And in in these kinds of lawsuits, often a company will have to submit a list of shareholders, especially a privately held company, to see who might be affected by materially affected by some outcome in the case.

23:15 So this is very routine, but it's a big deal when a company like X files a list of shareholders. In this case, it was they were filed under seal in one of the many litigation efforts underway. And the case hadn't yet gone to trial. But uh, I got this pro bono firm called Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press that does a lot of First Amendment work to represent me and file a motion, though we're not part of the litigation of this of this case, you can still file an outside motion and say, we would like to unseal this list.

23:44 Normally it's just a list that the two parties might look at and the judge to see, like, you know, does someone unexpected have an ownership share in X that's related to this litigation? Does the judge, and that's actually happened that a judge in Texas that must likes to present cases before is a Tesla shareholder.

24:01 That hasn't seemed to do anything so far. But anyway, this is the reasoning behind this kind of thing. So our CFP, the organization representing me, filed in summer of 2024. And actually, I thought it might not work or it would take months. About a month later, a judge ruled in our favor that, hey, this is in the public interest, and these kinds of things do get unsealed from time to time.

24:21 So that was unsealed. The usefulness of that was that we got the names of legal entities that own pieces of X. We didn't really get the specific amounts and we didn't always know who ran those legal entities, but you could start researching these LLCs and trusts and other groups. And while Musk had filed some paperwork with the SEC and elsewhere that gave us a little bit of an idea of some of the people or venture capital firms investing alongside of him, this was a much clearer picture and provide a basis for researchers and journalists to go on.

24:54 And we found out who was investing alongside Musk and also in some cases who wasn't. And it was the Saudis, of course, some Qatari money that hadn't really been talked about much, I think. A lot of VC firms, some of Musk's traditional allies or people who said that they were gonna buy in, uh, didn't seem to.

25:12 It wasn't clear to me if Larry Ellison ever did, despite offering $2 billion, um, unless there's still a couple of unidentified trusts and other vehicles there. But it was kind of this window into the nitty-gritty. Um, and also it was interesting because when Musk was trying to buy Twitter, he famously tried to back out of it because he basically offered too much and then the price started crashing.

25:34 But there were these text messages released as part of discovery in a case in Delaware court. This was when Twitter basically sued him into consummate the deal. And some of these text messages were with people like Larry Ellison, where he was Larry Ellison said, okay, I'll put in two billion, or David Sachs was saying things.

25:50 And it was a very interesting insight into Musk's world. Well, in the book, what I do is I look at those text messages and then I contrast that with some of the names that either did or did not appear on that ownership list. And I think it says a lot about how Musk operates. And that one thing we do know is that a guy like this, he's actually very highly leveraged.

26:08 He might be the richest man in the world, but he is constantly dependent on other people and institutions. And like we've said, now the Saudi government for constant infusions of cash. I mean, there's sort of an expression like if I owe you like $5,000, that's my problem. But if I owe you $5 million, that's your problem.

26:26 Once we're talking about money in uh in the scale of billions of dollars, these relationships become a lot more complex and Musk becomes potentially more beholden to his creditors, but they also are reliant on him too to kind of keep this machine going.

26:39 Yeah, and we've certainly seen plenty of that, right? And there's always a discussion as to whether the machine is going to stop working and you know things might collapse, but we haven't seen it yet, of course. Going online without ExpressVPN is like putting a sign in your front lawn that says, Hey, I don't lock my front door.

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27:44 So secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com slash TWSU. That's EXPRESSVPN.com slash TWSU to find out how you can get up to four extra months. ExpressVPN.com slash TWSU. Going back to what I was saying before about trying to understand the nature of people and to pick up on what you were saying about Elon Musk there just that time, in the book you you talk about how there does seem to be this real notable shift in Elon Musk and his politics and you know the way that he's like acting publicly around 2022.

28:19 I wonder how you explain that shift that we begin to see there and if it tells us anything about the broader changes that are happening in Silicon Valley and among this kind of you know tech billionaire class in that moment.

28:34 There are a couple of things. Uh I've mentioned before that a lot of the kind of social movements and political movements of the last few years have sort of shocked tech leaders and taken them aback. They've affected different people in different ways among the general population, but there were comments for, for example, actually from Mark Andreessen where he he claims he was talking to some CEO or of a portfolio company, and they decided together that young people were joining these companies uh in order to destroy them because they were communists and left-wingers.

29:04 And so I think one, you there is a lack of touch with reality or or with how most everyday people think. I mean, I think that's very unlikely that that's the case. But you know, these people exist kind of at this great remove. And the movements of the last of the last decade over inequality, over Israel and Palestine, over BLM, over sexual harassment and me too, have shocked a lot of them.

29:30 And they they don't really, it's not the form of progressive politics that they recognize. With Musk in particular, he has cited some things. Um, and I think one of the most important ones is uh his daughter, Vivian, is changing her name and coming out as a trans woman and writing in the application and change her name that she didn't want to be associated with her father in any way.

29:49 He said in an interview with Jordan Peterson, the right-wing influencer, kind of kooky celebrity psychologist, the woke mind virus killed my son. And then he talked about dead naming and had this totally wrong definition, in which he was somehow Musk is the victim in this case, even though his daughter is living how she wants to.

30:09 But that really catalyzed, I think, Musk's radicalization. It opened him up to a lot of transphobia and made it one of his main issues. And he started talking about how schools were turning kids into communists. You hear this kind of thing even from someone like Bill Ackman, the financier, who says his daughter became a communist at Harvard.

30:28 The world, you know, in some ways was changing, or at least the spectrum of political possibility, I think. And people like Musk didn't like that and wouldn't tolerate it. There were more specific events in terms of their relationship his relationship with government. When the Biden administration didn't invite him to the EV summit, he took that very personally.

30:45 I mean, it's a little ridiculous, but even some of his colleagues said, you know, that was a big mistake. Or more towards his bottom line, perhaps, during COVID, when the Tesla factory in Fremont had to shut down. This led to this whole battle between Musk and the county of Alameda and the state of California.

31:02 And he eventually said, We're opening up. I'm going to be there. Please arrest me if you need to arrest someone. And the county and state eventually kind of conceded to Musk. But that sort of idea that there could be limitations from the state imposed upon his work or upon his ability to produce cars was a big deal for him, also, I think.

31:19 So you kind of have to put all these things together. That's why I wrote a book about it. That's why it's sort of a group biography of Musk and these other guys. But that's, I think, where they're often coming from. And I think finally it's this exhaustion with on their part with like they don't want to answer to anyone anymore.

31:35 They don't like the criticism coming from people like us, or even just the version that appears in the New York Times. And you hear this a lot from people like Mark Andreessen that, you know, every tech critic is basically a Luddite or a communist trying to take them down and they won't have it. And there was maybe a certain bargain with society before where they would make a lot of money and then donate some to charity.

31:55 Uh, Andreessen again would talk about this. But whatever bargain might have existed before, they think kind of the the government and civil society has broken it, and they just want to be clear to innovate to their delight and do what they want. Um, you know, it's a it's a very traditional kind of grasping for corporate power, but it's worked for them in some ways because it's wrapped, of course, in their their techno-optimism.

32:18 Absolutely. And, you know, you talk about this book as kind of a biography of this group of people, right? You know, obviously we often talk about specific figures, like someone like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or Mark Andreessen, but you talk about a whole cast of characters in this book who, you know, I think for some people will be people that they're they're far less familiar with, you know, talking about a number of the venture capitalists and their roles in what we've been seeing for the past number of years, or, you know, this broader group that's often referred to as the PayPal mafia of a bunch of people who came out of, of course, the PayPal company that Peter Thiel and Elon Musk were both

32:55 involved in. I wonder, you know, looking at this broader network, what that tells you about the evolution that we have been seeing politically in Silicon Valley for the past number of years and the influence that they are able to wield in forwarding this kind of a politics.

33:09 One reason I write about this as more of a network or a group is that you can see this every day. Uh, you know, one actually sort of fortunate thing about being a journalist now is I don't necessarily have to try to interview Elon Musk, which he he would never talk to me anyway, but I can go online and see what he's saying and who he's talking to.

33:27 And I can see which companies these guys are investing in and the events they appear at in the podcast they go on when they have these very long discussions sometimes about exactly what they believe. And I think in some ways they're actually very forthright at times. I mean, this week, Joe Lonsdale, who's a uh figure in the book, who's kind of a younger PayPal mafia figure, he retweeted someone saying that there should be minimal Muslim immigration to the US.

33:50 I mean, these people are not hiding what they think. So that's why, again, it's this group of people because they are they are working together, they are friends and business partners and they're involved in politics together. So I do think in some ways it starts with the PayPal Mafia who came out of, of course, PayPal when it was sold to eBay in the early 2000s for more than a billion dollars.

34:11 You suddenly had this group of people of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, David Sachs, and others who were very rich. And for some of the people at the core of this group, like Peter Teal, they were always political animals. And Thiel and Sachs were writing partners in college and wrote a book together called The Diversity Myth.

34:28 And as Max Chafkin, a biographer of Teal, has said, the PayPal Mafia was actually more of a political grouping first and kind of a business or business network second. But you would see over the years that this group really formed the heart of Silicon Valley conservatism and Silicon Valley shift towards the authoritarian right.

34:49 And it grew and expanded. In the book, I talk about how I think people like Joe Lonsdale or even someone like Vivek Ramaswamy are kind of being drafted into this broader network because uh, for example, Ramaswamy, his his firm uh Strive, this kind of this investment fund, has investment from JD Vance, who is his law school buddy from Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman and others.

35:11 So you can kind of watch the this network grow over time and you can watch the effects it had. It it helped elect Trump twice. You know, we kind of learned about it 2016 a little bit more in retrospect, but we saw Peter Thiel at the time be the most visible tech supporter of Trump. And after the Access Hollywood tape, maybe the only outspoken tech supporter of Trump.

35:32 I think this group, I think it's still intact, it endures. And I think they speak in some ways for more and more people in kind of tech rank and file, especially men in tech, rank and file, for whom these guys are figures that they look up to.

35:46 What do you make of this question of evolution versus they were always like this? You know, on the one hand, you can see someone like Peter Thiel, who, you know, we used to associate as more of a libertarian. He used to talk about C-steading and things like that. But on the other hand, him and David Sachs, as you described, were long involved with, say, the Stanford Review back when they were at Stanford University, which was, of course, very right-wing, very conservative at the time.

36:10 You know, do you think that their politics were just hidden for quite some time, or do you see a notable shift in the past few years with how they represent themselves politically?

36:18 In some ways, both. And some ways it depends on the characters we're talking about. Teal's been always talked about escape and exiting kind of the strictures of government and society with things like seasteading, or he's he's wrote something about how someone needs to create the technology of freedom or the technology that enables freedom.

36:34 And he was referring to seasteading, but he's never really been a libertarian in practice. I mean, people have asked him about Palantir, of course, and how can you justify this company that's basically an arm of the security state and mass surveillance? And his answer is always sort of like, well, better me than someone else, or someone has to do it, kind of.

36:53 That of course is not very firmly held libertarianism. Most of these guys, I think, aren't really libertarian in practice. I think the part of libertarian that appeals to them is that they don't want rules, that they want ultimate freedom to do what they want. And that, and there's something kind of childish or juvenile about that, and there's something kind of macho or at least affected machismo and jingoism on their part, but they have taken that attitude that they are, in some cases, the cognitive or genetic elites and that they have a right to rule.

37:25 In the past, people like Thiel or Sachs, that attitude was more politically focused from early on, you know, and they're involved in kind of institutional Republican and conservative politics. I think for other people or other billions and billionaires in tech, including people like Musk, it was perhaps an underlying attitude that animated them.

37:46 I mean, I have a podcast coming out this fall about Musk, a mini-series for the CBC. And we talk in there a lot about Musk's South African upbringing and also about this idea called boss camp or bossism. It has a few different terms, but it kind of comes, it comes from apartheid South Africa where basically an elite white man was in charge in every room.

38:07 And there's a certain way in which that authoritarian, privilege, and attitude has followed Musk, I think, even before he was ever involved in politics, um, when he was at his other startups and other companies and organizations he's been involved in. So it simply, I think, got more focused when some of these people, like uh Andreason or Musk, started seeing politics affecting them more personally or their bottom line in a way they found inhibitive.

38:34 Yeah. And, you know, obviously a name that sits over this whole conversation, you know, which that you can't really ignore. And it's hard to think that we got this far without really talking about him, of course, is Donald Trump. You know, the big story of the past year has been this relationship between these Silicon Valley billionaires and Donald Trump himself.

38:52 Obviously, this is something that you discuss quite a lot in the book, and of course, set up for us, like how this actually came to be. Seeing what we we have been, you know, watching over the past year, what do you make of the way that the tech industry has so vigorously embraced Trump? And do you see any kind of cracks in that relationship, you know, besides obviously the souring between Trump and Musk themselves?

39:15 But do you see this as a relationship that remains strong, or is the tech industry going to go a different direction in the future as well? As we know that they they can change their allegiances very quickly.

39:27 Yeah, I wish I could say there were cracks, but I don't really see any right now. I mean, Trump is obviously an authoritarian, consolidating power. And we saw just a week or two ago when a bunch of CEOs were at the White House dining with Trump, and Tim Cook was thanking him repeatedly. Zuckerberg was time on investing hundreds of billions of dollars, and then in kind of a hot mic moment said, I didn't know what number you wanted me to say.

39:50 I mean, incredible deference and fealty. And I think there are two reasons for this. One, there's of course the self-interest reason, which is that Trump has said that he was going to try to imprison Zuckerberg. I mean, these were you know tweets or posts online, but uh, they don't want to go to prison.

40:06 They don't want their companies broken up in the case of Google, which has had a favorable antitrust settlement, it seems recently. So there's that. But then a lot of these guys do share MAGA or Trump grievances. Um, and that's something I talk about in the book also. Not all of them, not the not really the guys I just said, but like Musk, again, the transphobia is something that aligns him with the MAGA movement.

40:28 You know, some of the resentments against quote-unquote woke politics or Democrats. I mean, Musk feels that acutely and posts about it, you know, long into the night for the last couple of years. Sometimes it depends on the the figure we're talking about or the company, but there is a certain alignment in that sense of reactionary grievance or a lot of kind of cultural discontent.

40:51 Trump is is an abuser and prolific sexual harasser. Me too did not go over very well in the tech industry. There are a lot of people who weren't accounted for. Musk himself has, you know, had some accusations, including the one that was reported on Business Insider about the Masseuse on the plane. So there's similar attitudes there, I think, that that align them.

41:10 But you know, in some cases, I still find it rather shocking. And one person I talk about in the book is is Sergei Brin, who, you know, was a Jewish refugee from the Soviet Union and was brought over in the 80s. And during the first Trump administration, he went to the airport, went to SFO in San Francisco during the so-called Muslim ban and protested.

41:32 And he wasn't actually very loud about it, but he showed up and some people recognized him and he told a journalist or someone there, I'm doing this because I was a refugee. Well, we have another Muslim ban that people don't really seem to talk about, and we have all kinds of horrible things happening to immigrants here or people who are trying to immigrate here.

41:49 And instead, Sergei Brynn is going to meetings with Trump. I mean, he's back at Google, he was kind of away from Google for a while, I believe. He's now working on AI again, and he's going with Sundar Pichai to meetings with Trump. So, you know, it's been a more quiet reversal on his part, but I think it shows the incredible opportunism and any liberal beliefs among some of these people were never that firmly held in the first place.

42:15 You know, in the book, you talk about that initial meeting in 2016, where you had a lot of these tech CEOs organized by Peter Thiel who went to Trump Tower and, you know, kind of kissed the ring with Donald Trump in that moment, but there were still these tensions, right? And now, you know, talking about that more recent meeting that we saw where they're all sitting around the table and, you know, can't say enough praise of Donald Trump, there has been a real big shift there.

42:41 And, you know, for you, does that feel like more like self-interest? Or as you've been saying, I guess, or is it that, you know, these people's politics have just fundamentally shifted over that time to make them much closer to where Donald Trump sits today, even though he's more extreme in this term than the previous one?

42:59 Unfortunately, I think it's a toxic mix of both. Some of these guys, even the supposed kind of centrists or liberals, will kind of say, Oh, we're exhausted by wokeness or kind of pay lips or set. I even see this among, I wrote an article about kind of Muslim attitudes in tech, about Israel and Palestine.

43:15 It was a longer story, but you know, you see people like the CEO of Replit, who speaks out aloud on Gaza, but also complains about woke politics. I mean, there's both. But the other factor that we haven't talked about as much is that the government is now a huge source of contracts and funding for the tech industry.

43:29 I mean, it was always important, but with a huge amount of capital being put into AI and data centers, everyone wants a piece. XAI has already forced its way into a DOD contract. Elon Musk was very upset that open AI and not XAI was going to be part of this big Stargate project, which it's unclear, you know, if that'll actually happen and how it's been advertised.

43:50 But we've seen for companies like Oracle already that being you know in the inner circle of Trump is incredibly lucrative. So during the first Trump administration, they're fighting over this. Jedi contract. It's an acronym for a DOD cloud computing contract. Eventually that was a long lawsuit. And then it got divided up into a few different companies.

44:09 So they all want to seat at the table because if they don't, they might get punished by Trump or the administration in some way, but also they're missing out on billions and billions of dollars worth of contracts. And they all feel that very much right now. And we know that AI spending is floating the economy and that the economy is actually not necessarily in such great shape.

44:28 So no one's willing to really look beyond that kind of self-interest at this point. I don't expect we probably shouldn't expect highly moral stands from corporate America in general, but I certainly don't expect it to happen from the tech industry, despite their sort of utopian past or progressive past.

44:44 Yeah, you know, they they seem to be very clear that those contracts are in their sight, right? Some of them much more directly than others.

44:51 And they don't want to deal with this stuff. And that's what I mean when they like some of these guys, even who talk about kind of liberal or left-wing issues, are tired of wokeness. Like, they don't want to deal with that stuff. They just want to be capitalists. And some of them want to be, you know, want to build stuff for the military or be authoritarians or whatever, but some of them just want to not have to deal with any sort of moral voice on their shoulder or any kind of thing inhibiting their work.

45:14 And and that's the kind of almost exhaustion with politics that they exhibit and why I think they'll they roll over so easily in some cases for Trump.

45:22 It's a really good point. And there are so many different aspects of this that we could dig into because the book is so rich in detail, you know, with everything that we have been seeing for the past few years and many things that people won't be aware of that that occurred, right? And so to start to close off our conversation, there are two final topics that I really wanted to discuss with you that stood out to me from the book.

45:41 And of course, your previous book looked at cryptocurrency and you've done a ton of reporting into that industry. And when you're talking about the people who have been developing these relationships with the Trump administration, of course, the crypto industry is a major one, right? You know, we've really seen this kind of return.

45:57 They've benefited immensely from this relationship. And so I just wonder, you know, have you been surprised to see the degree to which this industry has been able to revive itself and, you know, to really kind of buy the allegiance of Donald Trump as we've seen him, him and the people around him really benefit, you know, and profit off of these tokens.

46:15 So, yeah, what what do you see there?

46:17 Yeah, every week there's something new, I would say, for sort of close watchers of the crypto industry. For those who may not know, in in 2024, the cryptocurrency industry became the biggest donor by industry, you know, more than pharma or or energy or anything else, to though Trump said that if energy CEOs gave him a billion dollars, he would give them whatever he wanted.

46:38 And part of the book is about the corruption and this role that crypto played, and which is an arm of the tech industry basically, and the corruption wrought by crypto. And I do argue that it's different. We've certainly had corruption in politics, we've had a serious problem of money in politics since the citizens united, but crypto has taken things much farther than we might have anticipated, and just in one election cycle.

47:02 And the big difference also is that Trump himself has become the country's leading crypto entrepreneur because his sons really embraced it and convinced him. And I think, of course, he doesn't understand it, but it's free money in his pocket. And his crypto companies have now become bribery vehicles, essentially, and very easy ones.

47:18 Anyone can do it, and it's in the interests of a lot of foreign actors or heads of state to do it. This is not about morality, this is about kind of realpolitik. If you want something from Trump, you should buy $20 million worth of his token. There's just an incredible way in which the wheels have kind of come off of the machine of rule of law, that nothing seems to be enforced anymore.

47:37 And this has happened at so many levels at regulatory level, at the DOJ, at local levels. And I don't think we've ever really seen this kind of merger of electoralism, of one big industry and of the president's own financial interests ever. And the other part that that is kind of stunning about this is that crypto remains kind of a not very profitable industry and certainly not productive.

48:01 It is not an industry that provides a lot of use for people. You know, they have various claims, which we don't need to go through, but they are not big cash flows or things that are being made thanks to the crypto industry. A lot of the financial services we have, while imperfect, are frankly better than what crypto is offering.

48:19 And it's kind of all these shady operators passing around the same bag of cash and fictitious tokens. And what continues to be shocking to me, I guess, is that no one has done anything, that Trump has received billions of dollars of crypto tokens and real money through his administration, through these first six six plus months, and nothing has really happened.

48:38 Even the Democrats aren't fully aligned on this issue. And in fact, they passed the Genius Act, which helps legalize these types of tokens called stable coins here in the US. And of course, Trump is in the stablecoin business and just did a very corrupt deal with the UAE and Binance in his own stable coin.

48:56 So maybe it's because it's suddenly become so broad or so infected the political system. But it is rather amazing to me. And the only reason I think I can really attribute it to it is money. Um, is that you know, I've talked to Democrats in Congress, uh I've reported this, that some of them seem to like the industry for one reason or another.

49:15 I imagine because it helps them. But others have told people I've talked to, again, people in Congress say they've seen what happened to their colleagues. They saw what happened to Katie Porter, Sherrod Brown, or Jamal Jamal Bowman. Um, Sherrod Brown had $40 million spent against him by the crypto industry in Ohio.

49:33 And they're worried about 2026 or whenever they're up for re-election. And that's kind of it. Congress is one place where you maybe would, I mean, how cynical do we need to be? But you would hope that some of these guys could take a stand and say, like, it's not worth it. Um, we need to do something about this.

49:49 But, you know, this is a huge point of contention I have with the Democrats, and I think a huge problem. Like, if we want to get back our country and our politics or even tamp down the corruption at all, we have to think about the role that this industry is playing. And I and what I argue is that it's not like most other industries.

50:07 There are plenty of industries with negative externalities. There are plenty of problems with the oil industry or with pharma or these other big donors. But crypto is not productive and it's much more like payday loans or a predatory financial instrument than it is like anything that's going to empower people.

50:22 So I think we need to look at it accordingly as part of the political process. It it helped re-elect Trump and it's helping to further corrupt our political system and provide bribes for Trump. That is not a normal corporate or political actor to me.

50:35 Yeah, uh really well said. And, you know, I think when you're talking about that money, you can see how how scary it is, right? How it how it distorts democracy, how it distorts accountability, because of the way it can be wielded in order to get these lawmakers in line. But, you know, speaking about money, and this gets to my my final point, I feel like one of the through lines, and one of the things that really stuck out to me as I was reading the book is your analysis of these people themselves, right?

50:58 And how because of the amount of wealth that they hold, because of their position in society, that they fundamentally see the world in a very different way than what most of us would. And, you know, for example, you talk about this moment when they tried to build the city in Northern California, and we're basically just trying to buy off everyone locally and not recognizing that, you know, a community is about relationships, is about is about a broader society.

51:23 And, you know, time and again, I feel like this comes out in your book when you're talking about how these people relate to the wider world. And so I was hoping that you could just talk a bit about that and also talk about what that means for then how we understand them and how we relate to or how we think about, you know, then challenging the power and influence that they have in our society.

51:42 Yeah. Well, one thing we've sort of been circling around is that these are kind of antisocial people who don't they're a little bit misanthropic and don't really like the rabble, you know. Um, as you've written about with Elon Musk, the boring company, at least, and correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't he he talked about that in part because he wanted to escape traffic?

51:57 And this is a guy who never would ride a train, doesn't want to be around other people. And I think this actually plays into some of the stuff I said earlier in our discussion about San Francisco and about their disenchantment. That, you know, there's this idea among the tech elites that progressives somehow killed San Francisco, which is not entirely accurate, but you know, they see a city, their city, suffering from social ills that are very visible.

52:18 And instead of saying we need to do something about homelessness and public drug use and other social problems or inequality, they want to, you know, turn away or be gated up and be away from everyday people. You know, one thing I think about with Mark Andreessen, for example, who's someone who seems very angry, you know, has blocked practically every journalist, including me.

52:37 He has three mansions in Malibu, in addition to one in Aetherton and elsewhere, I'm sure. He's married to a billionaire heiress. And I, and but he seems so angry every day. And sometimes, you know, when he's typing out something about how the country's falling apart, I'm thinking, which mansion was he tweeting this from today?

52:54 You know, like the disconnect is incredible. And it's not just like, oh, you know, there's William Randolph Hearst up in his castle. It's like they're all talking to us and making decisions that affect all of us, including how these technologies are developed and deployed. But they really don't care for people.

53:11 They're not building institutions by and large. Some of them are building, trying to build alternative institutions, but they are not, you know, donating to libraries or universities very much. And these are people who don't seem to think that society can be fixed and don't want to work with the rest of us to fix it.

53:27 And that's why the political program that they're espousing is often very negative and not very positive or proactive. And Teal has even lamented that sometimes that it's very negative, that they don't seem to have solutions. And I think that's a huge problem too, because a lot, a lot of people do have solutions or at least have good plans for how how to work on some of the stuff we've talked about here, but they're not interested in that and and they won't accept that.

53:48 And and that's ultimately very dispiriting that these people are kind of have this kind of anti-human and antisocial sensibility. And it also speaks to how adversarial the relationship ultimately is between them and most of the rest of us in society. Like we are talking about challenging power. You know, I don't think these are people that we're necessarily going to persuade.

54:06 They have to be contested in other ways through public opinion and protesting and voting and and taxation, whatever, whatever else we can do.

54:14 Jacob, it's a fascinating book and gives us such important insights into this moment that we're in and these people who are dominating not just our society, but it feels like the world increasingly. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me about uh this great book.

54:28 A real pleasure. Thank you.

54:31 Jacob Silverman is an independent journalist based in New York and the author of Gilded Rage. Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with a Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Kyla Hewson. Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.

54:47 You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.