Gilded Rage
Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
By Jacob Silverman
Category: Technology & the Future | Reading Duration: 20 min | Rating: 4.1/5 (18 ratings)
About the Book
Gilded Rage (2025) exposes how tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel became radicalized members of the MAGA movement and, more importantly, why. It unravels the strategic machinations of Big Tech’s support for Trump and lays bare just how much both parties stand to gain from what was, to start with, the unlikeliest of alliances.
Who Should Read This?
- Voters who want to know how their political choices are really being shaped
- Tech workers ready to reckon with the industry’s rightwing shift
- Anyone still making sense of the 2024 US election
What’s in it for me? Mapping tech’s rightward turn.
In 2024, the US presidential election presented Americans with a stark choice. The Democrats failed to articulate economic solutions during a brutal cost-of-living crisis. The Republicans, though they nailed the populist messaging, mooted hard-line policies like mass deportations while also promising further tax breaks for the wealthy. Polling was tight.
Pundits struggled to predict a winner. But the Republican candidate Donald Trump clinched a convincing victory. And it was Big Tech that moved the needle. 2024 was the year in which the industry finally flexed its unprecedented influence over government and elections. Elon Musk led the charge most visibly, hosting MAGA rallies and offering cash prizes to voters. Post-inauguration, his unconstitutional appointment to lead DOGE saw the billionaire tear through government institutions with characteristic abandon.
But Musk wasn't flying solo. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Thiel all turned up to the inauguration: a Silicon Valley reunion at the capitol that confirmed that tech, once progressive and liberal, had veered hard to the right. How did this shift happen? In this Blink, we’ll unravel it. It was 2016. Trump was deep into his first presidential campaign and he was not tipped to win.
Chapter 1: Peter Thiel’s turning tide
Already viewed as an outside chance, on October 7, just twenty-seven days before the election, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell: a video of Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, in graphic terms. So graphic, he used the words "grab them by the pussy". The mainstream media saw this as the final straw for his shambolic campaign. Peter Thiel saw something else entirely.
Eight days later, in a very pointed show of confidence, he donated $1. 25 million to Trump's campaign. Thiel’s support for Trump and the MAGA movement went against everything Silicon Valley supposedly stood for. The tech elite had cultivated an image as liberal, rational, opposed to Trumpian chaos. California was a deep blue state. The tech bros largely backed Hillary Clinton.
But Thiel had never followed the rest of Silicon Valley’s lead. In fact, he built his reputation on contrarian bets – like funding Facebook when others passed – that paid off big-time – like funding Facebook when others passed. In 2016, once again, the payoff came quickly. Trump pulled off a shock victory. And on December 14, 2016 fourteen tech execs held a summit with president-elect Trump – each of them hand-selected by Thiel. Thiel and Trump eventually fell out.
Trump asked for a $10 million cash infusion for his 2024 election run. Thiel refused and the relationship soured. But Thiel’s fingerprints were still all over the campaign, especially in Trump’s choice of JD Vance, a former Thiel employee, as running mate. More importantly, Thiel had signaled a turning political tide. And Silicon Valley is a bit like nature. It abhors a vacuum.
When Thiel stepped back, there were plenty of wealthy, vocal men ready to fill his space. One of the wealthiest – and certainly the most vocal? Elon Musk.
Chapter 2: Twitter, X, and the struggle over “free speech”
Back in the days when X was still Twitter, Elon Musk was one of the platform’s most prolific, not to mention provocative, users. He used the platform to hype his electric car company Tesla, air his grievances, and even – according to the SEC, anyway – to manipulate Tesla’s stock price when he tweeted an announcement that he was taking the company private. Musk had his grievances with the platform. He chafed at its policies on content moderation and hate speech policies.
He wanted Twitter to be an absolutist "free speech" zone. In this, he aligned with another prolific Twitter user: Donald Trump. In 2022, seemingly on impulse and in a deal so chaotic he tried backing out before being sued into completion, Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Musk imposed a new world order on the platform. Free speech was in. Anyone who opposed free speech – or, to put it differently, anyone who wanted to keep violent, bigoted content off the platform – was out.
One of these people was Yoel Roth, head of Trust and Safety at Twitter, who advocated against hate speech on the platform. After Musk took over, he dug up Roth's old academic dissertation: a straightforward piece of research about how platforms handle sexual content online. Musk twisted it, suggesting to his 100 million followers that Roth wanted to allow sexualized images of children on the platform. The implication was clear, and deliberate. What’s more, it tapped directly into the alt-right’s obsession with pedophile conspiracies, like Pizzagate, which led armed vigilantes to show up at a Washington pizza restaurant, convinced that children were being held in the basement. Roth was similarly targeted by the alt-right.
He was doxxed and subject to death threats. He resigned. And content moderation, formerly seen as a benign good, was now a hot-button political issue. But the Roth incident was just the beginning. What Musk amplified on the platform now known as X increasingly aligned with the MAGA-sphere and beyond: conspiracy theories about trans people "grooming" children, rants about "woke mind virus," and QAnon-adjacent content about shadowy cabals controlling world events. It was easy enough to read the saga of Musk’s Twitter takeover as one billionaire’s rightward drift.
Of course, it was far more insidious than that. When the world’s richest man mainstreams far-right talking points to 200 million followers, he's not reflecting political realignment. He’s engineering it. As a use case, X shows that tech billionaires like Musk have the influence and infrastructure to shape reality at scale. Ever heard of the venture capitalist David Sacks? Back in 1995, he co-wrote The Diversity Myth with Peter Thiel.
Chapter 3: Tech’s electoral takeover
The book dismissed affirmative action as reverse racism, mocked ethnic studies programs, and infamously argued that many date rape accusations were the result of "belated regret" after consensual encounters. Now, both authors later apologized for that specific claim. But they appeared to stand behind the book’s other arguments: that identity politics were destroying meritocracy, political correctness was tyranny, and universities were indoctrination factories. As a political donor, Sacks had a big enough wallet to try and impose his anti-woke, anti-regulatory views on local government.
For example, in 2019 he wrote enormous checks for Gavin Newsom’s California gubernatorial campaign, because Newsom was business-friendly and tech-friendly. But when pandemic lockdowns disrupted the tech industry and progressive tax policies started threatening profit margins, Sacks pivoted hard. He began funding Republican candidates who promised deregulation and lower taxes. Okay. “Wealthy man tries to influence election results” isn’t exactly a new story. But it gets more sinister.
In 2022, Sacks became the primary donor to a recall campaign against San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. Boudin was a progressive prosecutor whose policies included reducing cash bail, declining to prosecute quality-of-life crimes, and prioritizing rehabilitation over incarceration. Tech executives like Sacks were watching homelessness and property crime rise around their downtown offices. And with a characteristic amount of self-reflection on the role the tech industry may have played in the city’s changing urban dynamics – which is to say: not a lot – they blamed Boudin. Sacks poured hundreds of thousands into attack ads blaming Boudin personally for every smashed car window and retail theft, even though crime data showed violent crime had actually decreased under Boudin, while property crime trends mirrored other major cities. The campaign tapped into fears about urban disorder and channeled them into rage against one elected official.
It worked. Boudin was recalled by 55% of voters. There’s a distinct through-line from The Diversity Myth to the Boudin recall. Per Sacks, the progressive city of San Francisco had been transformed into a lawless hellscape precisely because of its woke priorities.
Political correctness was, indeed, tyranny. More significant than Boudin’s recall was the playbook it established. Like the software engineers they oversaw, tech’s big hitters realized that if they didn’t like an electoral outcome, they could engineer a new one.
Chapter 4: Free love, anarchy, and tech bros
Every year, tens of thousands descend on Nevada's Black Rock Desert for Burning Man, a week-long experiment in radical self-expression where giant art installations tower over the dust, and everything operates on a gift economy. Money's officially banned. Plot twist. This anti-capitalist, anarchic gathering has become a pilgrimage site for Silicon Valley's elite.
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Larry Page have all attended. Why? Burning Man attempts to create a provisional utopia in the Nevada desert. And tech founders are obsessed with utopias. It makes sense. Their industry is based on the premise that technology can solve humanity’s biggest problems.
They see society itself as debuggable. Existing systems and institutions? They’re legacy code, full of inefficiencies. Just look at the pattern: Bitcoin was designed as an exit from central banking and government-controlled currency. DeFi platforms aim to replace Wall Street's regulatory frameworks. Social media promised to bypass traditional journalism's gatekeeping.
Each represents an attempt to route around established systems their founders view as unfit for purpose. It’s this utopian mindset that drives Musk’s plans to colonize Mars and Thiel’s dream of building floating cities beyond the reach of any country’s government. Plenty of tech billionaires aren’t waiting around until mass transit to Mars is an option, either. In 2020, in Honduras, a group of tech investors and libertarian theorists launched Próspera: a private charter city operating under its own legal framework. The city boasted streamlined permitting, minimal labor laws, and an independent court system based on business-friendly precedents from common law jurisdictions worldwide. When Honduras elected a leftist government it moved to abolish the charter city program, arguing it violated national sovereignty.
Próspera struck back with an $11 billion lawsuit. Despite the protests of Hondurans, the city still stands. This is the problem with utopias. Everyone likes the idea of living in paradise. But paradise means different things to different people. To the tech elite, paradise looks like the absence of pesky democratic governance, coupled with unfettered capitalism.
So, kind of like Burning Man, only with lots and lots of money. And this is another place where tech billionaires and the MAGA movement find common cause. The populist right has built its appeal on deep institutional skepticism: on a distrust of government bureaucracy, legacy media, academic elites, and international organizations. For tech founders who've concluded that democracy itself is the obstacle to a perfect world, that worldview looks an awful lot like a permission structure.
Chapter 5: Welcome to the dark side
For years, MAGA meant red. Red hats, red ties, Republican red. Then things took a darker turn. Literally.
Dark MAGA emerged in 2022 as an edgier, more aggressive take on the MAGA movement, one filtered through internet culture and tech bro nihilism. Think black and white imagery and accelerationist memes. Early adopters included the Peter Thiel associate Curtis Yarvin, who advocates for replacing democracy with CEO-style governance, and various crypto entrepreneurs who hoped Trump would legitimate cryptocurrency. And, of course, there was Musk. Elon Musk didn't just endorse Trump. He went all in, appearing at rallies in his black MAGA hat and pouring over $100 million into the campaign through his super PAC.
Yet the real action was happening behind the scenes. While Musk dominated headlines, a quieter Dark MAGA movement had been building through policy work. Specifically, through Project 2025. That’s right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation's 900-page blueprint for reshaping American government. It proposes gutting federal agencies, replacing career civil servants with loyalists, and consolidating executive power. Where’s the tech connection?
It runs through JD Vance. Before becoming Vice President, Vance worked in Silicon Valley venture capital, backed by Peter Thiel. Thiel bankrolled Vance’s Senate campaign. Vance isn't just MAGA. He's the tech industry's man in the White House. Project 2025's deregulatory vision aligns perfectly with libertarian tech movements, especially crypto.
Crypto founders want to create financial systems that operate beyond government control. Project 2025 promises to deliver what crypto advocates want for digital assets across the entire economy: freedom from the SEC, the Fed, and traditional banking regulations. Perhaps that’s why Fairshake, a crypto-funded super PAC, spent over $130 million on the 2024 elections, relentlessly backing pro-crypto candidates. Vance himself is a crypto devotee who's called for eliminating regulatory agencies' power over digital assets. Dark is exactly the word for it.
Chapter 6: What just happened?
In his farewell address to the nation, Joe Biden warned about the looming rise of an American oligarchy, a concentration of wealth and power strong enough to threaten democracy itself. But it wasn’t looming. It had arrived. Big tech had gathered all its resources to secure a Trump presidency: money, influence, and algorithms were all on the Republican candidate’s side.
And when Trump won, he secured the popular vote as well as election victory. Unlike in 2016, he was coming into office with a popular mandate. For Trump personally, the victory meant salvation. The snowballing federal prosecutions and legal investigations against him could all be halted. For Trump’s allies, too, this boded well. If Trump could bend the justice system for himself, he'd bend rules for them too.
Contracts, regulations, and law enforcement all suddenly became negotiable for those in his inner circle. The markets responded decisively. Stock prices for defense contractors, fossil fuel companies, and tech giants surged. The message was clear: the regulatory guardrails were coming off. So what really happened here? How did tech and Trump become so intertwined?
Well, one answer is that as tech and the populist right both gained in influence they found ideological common ground in institutional skepticism, anti-woke sentiment, and libertarian ideology. In short, both movements see established systems as obstacles to be dismantled rather than reformed. Another answer is this. On the day Trump won the 2024 election, the world's ultra-wealthy added an estimated $64 billion to their collective net worth.
Google's old motto was "Don't be evil. " It turns out there's a corollary nobody mentioned. Don’t be evil unless there's a massive payoff.
Final summary
In this Blink to Gilded Rage by Jacob Silverman, you’ve learned that tech’s rightwing shift isn't an ideological accident. It’s a calculated strategy. Tech billionaires see democracy and regulation as obstacles to their utopian visions and profit margins, while the populist right offers the deregulatory, anti-institutional framework they need to operate unconstrained. The result is an American oligarchy where the world's richest men don't just influence policy; they dismantle democracy itself.
Okay, that’s it for this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. See you in the next Blink.
About the Author
Jacob Silverman is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist whose reporting beat is the intersection of technology, politics, and power in Silicon Valley. He is the author of Terms of Service, co-author of Easy Money, and his work has appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications.