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Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar
12/22/25: Silicon Valley's Dark Quest For Techno Fascism
01:03:38
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We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, add staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that. Let's get to the show.
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A
Hey guys, hope everyone is doing well. I have a fantastic interview I want to share with you that I think is extraordinarily important given the way that tech oligarchs have effectively taken over our government and are operating it for their own ends. So you guys know me, Saga, Ryan, Emily, the whole team. We've been covering AI, we've been covering crypto, we've been covering both the near term and the long term effects. So everything from the the immediate electricity price hikes because of the data center buildout, the way our whole economy is apparently now just one big bet on AI. The stripping back of all regulations to rein in or have any sort of democratic check on what these tech oligarchs ultimately want. And then also the more dire longer term consequences of potentially shredding the social contract, eliminating the need for all or most human labor, and ultimately an actual existential threat to humanity itself. So, so my guest is Jacob Silverman. He wrote an incredible book about how this cast of characters has come to effectively stage a coup of our democratic government and are getting everything they want in Trump 2.0. His name is Jacob Silverman. His book is Gilded Rage. Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Elon Musk is in the title and Elon Musk is definitely in the book, but this is really about everyone from Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Mark Andreessen, David Sachs and how they made this, I guess you'd call it a right wing turn. Although their politics in terms of economics have always been very self serving and very libertarian. So in any case, if you have to read one book over the holiday season to understand how we got where we are now with regard to, you know, crypto, with regard to the wild wild west of AI development, just off to the races with that. I really recommend this particular book. And with that being said, let's bring in the guest. All right, guys, so it is my pleasure to be joined today by Jacob Silverman, who is author of a fantastic new book called Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. He's an independent journalist and also has a limited, what, four episode series at the CD CBC said CDC that is called the Making of Musk and focuses on some of the topics in the book, but really hones in on Elon Musk himself. So great to have you, Jacob. Welcome.
- [04:28]
B
Thank you. Glad to be here.
- [04:29]
A
Yeah, of course. So I wanted to start with this image actually from Trump's inauguration, which is when it really set in for me that, oh boy, we have a problem. So this was the, the, some of the billionaires and some of the specifically big tech billionaires who were lined up behind Trump at his inauguration. Not lawmakers, you know, there were some of those, but further back these were the guys that were in the front row. And so I'm curious, as someone who's been writing on the tech world for, about the tech world for quite a, and really had your eye on the ball in terms of what these guys have been up to, I'm curious what you thought when you saw this lineup at Trump's inauguration.
- [05:09]
B
Well, it's, it's clarifying in Some ways to see these guys all line up together. I mean, this is the oligarchy or the new oligarchy out in the open. And I don't think it's necessarily surprising anymore. I mean, I divide some of these tech elites into kind of the opportunistic group and then some into the more dyed in the wool ideological people. But they're all kind of moving in the same direction. Direction and seek the same favors from the Trump administration. And if any of them ever had liberal politics, all wore them pretty thinly. So I think that it's a powerful image and also a good one for the public to see in a way because the people who may have been powerful behind the scenes are now very much to the fore going to the inauguration, going to Trump's Oval Office and presenting him with gold gifts. So I consider it as a possible book cover.
- [06:00]
A
Yeah, it would, it would be good. The book cover you chose is also great. But it is a powerful image. I mean, for me it was really striking because obviously there's been a lot to focus on in Trump 2.0. There was a lot to focus on going into Trump 2.0. But you know, you probably have understood this the whole time, even as there is a lot happening. I feel like the tech takeover is actually the central project of what is going on here. You know, from the beginning you've had executive orders to roll back any Biden era regulation of AI development. Obviously Trump going all in on crypto for his own personal wealth and corrupt purposes. You know, Elon Musk with Doge and the extraordinary and I think criminal acts that occurred there. You know, just, we were just covering on breaking points that Trump just signed a new executive order banning states from regulating AI at all for 10 years. So I wonder how you see this project in Trump 2.0 and how Central you see it as being.
- [07:04]
B
Well, I think there's been a total and in some cases mutually very profitable alignment between the tech industry and MAGA and Trump to a degree that I think a lot of people didn't anticipate. You know, some people have asked me, do you think that they sort of bit off more than they could chew the tech industry or they have any regrets? But so far I think it's, it's working out very well for both sides. I mean, even someone like Elon Musk, there hasn't been a lot of blowback towards him. He still has his government contracts, there's still that mutual dependency, especially through SpaceX and he's getting new contracts through XAI so the kind of high tech corporatism represented by Silicon Valley and their rhetoric that somehow they can introduce efficiency and innovate the future seems to be actually really amenable to the kind of Trump authoritarianism and the things that they want to do. And more specifically, the Trump administration doesn't really have an industrial policy or a way to bring back manufacturing or the other things that they sort of vaguely talk about. So just kind of handing it all over to the tech industry and saying we'll invest in AI data centers is kind of a solution to that and is exactly what the tech industry wants right now.
- [08:17]
A
You write in the book that these guys are always looking for an exit, and right now the exit, and this has been actually years in the making, right now the exit they're looking for is basically from society overall. And I mean, most extreme example of this is Elon Musk with his Mars fantasies. But I'd love for you to elaborate on that concept and explain to people what is it that these guys actually want.
- [08:40]
B
Yeah, exit is a specific word that you'll hear sometimes from people on the tech right, especially people who might style themselves as libertarian, like Peter Thiel, for example, talk about. There's an interview with him from a podcast about how it's increasingly harder to exit, and he specifically cites getting your money out of the US into Switzerland. But it's a broader idea that they are very fed up with mainstream society. They don't want to live with the rest of us. I mean, I talk about this in a more specific sense about San Francisco and the social problems there and how tech elites reacted to it and really kind of gave up on San Francisco as this failed city. But it also influences things like charter cities or these, these initiatives to build these kind of corporate fiefdoms, these little city states. And very relevantly right now, there's one in Honduras on an island called Roatan. The settlement itself is called Prospera. This is funded by Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen, other pretty well known tech elites. It's basically a startup that under a previous right wing government, Honduras, not Joh, I believe, but a different one allied with him, basically purchase a small piece of this island from Honduras and then the subsequent left wing governments challenge that in court and want to take it back quite understandably. And Prosper is suing the government of Honduras for more than the GDP of Honduras. And someone like JOH and his party would probably be much more minimal to preserving that relationship. So like, that is probably the most advanced of these charter cities or city states. But you really see that exit in all kinds of forms. You know, it can be more metaphoric or sort of figurative with like a bureaucratic or legal exit, like let's find out how to move fast and break things and break the law. But it is also a very specific idea that, as you said, extends to everything from, you know, founding new cities to going to Mars.
- [10:31]
A
And I feel like AI is a version of that exit as well. I mean, they, I think, believe. Well, you can tell me what, what do they think that the AI future is going to look like? And what sort of power do they expect to consolidate in their own hands if their company is the one that wins the race to SU Superintelligence?
- [10:50]
B
I think the tech industry has been operating on this assumption, or at least article of faith, that if they keep pouring resources into AI and into basically the current methods, largely focused around LLMs, that superintelligence or AGI or whatever else they might want to call it will somehow emerge. And there has been some admission even from the industry recently that that may not happen. This may not be the proper path for that. What we're more likely to see is some sort of big bubble burst in the next year, perhaps or 18 months as these enormous bets start being called in by perhaps some of the lenders who are putting a lot of money into data centers or as a company like OpenAI can't fulfill its promises and its huge spending promises. So for some reason the tech industry has decided this is the only game in town. And right now, with a lot of money coming in from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds and a lot of support from the Trump administration and from Oracle and Larry Ellison, who is probably the top Trump ally actually in the tech world. In some ways, we're still going to go down this path and they're still going to spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars or as much as they can over the next few years until it kind of all blows up. And maybe Microsoft and Google will be able to vacuum up the pieces. But that is kind of how I see it going. And I think, of course when it does blow up, it's going to affect the rest of us. Even if you don't own tech stocks, it's going to hurt the market, it's going to hurt people's retirement accounts, and there'll be knock on effects through the economy. But this is the kind of alliance and bet that they're willing to make on almost pretty much all our behalfs right now.
- [12:34]
A
Let's Back up a little bit and talk about some of the subject matter of the book, which really tracks kind of how we got to this place. Use Elon Musk as like, you know, a central character to explain this reactionary radicalization and shift. Elon really, you know, sort of comes into his own as this big time entrepreneur with a lot of help from Barack Obama. And they were close, and he was, you know, sort of seen as an. A liberal Democratic type of ally. Then he shifts his politics over the years. Although one of the questions I have for you is like, how much are these guys really changing their politics and how much are they just moving with the winds and exploiting opportunities as they see them? But let's just start with Elon Musk and what his trajectory has been from, you know, close with Barack Obama to Doge and, you know, wielding the chainsaw and being besties with Trump.
- [13:26]
B
Yeah. As we could talk about, I think there are people who, in this group that were very political from the start, but someone like Musk obviously did change. I mean, you can even watch an interview with him on YouTube from 10 years ago or 15 years ago and just see a different disposition and different interests and a different kind of psychological mind state, if you really want to get deep about it. He doesn't seem like the same guy, but specifically he was mostly a kind of centrist liberal. He didn't donate heavily in the 2016 election. He didn't come out strongly for anyone. And I think there are things, both in the broader culture, which I talk about in the book, but also personally to him, that some of which he's acknowledged and I think we have to pay attention to as much as we are sort of armchair psychologizing that change. And for one thing, he started having more conflicts. A lot of this started, of course, during COVID when there were these massive, very rapid upheavals in the culture and politics around social issues like Black Lives Matter, or around quarantine and health care. And some of these issues really were not. And also me too. And some of these issues were not handled well. None of them were really handled well by Silicon Valley elites. And in the specific case of Musk, he really did not like lockdowns. He did not like being not invited to this EV summit at the Biden White House. He's actually made a really big deal about that over the years, and some of his allies have. We should also note that this is someone who, during the first Trump administration, from a Trump advisory board, one of these kind of meaningless advisory boards. But Because Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Treaty. I mean, there was somewhat of an.
- [15:08]
A
Authentic, unfathomable today that we have that reaction.
- [15:11]
B
Yeah, yeah, there was an authentic belief in climate change, at least there. And then you cut to the 2024 cycle, and he basically was doing climate change denial on Twitter Spaces or X Spaces event during the 2024 campaign cycle while talking to Trump. And so you start seeing things like the fight over his factory in California, one of his most important factories, when the government of Alameda county wanted him to at least partially shut it down during the height of COVID And this is when Musk is going on Twitter, which he didn't own yet, and was saying that Covid was going to be gone by the end of April 2020. This was speaking out of delusion, perhaps, but also self interest. And it just kind of goes from there. And what happens also around this time is that his child, Vivian Wilson, she comes out as a trans woman and she changes her name, and in her name change application says, I no longer wish to be associated with my father. Over the years, some reporting has emerged, and she's since sort of come out also as her own media figure, person willing to give interviews to say that this guy bullied her for being queer. And that, I think, really did break something or change something in Musk. He became very openly transphobic after that. It became basically his main cultural issue, cultural lane into MAGA reactionaryism. It's something that he shares, I think, with sort of the broad sweep of MAGA people. Trump is amenable to it. And he's talked about specifically, especially in that interview he did with Jordan Peterson, I think, summer of 2024, he said that the woke mind virus killed my son, referring to his trans daughter. And so the idea of this woke mind virus, which of course seems very silly and is silly in some ways, but is also very real to him, I think did come out of his daughter coming out as trans and the broken relationship there. So that's why I talk about the political issues, of course, the broader trends in the culture. But also some of these guys will go personal on themselves. You see it also, even to a degree with someone like Bill Ackman, who says that Harvard turned his daughter into a communist. I believe she wrote her thesis on something about Marxism. That is actually something, I think, to listen to, to pay attention. These people think, even as sort of.
- [17:32]
A
Silly as it sounds, yeah, they think.
- [17:34]
B
That America's institutions and especially its liberal institutions have turned their kids into lefty trans radicals. Musk has said similar things about LA private schools where Vivian went to school. So that's the mix I'm kind of bringing here to the analysis.
- [17:53]
A
Interesting. So there's, you know, one part economic self interest, there's one part some sort of, you know, personal experience or kind of like, you know, what is experienced as a personal trauma with Musk, you know, how much of his radical. I have a bunch of Musk questions, but sure. How much of his radicalization occurs after he buys Twitter and is, you know, sort of. I mean, Twitter has now become its own radicalization machine because it seemed like he, you know, had already made this shift, of course, by the time he buys Twitter. But it also seems like once he was swimming in the pools of all this like constant great replacement theory Nazi content, that he just goes deeper and deeper and deeper in that direction.
- [18:33]
B
Yeah, I think that that's correct. I think you could see him trending that way. I mean, in tech, you know, he's surrounded by people who are sort of tepid social liberals, you know, billionaire philanthropic types, but mostly also care about the bottom line and their taxes. So it's not like he was ever very steeped in liberal, much less lefty culture or anything like that. And then when he starts just spending more and more time online, as a lot of us did, I mean, one comparison I make is that we all know people in our lives whose politics change, perhaps our own politics changed during COVID to one degree or another. And sometimes it's your friend or your eccentric cousin who becomes kind of a conspiratorial right wing radical. And sometimes it is the richest man in the world because he's online, as you said, in the same radioactive stew that a lot of us are either in or trying to avoid. And you could see it happening. You see who he's interacting with. There's been some studies of this, perhaps not enough, but you know that he's actually talking to Nazis and talking about the Great Replacement Theory or at least amplifying it. So that is one thing in a way that's kind of useful for analyzing what happened here to Musk and some of his peers is that you can watch their posts and watch how their online relationships played out, watch how often he posted and with whom. And we do have, of course, some understanding of that now. And really this is the black pilling of Elon Musk the same way it would be of anyone else on a 4chan like environment. But of course it's very different because of who he is and because he eventually does buy that platform and basically amplify all those tendencies and features we're talking about. Brings back the Nazis tilts Twitter X to be an overtly right wing pro Trump platform, which of course has electoral implications, but it's something that we can see happening right there.
- [20:25]
A
You know, as someone on the left, you know, I always, I can't say maybe always, but for a long time have seen these guys not as being, you know, really liberals or on the left. Obviously, when it came to economics, none of them ever were really. I mean, they're capitalists. Like, that's, that's their thing. They're tech oligarchs. That's who they are. But they wore a lot of social liberalism, which, you know, given how much of our politics focuses on culture war fights, gave them the semblance of being, you know, on the left or, you know, an ally of the Democratic Party, at least for some of them. Some of these guys have always been, you know, Peter Thiel has always been like a very ideological libertarian, at least in. In a certain sense. But how. So how much of it is for. For which of these guys is it that they are just sort of cynically exploiting the fact that, like, they can get what they want out of Trump and he's the guy in power right now? And so they're going to come with their gold bars and they're gonna, you know, Mark Zuckerberg caught on a hot mic saying, like, oh, I hope I said the right number of how much we're investing in the US Et cetera, like, how much of it is just opportunistic. And the next time there's a Democratic president in the White House, they're suddenly going to, you know, oh, my gosh, I was so wrong about all these things. And it turns out Trump was so awful. And, you know, President aoc, we're here to serve you. What can we do for the country under your leadership?
- [21:52]
B
Yeah, I think, you know, I divide them in sort of into a few tranches, and I think the opportunistic ones are more like leaders of Microsoft, Apple, Google, you know, meta. Like Zuckerberg, like you said, he likes to sort of blow with the winds or go where the winds are blowing and reinvent himself a little bit every few years or.
- [22:12]
A
Yeah, that moment when he showed up on Rogan with, like, his, like, chain and his. After he's doing his work, his big heavy T shirts. Oh, my God.
- [22:20]
B
So I'm wearing sort of a heavy sweatshirt, so who am I to talk? But, you know, he is very, and we heard it very well and very vividly on that hot mic when he said to Trump, I don't know what number you want me to say about his data center investment, like how many hundreds of billions of dollars. But I think it's worth also looking at, you have the dyed in the wool ideological conservatives and right wingers and people like Peter Thiel or David Sacks, who was Thiel's friend and writing partner at college at Stanford. And in the early 90s, they wrote this book called the Diversity Myth, which was basically like an anti multiculturalist, what we now call an anti woke screed. And so those people have always been there, and Thiel sometimes has been the lonelier figure, especially during the 2016 election. But I think what we've seen is that, yes, there is a great deal of opportunism of a typical corporate billionaire type, but there's also a lot of people in the Silicon Valley elite who are kind of ready to be activated or ready to be radicalized in their own way, I think, and were fed up with some of this stuff. And even some of them who, you know, some of them went one direction and back again. Like, I think of someone like Doug Leone, who is not a household name necessarily, but he's a partner at Sequoia, the most important VC firm in the Valley. He was a longtime Republican supporter, supported Trump in 2016 after January 6, said Trump had to kind of had to go. Elon Musk said the same thing in more gentle terms and that Trump was a little old and should ride off into the sunset. But then we see these guys come back and Doug Leone became a very vocal Trump supporter in the Valley. So I think that specific cocktail of opportunism and ideology is important with some of these guys. But ultimately it is about class, as you were kind of alluding to. I think like venture capitalist. Capitalist is in the title for a lot of these people that we're talking about. And so they are so primed to pursue authoritarian politics, I think when it's presented to them so easily like that is the world that they swim in in their own way.
- [24:34]
A
Yeah. Couldn't you tease that on a little bit more why it is such a logical fit that, you know, this president who is, you know, at core and just authoritarian like that is, every instinct in his body thinks that it should be basically illegal to criticize him, constantly consolidating power in his own hands and in the executive branch, constantly, you know, flouting the. The Constitution, laws, etc. I mean, that is just like, to the extent he has any ideology, it's just like a lust to consolidate power and be the, you know, the boss. And I guess, I mean, the obvious thing is like, here he is, this CEO, not nearly as successful as like an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but he also has that CEO mindset where it's like, I should have total and complete control. So is that where the, the alignment fits here? Why is the authoritarian bent of this administration such a sort of natural fit for tech oligarchs?
- [25:30]
B
Well, I think for one thing, it shows how thin their support of freedom or individual liberty and free speech are. But more importantly, this is a group of people who deal with fabulous amounts of money and also just increasing amounts. I mean, one change that I chart in the book is that a lot of that money is now coming from dictatorships in the Middle East. I mean, it has been for a couple decades, but for at least, Perhaps the last 10 years, maybe a little bit less. Saudi Arabia has been probably the biggest funder of tech startups, with the UAE and Qatar contributing a lot of money too. So you have people who VCs and tech CEOs who venerate this founder led startup model where the founder is the supreme decision maker and they are getting billions of dollars from people who are also have an authoritarian mode of governance. And this is not just metaphorical. I mean, Ben Horowitz, who is Marc Andreessen's business partner at Andreessen Horowitz major venture capital firm, said at one of these Saudi business summits a few years ago to his Saudi counterpart, he said, you have a founder also, you just call him your highness. And I think at all levels there's this authoritarian mindset and way of doing business that really appeals to them and that they've honed with their Middle Eastern partners. And now Trump is more garish and stupider and more easily bought and stuff, but they don't mind, so they're still willing to work with that. And his authoritarianism hasn't encroached on them yet, hasn't washed up on their shores. Quite the opposite. As we talked about earlier, he is pushing AI because it's good for business or good for his pocket. And that works for them for now. And so if Trump's authoritarianism somehow turns against Silicon Valley or specific people, yeah, then they might have a problem. But right now, you know, these guys think of themselves as kings or dictators of their own little empires. So that works very well with them when they can just, you know, let Trump be Trump.
- [27:38]
A
Can you talk a little bit about how they used, you know, politics in San Francisco to kind of workshop some of their reactionary politics and what that looked like.
- [27:49]
B
So this is really starting around 2019, 2020. Of course, Covid is always a marker here when tech elites really getting fed up vocally, of course, with San Francisco seeing it as kind of this failed city. I mean, you had articles coming out in national magazines about how San Francisco was dead or could ever recover from its doom loop. It's actually recovered in a lot of ways in the last few years, depending on what you're measuring. But that's kind of a different topic, but less a sense of philanthropy or government reform, much less activism could fix this, and more of a sense of, you know, we need massive intervention and we need to kind of take control of the political system. Now you. You have. So what happened was they discovered Recall Politics, really, which is that especially David Sacks, who a lot of us know better now as the. The crypto and AIs are in the White House, who's profiting from that role. But before that, he was kind of another VC in the PayPal mafia world and was always a conservative, but wasn't as active. He was the type of conservative who would donate to Democrats in California, just so he had their ear. And to the point where he started getting involved in Recall politics, though, and being a little more public and vocally radicalized, I would say. And first supporting this campaign to recall a couple members of the San Francisco school board, which had never happened before. This really became a flashpoint over kind of woke politics, identity politics and conservatives in San Francisco and the business world there really came out strong and put a lot of money in this recall election. It worked. And then you had the attempt to recall Gavin Newsom, which did not work. But you had the sort of funny spectacle of David Sachs both funding the election of Newsom and then a year or two later trying to fund his recall. But that's just how big money works now. And then you had the recall of Chesa Boudin, and this was really big because he was the DA in San Francisco. He was the figurehead, kind of the progressive prosecutor movement with people like the LA and San Francisco DAs. And in the minds of San Francisco tech elites, he was responsible for everything there from kind of hate crimes against Asian Americans. During the height of COVID or increase in property crimes, there was actually a decrease in violent crime that was kind of sort of years in the making and has continued beyond him. But Anyway, he was tarred as this person who had left San Franciscans to die or cared more about, cared more about criminals supposedly than crime victims. And the establishment, right made it a point to get rid of this Soros DA as they called him. But also really the tech elites and Sachs was the ideological and at times the monetary leader here, donating millions of dollars. I think at one point something like 60% or more of all money donated to the recall effort of Boudin was from Sachs. And they succeeded and they succeeded also in painting for at least for a while. Maybe it's rolled back a bit, but this progressive prosecutor movement as kind of evil or corrupt. And they were very vocal after that. Sachs went on Tucker Carlson, who thanked him for saving democracy. This was on Fox News. He went on Megyn Kelly and said, this is a model that we plan on.
- [31:18]
A
I didn't realize democracy had been saved.
- [31:19]
B
That'S great news, by a billionaire's cash. And this also, I think was very reflective. And he went to Megyn Kelly and said, we're going to replicate this across the country. And I think this is also very reflective of one other trend you saw in right wing politics, which is that but elections are gonna be contested everywhere. There's gonna be of course, the normal electoral process, there'll be disinformation, there'll be at the ballot box, but also afterwards with election denial. And then recalls, whenever recalls present an opportunity. And that's something that we've seen more nationally. And I think that the money right wing elite now sees as another way to pull on the levers of power as you pour a few million dollars into some local election that isn't used. And that is in a sense what happened in San Francisco with some of these smaller elections. And that provided this model for them to go nationally, both I would say rhetorically and as a matter of strategy.
- [32:19]
A
How much of this was these guys being annoyed by the activism of their employees? Like finding their employees activism and wokeness irritating to them?
- [32:30]
B
Very much so. Again, this is something where we can go to the tape of these guys saying what they actually believe, which is sometimes rather paranoid. Marc Andreessen has said in interviews that he was speaking to the CEO of one of his portfolio companies, someone he had invested in. And the guy said, I think some of these young people from elite computer science schools like Stanford and Carnegie Mellon are getting jobs at our companies just to destroy them from within because they are Marxists and leftists. I mean, you hear anti communist rhetoric from a lot of these guys now from Joe Lonsdale, who is a right wing conservative and kind of a younger member of the PayPal mafia, you could say. And you hear from Marc Andreessen, talks about communism too. It's this weird almost 50s red scare throwback kind of thing, or even an earlier era of anti communist fervor. But so they do both think this, that people are kind of infiltrating their companies and they also are just very fed up with any visible form of activism. And a great example is that Google, you know, the don't be evil company, that they contributed to something called Project Maven, which still exists. It's a big DOD project related to kind of drone imaging and targeting airstrikes. And in 2018, a number of Google employees signed a petition and protested against Google's participation in this. They were doing image processing, essentially kind of AI image processing. And Google dropped the contract, which wasn't that big at the time by Google standards. And you cut to about six years later during protests over Google's work for the IDF and Israel during the ongoing war in Gaza. But this started really in 2024, some of the protests, and Google fired 40 people in one day who participated in a silent protest in an office. That of course didn't disrupt anything. So the attitude has completely changed both within the ostensibly kind of liberal companies. It's really worth watching what's happening at Microsoft. They've had protests over the last few months. I've heard of people trying to emerge as whistleblowers because there's a lot of internal surveillance. There are probably violations of labor laws. I mean, all the big tech companies have insider threat programs, which is a term we started hearing after the Snowden revelations, which was something that was supposed to only exist within the NSA or CIA or something like that. Like they are surveilling their own employees and monitoring their activity very heavily. And then you have the companies that are overtly ideological, like the defense tech companies, Palantir, Onderil, and the people we know associated with them who are saying building weapons for the government is good and Trump is great and we're glad to be here. And that's what the company is about is defending Western civilization. That's the kind of rhetoric you also hear. Now.
- [35:25]
A
Can you talk a little about Alex Carp, who's the CEO of Palantir? We were just watching some clips of him at some conference where he seemed absolutely. Oh, it was with that, what was it? The deal book conference anyway, some like New York finance conference or whatever. And I mean, just seemed like he was on crack effectively and saying insane things, which is kind of par for the course for him. He's another one. He always pretends like, I don't know, you can tell me if this is real or not. But he does the whole shtick of like, I was a liberal Democrat and they've just completely gone crazy. Who is this guy? Where did he come from? What is his deal?
- [35:59]
B
Yeah, he's a really representative figure, I would say, of this type. That's this very jingoistic nationalist tech elite type that you see in venture capital and in the more defense aligned sectors of tech. Now he does play that song of oh, I was a Democrat. I mean, he even claims to have been a Kamala supporter or a Kamala supporter in the last election, which I'm a little dubious about or what does that really mean given also the company he keeps, the work he does.
- [36:30]
A
Is there any evidence that he contributed to her or anything like that?
- [36:33]
B
Not that I know of, but I should go back and check the donations. But anyway, he routinely appears, let's say, very amped in public. And I think also CNBC producers I'm sure love this stuff because the clips get passed around a lot and he'll do things like. Well, some of the clips are perhaps revealing where he talks about how he wants. He talks about short sellers who want to try to short his company stock, how he wants to send their Coke dealers to their door. I mean, I wonder where he got that idea to beat them up. How he wants to drone his enemies. This is the kind of thing he does every few months at the very least. And now that there are also more of these conferences where he can kind of of preen and dance around on stage. He originally comes from this background where he was a PhD student in Philosophy at a German university. I mean, I believe he got his PhD and they refer to him as Dr. Karp sometimes. @ Palantir he supposedly studied under Jurgen Habermas, a great German philosopher and intellectual. I think that relationship has been overblown. But he was this intellectual of sorts of. And somehow he ends up in charge of the startup Palantir, which comes from Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale I mentioned earlier and is really, I mean there is a larger history here, but of kind of the recent defense tech boom, this company could not be more important. I mean it is now a huge company on its own, one of the most favored companies in Trump world, making so much money thanks to the Trump administration. But it exemplifies and in the figure of Karp this new proud, very much like war seeking tech elite who thinks that we need to build weapons and surveil everyone and project power in order to somehow deter aggression against the United States. I mean, they operate according to a very crude logic, which is not anything about diplomacy. It's just about this idea of dominance, as the New York Times calls it, and projecting American power and making people afraid China will be too afraid to attack us. And it's a very juvenile vision, but it's one that he's, he's very willing to dispense at a really rapid.
- [38:47]
A
Rate. Yeah, well, and I think they also exploited like, genuine issues with the existing legacy military industrial complex, which, you know, where they are, like, they are incompetent and there are massive cost overruns. So they're able to make this pitch of like, oh, we'll be cheaper and we're, we'll be more nimble. And that's part of the appeal as.
- [39:07]
B
Well. They're using that Silicon Valley, the traditional kind of Silicon Valley model, which even Doge used. Yeah, which Doge used too, like disruption, bringing efficiency. They talk about how the prime defense contractors, which is this industry term for Boeing and Raytheon and those big ones, are expensive and entrenched. And this is something you hear from some liberal Democrats, more like centrist Democrats or antitrust Democrats even. But they're not, of course, necessarily better and they're producing their own ideological agenda. But it works for them in a way. It's brought them into the corridors of power. It's allowed them to start building up these contracts. One thing I write about in my book is that there was that big meeting of Trump and a lot of tech CEOs in November 2016, right after the election at Trump Tower. And this was one of those resident images where you had a dozen or more top, top tech industry executives meeting with Trump and not quite kissing the ring, but more like, well, we're looking forward to doing business with you and we have to. So here we are. And all before cameras. And Alex Karp was there and Thiel had set up the meeting. Trump was praising Thiel, but at the time, Palantir was a startup that was privately held and not gone public. It was a valuable startup, but not nearly worth as much as like Cisco or Facebook or Google or any of the companies represented there. And now, okay, maybe we'd understand Alex Karp being at the table. But I think if you sort of track that arc from 2016 to now where it's a publicly traded company with a Market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars. It really reflects what this era has become and what that right wing tech and Trump union has.
- [40:46]
A
Wrought. It really seems to me. And you can tell me if this is an accurate analysis based on your reporting that the sort of common thread with all the grievances that these guys had, whether it was the employees daring to speak up about like internal practices or, or contracts that the companies were involved with that they didn't want, whether it was personal things like you know, Elon Musk's daughter being trans, whether it was the Biden era policies around crypto and policies, at least some AI regulation and of course the. The antitrust direction with Jonathan Kanter and Lena Khan, the potential threats to, you know, deal making and this actually having to undergo scrutiny, whether it was the COVID lockdowns. All of this has to do with like, I can't just do whatever I want. You are actually like, there is some minor check on the power and fortune that I can amass and I find that completely unacceptable. And so I'm going to. You know what, what you really sort of make clear when you dive into the politics in San Francisco in particular, but other cities as well is they see this sort of zeitgeist of okay, we can tap into dis. Cultural disaffection, but as a way also to, you know, consolidate this right wing shift and consolidate our own power and really strip back the sort of any sort of regulatory or other hurdles that are getting in our. In our way. I mean, it seems like, just to sort of summarize that, it seems like the common thread here is we want as much power as we can and even slight little pesky annoyances within our own companies or lives or operations are unacceptable and we're going to move heaven and earth to push all of those out of the.
- [42:27]
B
Way. Yeah. Someone recently summarized it to me as they don't want to be governed. And we see that very much in practice where any criticism they cannot tolerate. You see this especially people like Marc Andreessen or Musk himself. Sometimes it is baffling, I think, or striking to most normal people that is this it. Like did Musk really get so angry because he wasn't invited to a Biden EV Summit? And like, yeah, I believe them when they say that because these are people who are of course surrounded by the most. Yes. Of yes men and are not only. Yeah, as you described, they're not only just so rich, but there's a constant. There's a greed and resource accumulation, a drive that is never ending. I mean, Musk has said that he needs to be a trillionaire so that he can get to Mars. I mean, and the ridiculousness of that vision and the very much grounded in the laws of physics reasons why it won't happen is a whole other thing. But this is the pretense of why he supposedly needs as much money as possible. And they are no longer content with whatever might be the conventional checks and balances and regulations of the democratic system. And they certainly saw that, or thought that the Biden administration, in what we would probably agree are some pretty much modest reforms or effective in the forms of Lina Khan, Jonathan Cantor. But overall, they weren't so aggressive. They didn't break up any companies or put anyone in prison besides some obvious crypto criminals. But this is all unacceptable to them and they cannot deal with any of that. So we talked about exit earlier. They're pursuing two lanes at once. Some of them want to exit, but at the same time, they're also willing to control the levers of power because they see a good return on investment by pouring in money or allowing their allies in the crypto industry to do the same. And so that's where I think it ultimately amounts to. It's almost like the Uber model of going into a city and basically breaking local laws about employment and transit applied to politics that, like, we are just going to do what we want because nothing else is tolerable. And we also saw that in the example of Musk. He reopened that factory in Fremont, California, and said, you can arrest me if you want. You know, he did this whole hero thing, like, don't arrest my employees, but, you know, arrest me if you need to. And then a week later, the Alameda county folded and allowed him to basically run the Fremont factory how he.
- [45:00]
A
Wanted. I mean, it's a story. I'm sure if you look at all these guys, I mean, Bezos and Amazon, they also were like, yeah, we just don't really think that sales tax should be a thing for us. I mean, all of them, you know, they see the laws as optional at best. And Elon and SpaceX too. You know, there's obviously, for good reason, a lot of regulations and a lot of checks with the government and inspections that you are supposed to go through before you do massive rocket launches. And at times he was just like, that's going to take too long. We're not doing that. So it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that they don't really see themselves as subject to the laws the way that the rest of us.
- [45:41]
B
Do. Yeah. And I think actually there's one particle in the book, there's this leaked audio from Eric Schmidt, who I talk about in the book as sort of an authoritarian bridge figure because he's nominally Democrat, but I think he's important to sort of precursor to some of these guys. And he basically says to a class of Stanford students, you know, if you want to make your own TikTok clone, just do it with an AI and then get lawyers to clean it up later. Like that's very much the.
- [46:05]
A
Attitude.
- [46:06]
B
Yeah. As a thought process among some of these people. And we see it, you know, manifested everywhere. And from their desire to have their own money to their own islands and city states, they want.
- [46:18]
A
Out. Well, and the irony of them simultaneously like celebrating actually their own law breaking and wearing it as a badge of like, we're disruptors and we're founders and we're leaders and all of this and also at the same time fixating on law and order for, you know, the, the common folk is an incredible irony. I mean, one thing I've always found instructive about Elon Musk is you were, you were talking about his Mars delusions. Like, this is a man, not only does he not think that our laws should apply to him, he doesn't think that the laws of physics apply to him. Like, that's how much he has this sort of like delusions of grandeur and main character.
- [46:58]
B
Syndrome. Yeah. And you talk to people like Adam Becker, an astrophysicist turned journalist, has a good book, that stuff is never going to happen. No one can live on Mars and the worst day on Earth is going to be better than the best day ever on Mars. But this is where they become aristocrats or people who feel entitled to lead or to rule. And I also think this is where the fascism really emerges, is that they think that the future that they were promised has been, hasn't been given to them and that they were promised. You know, the famous line from Teela and Founders Fund is we were promised flying cars. We got 140 characters like there. And this is actually, you know, you see some, some analogs to this in like 1920s futurism and early proto fascism then, which is that like this new industrial age was supposed to give us utopia, was supposed to make everything incredible, and it hasn't. And though they are as rich as could be, they are very impatient and angry and they see the rest of us, or any critics, journalists, the government, anyone who just doesn't understand and praise them as impediments to that great future. And that also you can see that manifesting now with the refusal to put any checks on AI or whether at the state level on policy, Trump's executive order or in the industry, they all talk about how concerns about AI safety are bs or at least among the right wing tech people, they don't want anything to be held back because, yes, it's about greed, but also this idea that if only they could do what they want and pour as much capital into these projects as they want, somehow that better future might arrive. And that's what makes them, I think, or what provides that final push into fascism in a way, because to do that, they align fully with, with the.
- [48:54]
A
State. So let's talk a little bit of specifics with the Trump administration. And, you know, starting from the beginning, like, what was Doge actually about? What did it actually accomplish? Because we know that it didn't. I don't know if they ever really cared about saving money, but it didn't do that. It did effectively defenestrate and destroy significant parts of the government. So is, I mean, was that the primary goal, was the goal to have lots of data that Elon could feed into his LLM? Like, how do you see the project of Doge and how we should think about.
- [49:27]
B
It? Well, we definitely shouldn't think of it as a failure by their standards. You know, it's a huge disaster. It was probably a crime or a number of.
- [49:37]
A
Crimes.
- [49:37]
B
Yeah. And I think that the data side is very important. That's one way in which it was probably a success for Musk and others. I mean, there's been some good reporting, but there's just so much we don't know about what they were doing inside the government. You know, I think it's reasonable to we know that data was taken or exposed in the form of everyone's Social Security information on an unsecure server. This is, we are, of course, surveilled by tech companies all the time. But this is like really important stuff. Someone who used to work at the SEC told me, you know, or texted me earlier this year and said, doge is supposedly coming to the SEC today. They are going to get their hands on so much sensitive, like, private market data, things that the government knows that industry doesn't know, like important big picture or even really granular stuff, things about the American economy or its people or plans for the government. And I think the value of that, especially when it can't be gleaned elsewhere, is huge. And when there is this kind of data war fueling AI. The other thing I wonder about, and this, this is, you know, we don't have a lot to go on here, but was any money taken? Because you had things like DOGE operatives going into core federal payment systems, not just, you know, taking over an agency, but like the systems that feed, that disperse trillions of dollars. And so it's just, you know, these are the kinds of things that under a normal government would be audited in some way. But obviously audits don't matter here. The inspector generals were all fired illegally at the beginning of the Trump administration. So I think it succeeded in creating this disruption. This may be a proof of concept. I mean, at least there are some ideas probably that I think that the tech right has about how to do it better next time. But it showed that you can launch an attack on the administrative state. You could profit from it, you could get out some of the people you don't like and there would be no punishment. A lot of people have had to be brought back by some of these agencies who they've deemed them essential, or things were just collapsing too much. But still there's been, especially in the wholesale example, USAID or some of these other agencies, or the now named Trump Institute of Peace. But I think they got a lot of what they wanted. And I think it's also worth noting that a lot of those DOGE operatives are still kind of scattered throughout government agencies or have government jobs. We don't really know what they're doing. And some of them are still 22 year olds with the resume of cybercriminals who have incredible.
- [52:10]
A
Access. Terrifying talk about the meshing of the work of ICE and this, you know, this tech world. Palantir being the most obvious example, but I don't think by any stretch the only one. You know, why is this mass deportation effort important also for these tech oligarchs, especially the ones focused on surveillance.
- [52:34]
B
Capitalism? They, they've really discovered a love of government contracts. And it's because of their changing politics and of course because of the money there. And the government can be a very reliable client. And it has been, of course, an intrinsic part of the tech industry for many years. But there's such big contracts being handed out now for AI and other purposes and of course for any kind of technical services for expanding government agencies. And that includes Border Patrol and ICE and all the surveillance and data processing that goes with it. So you have companies like Palantir that are very proud to be part of this process that can get Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of contracts. Salesforce has been a vendor for the border patrol for years, I think since at least the first Trump administration maybe. And sometimes this just means we're gonna help you recruit more people through online ad campaigns and ad targeting and stuff like that. I mean, it is important. Important. You're still bringing in bodies for the modern day Gestapo. But there are all kinds of ways in which these companies, some of which seems several degrees removed from actually pulling people off the street. But there are all kinds of ways in which these tech companies can provide services. They're all using Microsoft products, pretty much can provide services to the government and to agencies like ice. So anytime there's a huge growth in one of these agencies, or not just there's huge growth in personnel, but also new technical needs or capabilities, the tech industry is going to be right there because the moral quandaries have all been dispensed with and they've chosen kind of a repression over diplomacy with their own employees who are not all in line with this. And I think that will be a source of rising friction. But for now, there's a lot of money to be made here and they're perfectly happy to do it. So you see it especially on anything related to data management with a company like Palantir or surveillance and, or just running the day to day.
- [54:38]
A
Functions. Yeah. And I think Palestine has been a, you know, a test run or a testing ground for a lot of this tech as well, because I mean, the level of mass surveillance of Palestinians is just without parallel. So you can bring this back home right now with regard to immigrants and then, I mean, you tell me if this is too conspiratorial, Jacob, but, but what these guys want to do with AI and perhaps they're delusional, very possible they're delusional and all just blows up in some bubble. And we never really get beyond, you know, making AI slot videos or whatever. The, the nightmarish hellscape we live in right now is we never get that far beyond that. But what they want to do is replace all human labor effectively. They want to rip up the entire social contract and redraw it from scratch for their own ends. They want to be trillionaires. They want all the power in the world. You know, they want to consolidate more power than has ever been possible to consolidate in human history. That is their goal. And these are not stupid people. So I'm sure they're thinking about when that happens. People are not going to be super happy about that. And so we're going to need massively powerful tools of surveillance and repression to keep the peasants in line so that we can all keep our.
- [55:56]
B
Heads. Yeah, I don't think that's too conspiratorial. I think it matches a lot of things we've heard from these people, or even reporting from people like Douglas Rushkoff, longtime tech writer and critic, who has talked to some billionaires about their sort of doomsday island plans. And do they need to kill the pilots who fly them to their doomsday bunkers so no one knows where they are? Just bonkers stuff. But Larry Ellison has talked about in recent months that we are going to have perfect, always on everywhere AI powered surveillance and everyone will be on their best behavior at all times, from you and me to police officers to anyone else. Do they believe it? I don't know, but they act like they do. And in some ways, the nightmare scenario is not necessarily that we get kind of a perfect AI dystopia and that no one is working. We're all sort of of turned into goo for the billionaires. But it's in a way an acceleration of what we have now, I think, which is that we get this really imperfect version where, yeah, we do have the economic collapse, but it also is taking a lot of jobs and also is supercharging repression on a corporate level, of course, on a government, federal level. But it is also at the same time deeply dysfunctional. All the AI will still be hallucinating. Like it won't even be sort of the perfect dystopia. It's just going to be a mess. But it will enable forces of repression and fascism. And I think you're exactly right that they've made a choice. You can sort of embrace reform, you can try to make society safe for capitalism or their vision of runaway capitalism, or you can choose some kind of repression. And I think they have essentially chosen the.
- [57:45]
A
Latter. My last question for you, Jacob, is, you know, is. Is it sort of too far? Like, if you did have some, you know, future president come into office who wants to check these guys, wants to rein in their power, what would that look like? You know, do some of these guys need to go to prison? In my opinion, yes. Do they have any thought in their head about potential future consequences from, you know, an administration that has a different ideological valence? What is it possible at this point to rein these guys back in and get them under.
- [58:22]
B
Control? Well, I think that they to pull out one part. I think they do fear sort of democrats. And I mean, I Don't know to what degree now, but we heard this a lot before the election. Like Musk saying, if she wins, I'm F'd, you know, I'm going to prison. Will my kids be able to visit me? Like. Like they were breaking a lot of laws. They're probably breaking more now. I mean, and they also face just a lot of regulatory and civil litigation, Musk especially. That was making their lives pretty difficult. And I don't think their sense of abiding by the law has gotten any better. The problem is we haven't talked a lot about Democrats here. I assure people that in my book, I write a lot about how they've contributed to this problem. And I think the Democratic Party is so fractured on some of the core questions here of. Of tech power. Is Silicon Valley an adversary? I think very few people in the Democratic Party actually see the industry or its leadership as an adversary. They see it as somewhere that.
- [59:18]
A
Base does elected leaders does not matter. And I think this will probably be a litmus test in 2028, if I had to.
- [59:25]
B
Guess. Yeah. And I think the question is, do you want to prosecute some of these people, break up the companies, do a wealth tax. You don't have to get too specific or means tested or wonkish or whatever. It's those few things, besides also getting big money out of politics. I mean, there's a lot of wish casting here, but do you not want to build more data centers and instead invest in healthcare and other public goods? We are actually seeing right now, as you said, you're referring to a litmus test we're seeing in. I was in D.C. recently. There's some sort of, of. I think it was a makeup election, but I saw some ads on TV about data centers and the Democrat advertising himself as against data center construction. Not totally frothing of the mouth, but. But mostly, you know, against it from a public interest.
- [60:11]
A
Standpoint. So, like, yeah, the Georgia elections, the utility commission board, or whatever that thing is called, that was probably the clearest cut data center backlash and directly because of the way that electricity prices have been impacted. But yeah, you can see the politics here really on a cross partisan bas becoming pretty.
- [60:31]
B
Potent. Yeah, I think so. And people don't like that in their communities. And there's sort of a local aspect to this where there are Republicans who hear their constituents complain about rising electricity prices or that the water's going away, and they don't like that either. But this does connect directly to the authoritarian politics of the tech industry where they are Coming into like Texas or Georgia or Virginia and promising these like 20 or $50 billion projects that are not going to produce jobs in the long term and are just going to make most people's lives worse. So, so that kind of grassroots backlash as you described is here and it's coming or intensifying and there is a real opportunity for the Democrats to tap it. The problem is, of course, the Democrats, but also the Trump administration has kind of eroded or just kicked away so many important load bearing institutions that the rule of law is really gone and a lot of criminals have been just straight up released from prison that there's so much makeup work to do in a way before we talk about moving forward or even just tamping down the power of these guys. I mean, I hope those things can be done at once. I hope there are prosecutions and breakup of companies and wealth taxes, big sweeping gestures that say there are other ways of relating to these people. You don't have to surrender power to.
- [61:48]
A
Them. Yeah, it's just really reasserting a small d Democratic approach, you know, that we're, we're not going to just bow to this tech feudalism and you know, surrender all of our autonomy, even on issues like, you know, local land usage and what we have in our backyards. You know, and one, I'm fully NIMBY when it comes to data centers and they're trying to build two in my, in my little rural area here. And I've seen that there's been, you know, a backlash to that, which is partly, you know, from the, the concern, it's the conservative area I live in. You know, a lot of the concerns are that, are that sort of nimby, like we want to keep the rural character of the community and we don't want this big thing built here from, you know, Amazon and whoever else is coming.
- [62:32]
B
In. Yeah. And you know, it doesn't really add a lot to the landscape. You're not like, you know, you're not really building a factory where even where a lot of people are working. And, and I think that speaks to the idea of like what are we getting for all this? That we've, that all the political power and the money that we've delegated to these guys. And I think that actually provides almost a little note of optimism, which is that they are not that popular. And when they're as people, as individuals, they're not the most charismatic personalities. A lot of their policies aren't and their business priorities aren't necessarily popular and seem to be growing less so. So that's where I think there is kind of room for optimism for the future or just political focus and strategy. Is that that, like when you explain this stuff to folks or when people see that they're just mostly getting AI slop and higher energy prices and you know, jerks on X who think that they should rule everything for all of this, it's not worth it. And, you know, hopefully the Democrats can tap some of those more kind of grassroots candidates who get.
- [63:34]
A
That. I lied. I do have one more question for you, which is J.D. vance? Like, is he just. I know Thiel was involved. Elon Musk was influential in getting him on the ticket. Is he just like a puppet for these guys effectively? Is that how you see.
- [63:47]
B
Him? I think so. I think he's an important bridge figure for the kind of new right, the religious right, because as he's taken on multiple identities, that was one of them. But the VCs really like him. They pushed hard, of course, to have him be the VP in front of Doug Burgum. Apparently there was a dinner at David Sacks's house during the 2024 campaign and Bergam was kind of hoping he was a dark horse VP candidate. And all the tech guys there said, you gotta choose JD and he is Thiel's guy and he's a former vc. And so I don't think they see much daylight between their views. And he may not have the question, I think, is does he have the unifying or rough charisma of Trump to unify maga? But there may be ability there for something to fall apart. But the tech guys, I think would be perfectly happy unless someone surprising emerges. You know, they road tested Desantis and Ramaswamy and a couple other folks, but I think JD is really their guy. I mean, some of them have money invested in him. Teal put money into his. Into JD Vance's venture capital.
- [64:56]
A
Firm. Yeah, that reminds me, there are some great scenes there with Vivek Ramaswamy and your firsthand experience with him in the book that people definitely need to check out. The book, guys, is Gilded Rage. Elon Musk and the Radio Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Jacob Silverman, thank you so much. Fascinating look at these extraordinarily powerful and malevolent, frankly.
- [65:17]
B
Characters. Well, thank you so thanks so much for your.
- [65:20]
A
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A
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