US tech oligarchs are very very rich and many of them are also very angry at the woke mind virus at regulation at democracy and they're using their extraordinary wealth and power to try to make the world reflect their vision.

I sat down with Jacob Silverman, author of the new book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, and host of the CBC podcast, The Making of Elon Musk, to find out how men like Elon Musk and Peter Theel are combining corporate and government power in pursuit of their goals.

I want to talk early history of Silicon Valley because I think not a lot of people know that closely close ties to the cold war the national security state when we talk about sort of the early funding for startups those were coming from the department of defense NASA I want to get a better understanding how did Silicon Valley later gain this sort of reputation uh as a bastion of progressive political ideas.

Sure. Yeah. In many ways, the Silicon Valley of today is actually returning to its early roots. But uh in the 70s and 80s, especially coming out of the 60s and 70s counterculture, the tech industry was seen as kind of a new frontier and a new area of almost countercultural experimentation. A lot of people, a lot of hippies who were involved in the hippie movement in San Francisco ended up uh getting learning how to program or getting involved in tech.

And it was certainly seen as an industry that was much more liberal and progressive in its attitudes, open to kind of uh new forms of social experimentation. And it wasn't seen and I think in inside as well the industry, it wasn't seen as close to the government or supporting the prerogatives of say the national security state or US foreign policy. And we had that general attitude or culture for a little while certainly in the 80s and 90s. I I would say that was kind of the prevailing attitude in tech.

Um, but things really started to change after 9/11 and then have kind of intensified in recent years, I would say, until we're almost more back to the relationship that tech had in in the 50s and 60s when it was being directly funded by the defense department.

Well, uh, it depends what area you're talking about, but there's someone like, uh, Stuart Brand who was part of the whole earth catalog, which became sort [clears throat] of he was less a tech, he was more of sort of a a figure on the tech scene rather than a tech executive or CEO. But um he there were other people who kind of came out of that 60s and 70s counterculture who saw um computers and even and the early internet as these opportunities for exploration of the mind and the self and communicating with other people forming that global village that Marshall McLuhan talked about.

And then more recently, you had someone like Steve Jobs who would talk who spoke uh in public about how dropping acid was one of the most informative experiences of his life. And he recommended it to students at a at a public lecture, I believe. Uh and that was really, you know, about that that change in perception that some people thought that psych and some people still think that psychedelics can bring you. But it was a it was kind of a different version of the countercultural and of drug experimentation than even what you hear now from tech people who go to Burning Man, for example.

Right. All right. So, let's uh fast forward here to uh 2024, the presidential election. According to the Washington Post, 80% of San Francisco residents and about 70% of residents in the counties near Silicon Valley vote for Kla Harris. So, explain to me what do you mean by radicalization and sort of who are the poster boys? And I say poster boys because incidentally they are all men.

They are all men. I mean there are a few prominent women in tech who are Trump supporters like Saffric Catz uh who was the co-CEO of Oracle or Genie Remedi from IBM. But you know this we are talking about and this book is a little bit of a group biography of 20 to 30 men almost all white men who uh are millionaires and billionaires. They are uh CEOs of tech companies. they are venture capitalists and of course at the top of this heap is Elon Musk but there's also a lot of his friends and colleagues people from the greater PayPal mafia as it's been called.

And of course at the top of this heap is Elon Musk but there's also a lot of his friends and colleagues people from the greater PayPal mafia as it's been called. Peter Teal has long been probably the most important Silicon Valley conservative.

And I think what changed really in the last few years leading up to the 2024 election was that you had some traditional tech conservatives like Peter Teal or someone like David Saxs or some lesserk known names like Doug Leon who's a major venture capitalist but then you had a lot of their friends and colleagues people of a similar social status and economic status who who spent time with the with them who really did start getting radicalized against the Democrats and Republican party.

And some of that I think did really start in San Francisco where they started to see San Francisco as a failed city and they blamed it on liberals and on Democrats and they saw they feared that what was happening in San Francisco some of its its social issues the homelessness the open air drug use they essentially decided that it couldn't be fixed and not only that it was spreading to other cities and that I think explains a lot of the transformation.

And then you also had um some of these CEOs people like Mark Andre who's a major venture capitalist starting to think that um the social justice movements of the time like Black Lives Matter or more recently some of the protests against uh Israeli military activity in Gaza um that they just found those movements unacceptable.

Um you hear from senior people in tech but publicly especially that um they think that this is wokeness g run a muck or this is something that's gone too far. So whatever vision of kind of liberal attitudes or even social justice that some of these CEOs and venture capitalists may have tolerated before certainly during the co era that started changing to a degree that they they either didn't recognize or weren't willing to tolerate anymore.

I want to talk a little bit more about uh Peter Peter Teal. um a little bit different when you compare him to someone like Elon Musk who you put on on your book's title, you know, a little bit more enthusiastic, someone who's called himself, you know, at the time, at one time a halfdemocrat, half Republican, but when you look at Peter Teal has always solidly been conservative. Help me understand sort of his influence on the radicalization of Silicon Valley. He is sort of the the presiding godfather of this movement, I would say. I mean, he is a political animal from from the beginning. And someone like Elon Musk, I would argue, wasn't before.

But, uh, Teal has been a hardcore conservative/ libertarian since he was in college at Stanford. He founded a a conservative publication called the Stanford Review. He's been hiring people from from that magazine ever since for his companies. And um, he was also a writer for a while and he co-wrote a book called Thy Diversity Myth, which was basically today we would call it kind of like an anti-woke sort of rabel rousing sort of book. At the time, the the big bogeyman was multiculturalism, which and political correctness, which in the early 90s kind of meant the same thing as what we might talk about wokeness or progressive politics now.

So, that has always been something important to Teal. Max Chaffkin, who wrote a biography of Peter Teal, has said that the PayPal Mafia Network, which we know as sort of the group of people who got really rich at PayPal and funded all these companies afterwards, started more as a political network, uh, Chaffkin has said, rather than a business one. Yes, it came out of PayPal, but these were people who were very some of them were very interested in politics, including Teal. And Teal was the Silicon Valley figure during the 2016 election who was kind of helping broker those connections between Silicon Valley and MAGA and the Trump campaign.

Well, let's talk a little bit about that time uh just shortly after uh Trump's first term. Uh I want to get a better sense of what's happening there because at the end of that and the beginning of his second term, Silicon Valley and the executives have kind of moved further to the right. What was happening between that administration, Biden administration, uh that kind of pushed everything that way?

Well, Teal himself would say that um the the Trump camp the Trump administration was a little too chaotic for him. And I think there was some dissatisfaction among people in tech or certainly some of Trump's conservative supporters that they didn't get done the things that they wanted to get done. At the same time during the Biden administration there this is when COVID was raging. This is when some of these uh entrepreneurs are coming into more conflicts with the state than they were used to.

I would still argue that these weren't necessarily major conflicts by most standards, but for example, like some of the the shutdowns or quarantine uh methods during COVID, Elon Musk especially was very upset about having to shut down his main factory in Fremont, California, his main Tesla factory.

And that was something he bowed with local authorities about. He eventually said, "You know what? I'm going to open it anyway. If you need to arrest someone, let it be me." In his sort of typical overdramatic style. Um but there were other instances like Mark Andre, major venture capitalist, major political player now. He said that the red line for him was when the Biden administration proposed attacks on unrealized capital gains.

It was really only over a very high amount of money, millions and millions of dollars. But this meant that if you were say a venture capitalist who invests in a startup, it goes public, the stock booms, and say you you have a hundred hund00 million in paper gains, you might you maybe have to pay some taxes on it. Now, it's worth noting this was not implemented under the B administration. It was just proposed, right?

But that was something that Andre on his own podcast said was a red line and he really didn't like. So, um, for some of these different people, they were different things, but they they saw themselves now as being a little more oppressed by the powers that be. Um, they would also complain about Lena Khan, who was probably Biden's most effective appointee. She was the head of the Federal Trade Commission. She's the person who would try to protect consumers, who would prevent some mergers from happening or work to break up some companies.

I think from a certain point of view, she actually helped um increase competition in the tech industry and in the business world. But the the tech industry at the time had sort of had enough with regulation with anyone standing in their way. Uh there was kind of this bargain that they had made with with the powers that be that you know we pay our taxes, we'll pay some we'll donate a little bit to charity and you let us do our thing.

Uh I how much of this radicalization of US politics can be traced back to 2010 because something big happens in 2010 Supreme Court citizens united decision. Help us understand how that kind of opens up this door for tech elites to sort of some would say meddal in in some of the politics here.

So now we live in the era in the US of unlimited spending for for political campaigns.

Sure. I mean, the last election must donate more than or donated is a funny term, but put forward more than $200 million, probably closer to 300. The crypto industry, who I talk a lot about in my book, um became the biggest donor by industry, they donated about $200 million mostly to uh one political action committee, one of these super PACs called Fair Shake.

And I I think in the especially in the last election, the the tech industry, you know, they when they go get into something, sometimes they go all the way, you know, and they're used to raising huge amounts of money. So to put 200 or $400 million towards a political goal for them makes a kind of sense. And, you know, we had seen since 2010 a lot of money flooding into politics and these huge super PACs being created, but we had never really seen one industry or really tech and crypto together. they're they're kind of one and the same uh put forward so much money at the same time and that I think was really novel.

And at the same time you also had individual tech leaders most notably Elon Musk basically implant themselves within the Trump campaign and Musk himself starting to be on stage a lot and at Trump's side and that kind of behavior was also something we hadn't really seen before. How much of this is these entrepreneurs and tech elites uh personal beliefs versus running a business being being a a a sound businessman?

I think there's a mix for some of them. It's certainly opportunistic. Like if you look at Google, Google didn't really publicly support Trump during the campaign, but I think they issued him some kind of congratulations and um its its ex top executives were uh at the at the inauguration. They visited Trump at the White House.

In the case of something like Google, they're afraid of being broken up because they're going through an antitrust lawsuit. Uh, and I think some of the other big tech companies have a similar kind of posture where, you know, they are opportunistic and looking out for self-interest. Some of them took some political stances early in the first Trump campaign, including Google. You had Sergey Brin showed up at San Francisco airport somewhat quietly, but he was he was discovered there by media. He was interviewed.

This is back in 2017. He was protesting the Muslim ban, the first Muslim ban, and he said, "I am a refugee." Because he was a Jewish refugee from Soviet Russia, and he was just showing up there and kind of making his voice known. Uh, now Sergey Brin is attending meetings with Donald Trump. And we have another Muslim ban going on. Uh, it just shows how dramatically both on an individual, I think, and on a company level, some of these things have changed. But I certainly think especially the people you hear t talking on podcasts on social media some of these CEOs and executives they have gone fully to the right and have been radicalized in the way that I think Musk has.

All right. I want to come back to a point that we were talking about sort of uh local politics. A few years ago uh wealthy tech mogul started weighing in on local politics in San Francisco specifically. I want to read a quote uh from Gil Duran a San Francisco based journalist alarmed by the political ambitions of those people that you mentioned in your book. These people have enough money to be dumb and dangerous for a very long time. They have to start finding ways to seize territory and power and create a different world that doesn't look anything like the United States we have today. I think what we're seeing here in San Francisco politics is like the emergence of that strategy. What are some of the examples of the strategy that Duran is uh describing?

Well, there there are a couple of important things there. For one thing, the one of the one of the changes that we've seeded seeing a few years ago was uh tech people in San Francisco putting a lot more money into local politics because they realized they can get something for their money. So we saw a recall of members of the San Francisco school board, something that had never happened before. There was and people like David Saxs, who's now Trump's AI and cryptozar, were at the head of this. He was donating a lot of money.

And then they tried to recall Governor Gavin Newsome. That actually wasn't successful. But then they had a big victory when they recalled the district attorney, Chasa Bodin, who was considered this reformist, progressive DA, but really got tarred as someone who was a Soros DA who was, you know, letting criminals off and and responsible for an upsurge of crime in San Francisco.

And that that was actually at the time even a misreading of the situation. I would say that the crime didn't uh necessarily crime violent crime wasn't in a bad way in San Francisco. what you had was a lot of uh social destitution. You had a lot of property crime and non-violent crime, but it had become very visible to people there and and intolerable to the San Francisco elites. So, that's kind of where it started.

And when Gil is talking about seizing actual land and territory, I mean, there's kind of two tracks that we see the tech elites on. They're involved in regular politics, you know, trying to influence what's happening in San Francisco and nationally via Trump, but they are also uh part of these movements. One's called the the network state movement that Gil reports very well on.

They're also called charter cities where they're actually trying to gain land where they can have sovereignty over.

Honduras is the big one which is there's an island called Roaton there and there's a settlement called Prospera which is owned by an American company, a piece of land there that under a previous more right-wing Honduran regime, they were able to essentially buy sovereignty over this land and turn it into a charter city. And the main goal of these things is really to escape taxes, to have a sort of bespoke nation that is somewhat of a dictatorship, you know, run by a small group of tech elites.

And one thing that they talk about a lot that they want to do in these kinds of charter cities are medical experiments that may not be legal in in the US or other countries. This very much relates to the industry's interests in life extension research or or radical forms of human experimentation that most of us probably aren't that comfortable with yet.

Uh and there h there are a lot of efforts going on right now from in Honduras to even places in the United States to the open ocean uh to um Greenland. Uh there's a there's a big uh charter city startup that would be very happy to see Trump in the United States take over Greenland because that's another possible territory. But um really what they're looking for are places with weak sovereignty or places where the local government has given up and they can hand it over to a corporation essentially or a few American venture capitalists and say here start your own community and you know it's often presented as hey this is just what's wrong with a new community or building something new but it the in practice these things look more like mini dictatorships that are are really there to serve a few millionaires and billionaires.

You mentioned Greenland, so right off the bat, I'm thinking of Vice President JD Vance. Maybe not a a favorite there, but uh you talk about him a bit in in this book. Uh he was sponsored early in his political career by Peter Teal. Um did Teal create JD Vance in his own image or in a in the same way he created say Prosper?

Uh I think uh Vance willingly fashioned himself in Vance in Teal's image. I think there Teal has disciples of a sort. I mean, people like Blake Masters who didn't win his his uh Senate race in Arizona or other people who have worked for Teal basically their whole lives. Sometimes they come straight out of the Stanford Review. Vance was someone who met Teal a little at a different point in his life when he was at Yale Law School.

And he as as Teal I mean as Vance has described it uh he was felt a little lost. I mean Vance is someone who through his own narrative and and his uh memoir has described himself as searching for a sense of identity at different points of his life. I mean he even changed his name a couple times he went into the Marines. He uh he was trying to escape kind times hard luck upbringing and when he met Teal at Teal came to to give a speech at Yale. Teal is someone who goes to a lot of colleges even still to give speeches. And according to his account, he heard someone there who he thought was very smart, but also telling him to kind of get away from the merit- driven rat race of elite law. And also what he liked about Teal is that Teal's religious. He's a Christian. And that appealed a lot to Vance.

And after that, Vance got in touch with them. And from there, his whole life really changed and was shaped by by Teal. But it it was a it was a choice I would say of Vances of them of him seeing someone who he could use as a model and a mentor and then really going for it.

All right. Many right-wing moguls have denounced DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion policies. Uh but I'm hoping you can help me understand the irony here because it seems in their own way these wealthy tech moguls are obsessed with identity. How so?

Yeah. Uh certainly a lot of them consider themselves elites and some of them consider themselves genetic elites. I mean and so in that way there what's the distinction between those two?

Well you unfortunately you see a a recurrence in what could politely be called eugenics in a lot of Silicon Valley. I mean, not just what I was talking about with um this research into life extension, but uh a lot of research into um IVF and different reproductive procedures that go beyond just trying to, you know, make people fertile or ability to reproduce, but actually, you know, screening babies for or embryos for different qualities.

And I think there there is a sense among tech elites that whether you're a founder which is a pretty hallowed identity or an engineer or a venture capitalist you are part of this distinguished elite at the same time you know more traditional forms of identity like they are I think they are very conscious of their status that most of them are white males and they have chosen to think that DEI and any other diversity measures and also social justice movements that some of which try to write old wrongs against you for marginalized people are h are instead um a form of victimization or discrimination against white people like them.

And so in that way that they seem to feel like they're on the back foot and that their own identity is threatened, that it's not okay to be a a conservative white male. Um I I certainly don't think that's true and I think that the proof is in uh how successful that they they've been but they feel like they sort of have to apolog the the the buying era having to apologize for who they are and now there's a sense that they can be proud of who they are again and part of that is considering themselves the sort of these elites the elect who can rule over the rest of us.

Got one last question for you here. Um, tech moguls as as we discussed have succeeded in not only limiting regulations for cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence. They're becoming more deeply embedded in the national security state and they lead the anti-dei sort of woke charge. What will they want in the years ahead?

Well, they're certainly looking to the government as uh a cash source. They want contracts with the government. They want, they know that a lot of money is going to be coming from there. It always has, but um given how right-wing tech leads have kind of circled around Trump and are populating his administration, they're now looking for big contracts.

And I think that there's still going to be consumerf facing companies, of course, and trying to sell their products to the public. But with something like the Stargate initiative, which is hundreds of billions of dollars being put into data centers for AI and computing, that that's a huge uh possibility for the tech industry. And I said earlier that they're kind of going back to the 50s version where, you know, there there was a vision of of the tech industry that used to say, okay, it came out of the the defense establishment a little bit, but then it found its own as this public facing industry with somewhat liberal countercultural values.

But now they're ve very proudly going back to working for the state, working for the security state. It's not just companies like Peter Teal's Palanteer, you know, it's Google, Microsoft, all the tech companies and also ones that are purpose-built to work for the uh defense and intelligence uh establishment like Anderil.

Um so I think that's where they see their future now is um none of them are really libertarians in practice even if they sometimes claim to be in in in theory and they are much more willing to unite with the powers that the and to seek mutual profit and power there in a way that I think wouldn't have been acceptable kind of to the tech rank and file 10 or 15 years ago.

I said last question but I am just curious. I'm going to throw one more at you. you talk about sort of you you've talked on your book about uh even working with some of these uh some of these very powerful people and uh with all the journalism and the research and all of the stuff that you do. Are you ever worried at all uh just in terms of how powerful these people are just in terms of what you're digging up and and so forth sort of what you're able to find and if they know who you are.

Um yeah I don't always know you know if these people know who I am. I mean, I was involved I I was involved in a I filed a legal motion to get, for example, the the shareholders of X uncovered and and that worked. And, you know, when I was going through that, I was like, "Oh, I wonder if this has reached sort of the general council of X yet." But, um, I worry I worry more broadly about journalists in general, I would say.

I mean, yeah, sometimes I certainly think about myself, especially because I'm I'm a freelancer. I'm not always attached to a big publication. And people tell me that some of these the some of these billionaires, you know, are very ligious. Some of them are work do their own dirty tricks through uh private investigators or other people. They certainly don't have a problem smearing others or even just, you know, kind of lighting you up on social media and making you the villain of the day.

And so that kind of stuff I think is concerning. I think what's more broadly concerning is how little respect they seem to have for journalism and civil society and democracy itself. I mean, these are some people like Teal who are on record as saying that they're not such big fans of democracy. Musk has said maybe we need a Roman emperor.

So, I certainly worry about myself, but you know, there are people who are revealing big secrets about this industry or big scandals at at the New York Times or elsewhere. And you I think we all have to be a little bit on guard and know a lawyer, too.