Gilded Rage by Jacob Silverman traces how Big Tech shifted to the right in in the past decade, including how Elon Musk embraced Donald Trump and helped him win a second presidential term. Martin C. W. Walker finds the book a sharp, thorough and compelling account of how libertarian Big Tech billionaires, culture‑war grievances and crypto ambition converged to reshape US politics, with consequences still unfolding.

Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Jacob Silverman. Bloomsbury Continuum. 2025.

Trump’s U-turn on Big Tech 

In Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, American journalist Jacob Silverman pieces together the story of how a disparate group of tech billionaires came together to change history. Just a few years ago, Donald Trump and the CEOs of “Big Tech” seemed stuck in a hate-hate relationship. Trump talked of breaking up the Big Tech monopolies and raged against being “de-platformed” by social media firms. The generally Democrat-leaning CEOs of Silicon Valley showed little fondness for the former President in return. Their companies were leading lights in movements such as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and ESG (Environment, Social and Governance). Many of their even more radical staff were vocal proponents of Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ rights. Even the minority of Tech billionaires with right-wing libertarian leanings such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk seemed highly ambivalent about Trump. Suddenly, in the summer of 2024, everything changed. 

The book describes how, after a failed assassination attempt, it started to look as though Trump would win the presidential election. Two days later, Trump selected JD Vance, a protégé of Thiel as his running mate who had previously described Trump as “America’s Hitler”. Other members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia” (founders of the international payments company) lined up behind Vance, including Elon Musk and David Sacks. Money started to pour into the Trump campaign including from the disreputable cousin of Big Tech, Big Crypto. Other parts of Silicon Valley started to support Trump or become much quieter in their liberalism. At the time of writing, Trump now loves Big Tech, particularly if related to AI or Cryptocurrencies, “woke” is severely out of fashion in Silicon Valley and even former liberal Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg is advocating more “Masculine Energy”. 

Peter Thiel and the libertarian influence 

The story is far from being a linear one of smart tech folk executing a clever plan. The philosopher-king of radical big tech is clearly Thiel, a long-time libertarian and democracy sceptic. Thiel wrote books and papers about his beliefs and spent years supporting various Republican politicians. It was Thiel, who in December 2016, first attempted to bring together Donald Trump and leaders of Big Tech. That first attempt had little impact, according to Silverman. Even Musk continued to describe himself as moderate and focused his efforts on Tesla, whose electric vehicles were then favoured by environmentally conscious liberals. 

Resentment against the established elite was a key area of common ground with Donald Trump. That resentment combined with Libertarian fervour to do things outside the normal rules of the state.

The “Rage” of the title came to the boil in early 2020s, the era of COVID-19, lockdowns, Black Lives Matter and online culture wars. The various personalities described had a common resentment towards the “oligarchic elite ruling class”. In spite of their great wealth, many of them felt like outsiders. According to Silverman, they either believed they deserved political power commensurate to their wealth or that they should not be constrained by politicians and laws. Two to three years, they began to make a more determined effort to influence the political system, starting in California and then spreading to other states. The feeling of resentment against the established elite was a key area of common ground with Donald Trump. That resentment combined with Libertarian fervour to do things outside the normal rules of the state. The most prominent of these was support for cryptocurrencies and the efforts of that industry to build a parallel financial system beyond government control. 

Musk’s Twitter storm and the crypto bubble 

The “rage” apparently afflicted Musk, whose self-proclaimed moderation quickly disappeared in a tirade of angrier and stranger tweets, many focused on fighting what he called the “woke mind virus”. Silverman details Musk’s obsession with and eventual purchase of Twitter and its ruthless transformation into X. Though Musk claimed he was driven by a desire to protect freedom of speech, the book describes the involvement of investors who are not obvious promoters of free speech. Twitter, now X, eventually became a platform to support Trump’s re-election campaign. 

The irony Silverman lays out regarding Musk’s shift to the radical right was how it conflicted with the commercial reality of his businesses. Musk has grown rich from government subsidies and contracts. His rocket company, SpaceX, literally got off the ground due to large contracts with NASA, and Tesla only achieved profitability due to large subsidies to electric vehicles. Yet Trump opposed electric vehicles and wanted Musk to lead large-scale cuts in public spending. Other parts of Big Tech, despite initial distrust of the state and particularly the military and security sectors, had become enthusiastic suppliers. Notable among these were Google and various parts of Thiel’s investment portfolio. 

The failure of the authorities to prosecute Bankman-Fried for alleged campaign finance violations made further attempts to buy politicians seem free of legal consequences.

It took a convicted fraudster to demonstrate how to really convert money (not his own) into power. Sam Bankman-Fried, the then-CEO of crypto exchange FTX demonstrated that all it took to win a high degree of influence in the Democratic Party was throwing vast amounts of money at the right people. Silverman points to the failure of the authorities to prosecute Bankman-Fried for alleged campaign finance violations. This made further attempts to buy politicians seem free of legal consequences. Trump transformed from a critic to a passionate advocate of crypto, especially when crypto money poured into his re-election campaign and the Trump family made huge profits from their own crypto ventures. 

What motivates billionaires to support Trump? 

This is not the first book about the rightwards ideological turn by parts of the Silicon Valley elite, and it will not be last. In a 1996 essay called “CyberSelfish,” Paulina Borsook described the strength or Libertarian belief in Silicon Valley, which later evolved into a book. Tech columnist Michael S. Malone wrote about the potential rise of “Technofascism” in 1998. Books about key libertarian believers in the tech industry like Thiel, Musk and Sacks abound. 

It could be argued that the tech billionaires have as much right to their political opinions as anyone else – Silverman writes from a left/liberal perspective, and makes no attempt to hide that leaning. Why should Silicon Valley be inclined towards liberal values? In 2018 several Google employees launched a class action against Google claiming “workplace bias against women and men with views perceived as conservative; men; and Caucasian/Asian people who work at Google”. This followed the dismissal of programmer James Damore for writing an essay attacking what he described as Google’s “Ideological Echo Chamber”. 

Across that group of tech billionaires, there are many whose support of Trump seems to come from fear or greed rather than ideology.  

But despite his opposing political views, the book’s great strength is Silverman’s objective, thorough account of how a politically incoherent coalition came together in an amazingly short period of time to win Trump’s re-election. That incoherence rapidly came to a head: the Musk-Trump bromance only lasted six months. The economic policies of the second Trump administration and the financial interests of Big Tech seem to regularly go out of alignment. Even across that group of billionaires, there are many whose support of Trump seems to come from fear or greed rather than ideology.

Like all good books, Gilded Rage answers some questions but leaves the reader pondering over others. Are regular complaints about the polarisation of politics and society simply a reflection of black-and-white thinking endemic to much of the tech industry? (Perhaps perceived “technofascism“ and “the woke mind virus” are just two sides of the same coin.) Has the huge concentration of power and wealth in the tech industry destroyed nuance? Has the toxic interaction of money and power always been like this, and the tolerance for bad behaviour, as long as it’s “authentic”, merely made it more visible? Have we entered a new era of unaccountable oligarchs, like those who accumulated immense wealth and power after the fall of the Soviet Union? And what might be the most uncomfortable question: what comes next?

Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Main image: Molly Riley for The White House on Flickr.

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