Gilded Rage – Jacob Silverman

[Bloomsbury; 2025]

The first ten months of the second Donald Trump administration have been tumultuous for anyone watching news out of Washington, DC. For a select few, they’ve been nothing but good news: the tech and Artificial Intelligence sectors have been making money hand over fist. This has been by design: this US administration has been both staffed with and funded by Silicon Valley billionaires and their fans. From Elon Musk, who ran the Department of Government Efficiency, debuting its slash-and-burn approach, to Oracle CEO Sam Altman, who worked with the government on AI policy, to Peter Thiel, with his close ties with Vice President JD Vance, far-right billionaires have closer access to the most powerful government in the world than ever before.

In his new book, journalist and podcaster Jacob Silverman traces the roots of this rightward swing in Silicon Valley politics, how several prominent billionaires have pushed the US into dangerous new territory. Gilded Rage is a well-researched, compelling read about how Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, and a handful of others have changed the American body politic for the worse.

Silverman has written for the New York Times, Slate, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He also wrote and hosted a CBC podcast called The Naked Emperor about the rise and fall of FTX and crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried. With years of experience reporting financial news, with a particular focus on cryptocurrencies, he’s well versed to write a book about the intersections of big tech and libertarian politics.

The book moves around the US, stopping in New York City, Miami, and Washington DC, but is largely set in and around San Francisco, where tech oligarchs hone their plans for the country. Silverman goes deep on some of these plans, from recall elections to campaigns against homelessness.

One of the more fascinating investigations in Gilded Rage is Silverman’s dive into California Forever. In 2023, a group of companies started buying property in and around Solano County, California. Often paying well over market value, this associated group soon owned some 60,000 acres of land. Silverman reports on the people behind these purchases—including tech billionaires like Marc Andreessen—and the project’s intent to start a community where both the land and the financing needed to buy the land are owned by the same corporation. From anonymous shell companies headquartered in strip malls to an ugly lawsuit against the county’s population, he chronicles how this group of billionaires wants to reform society in their own image, often by dangling investment to cash-starved countries in Central America. Writes Silverman:

In an effort to attract capital, countries around the world ceded aspects of their sovereignty to foreign corporations, establishing tax-free special economic zones, allowing oil companies to maintain private militaries, privatizing public resources like water and electricity grids, overlooking bribery and money laundering, or affording other special rights to companies that would normally be the province of the state.

And as Silverman reports, this process has already gone through test runs outside of North America. For example, there are Zones for Employment and Economic Development, or ZEDE. These are parcels in Honduras where billionaires are able to buy land and create their own set of laws inside its borders. “But ZEDE operators could do a lot in their corporate city-states,” writes Silverman, “for example, conducting medical experiments that would be illegal in the United States. As biotech investing, biohacking, transhumanism, and longevity research took off in Silicon Valley, that kind of experimental freedom was enticing.” But this zone was also a city-state without taxes and “where people like Thiel… would get to play dictator.”

Many of these billionaires are fans of neo-feudalist writer and far-right political commentator Curtis Yarvin, who calls for American democracy to be replaced by a system where the state is run by a king-like CEO figure. He’s a part of the so-called Dark Enlightenment, a loosely affiliated group of writers who have the ear of political figures like Vance and UK politician Nigel Farage, not to mention billionaires like Musk and Thiel. Yarvin’s ideas, bolstered by money and political access, have moved from the fringe to the right-wing mainstream.

But most chilling is this group’s ties to the current U.S. administration. Musk was both a major fundraiser and a public cheerleader for Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign. But others like Thiel, Altman, and Andreessen were donating and running interference: their attacks on Joe Biden and constant refrains about the US sinking into “cultural Marxism” helped sway supporters to Trump. And, as Silverman explains, Trump’s victory left one of their own just a heartbeat away from the Presidency: former venture capitalist and Thiel associate JD Vance. “When Vance was not directly working for Thiel,” writes Silverman, “his ventures were bankrolled by him.” Silverman charts Vance’s rise under Thiel and his political evolution from law school to Never-Trump Republican to MAGA loyalist. Now, as questions about Trump’s health are circulating on social media, Vance is potentially in a position of immense power.

Gilded Rage is not exactly a downer of a book, but it is a sobering one. Silverman explains the ways the US’s richest people have moved to the political right and the myriad ways they are trying to drag the country with them.

At times, the chapters feel like vignettes—the California Forever one feels self contained—and at times the narrative feels a little too focused on Twitter and Elon Musk, as opposed to similar right-wing moves by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Occasionally, it helps to have some background knowledge about libertarian politics to fill in the gaps when Silverman mentions writers like Yarvin who have influenced these billionaires. Still, the book moves at a quick pace and successfully shows how a handful of people have had such an outsized effect on the US and the world. Anyone who is looking to learn just how and why the country’s discourse has shifted in such dramatic ways in the last decade will find a lot here to chew on.

Roz Milner is a freelance writer and critic who lives just north of Toronto. Her writing has appeared in the Toronto Star, Lambda Literary, PRISM International, Broken Pencil, and elsewhere. She is currently working on a book of short fiction.