keenon.substack.com/p/why-tech-b... @jacobsilverman.com

As folks head to the polls today from CA to NYC, here's a good reminder that part of what's on the ballot is the power of the tech oligarchy (see: Musk backing Cuomo etc). Last week, I spoke with @jacobsilverman.com about his new book, GILDED RAGE, and our chat feels pretty relevant today.

Sharing a great new paper on VC from David Kampmann, LSE really leading the way on the new critical scholarship on VC @jathansadowski.com @mrshoward.bsky.social @edwardongwesojr.com @parismarx.com @profhilaryallen.bsky.social @jacobsilverman.com academic.oup.com/ser/advance-...

Mamdani is proof that a successful marriage can only have one poster in it

Getting hit in the chest from point blank range with a footlong sub and an enormous Peckinpah-style squib of sweet onion teriyaki sauce explodes from my chest.

This Vegas police equipment thing was a small detail in a wonderful book conversation I saw recently with @jacobsilverman.com talking about GILDED RAGE. It's all so gross and awful.

paul skenes is being held hostage in a raising canes

As SNAP hangs in the balance for nearly 42 million people, misinformation is rampant. Myths of laziness and fraud persist when we should be talking about too low wages for workers, income inequality, and our threadbare social safety net. In this guest post, Adam Chandler sorts fact from fiction:

I was happy to talk with Paul Krugman about GILDED RAGE, the rise of the tech right, and what American oligarchy looks like. open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

I was happy to talk with Paul Krugman about GILDED RAGE, the rise of the tech right, and what American oligarchy looks like. open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...

John Roberts when you ask him if something clearly unconstitutional is legal

It's scary how cute Park Slope was tonight. Happy Halloween, NYC.

It takes guts to stand up to the homelessness-industrial complex! (Techbro Joe Lonsdale, from Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley (2025) by @jacobsilverman.com )

so @matteowong.bsky.social & I wrote on data centers: arguably the most important buildings in the world & are, in a way, holding the economy hostage. Byzantine financial instruments, private equity, depreciating tech, hype, $trillion valuations. it’s all there. an ai crash prob starts here.

fresh audio product: • Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage, on the rightward move of the tech elite • Forrest Hylton conducts a political tour d’horizon of South America www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html#S...

The Democratic Party would do well to look to the social programs of the Black Panther Party as inspiration if SNAP disappears on Saturday. Just running party-sponsored food drives and regular party-sponsored spaghetti dinners in some major cities would be both helpful and good PR.

"Gilded Rage" isn’t simply a rehash of existing reportage. What separates it from other writeups, and where his it truly shines, is its attempt to get at the root of Silicon Valley’s anti-democratic lurch. www.thebulwark.com/p/why-our-te...

"True tech libertarianism has never been practiced. People like Peter Thiel have talked about exiting society...But then they pour money in recent years into controlling, subverting, or influencing the US government." - @jacobsilverman.com www.hardresetmedia.com/p/the-crypto...

“A lot of these people have become successful by stopping being libertarians, and throwing their lot in with MAGA...The financing of crypto is not coming from...retail investors. It’s coming from Wall Street and the government.” - @jacobsilverman.com www.hardresetmedia.com/p/the-crypto...

I'd need to know more about whether the minister shot in the face with a chemical agent from point-blank range before weighing in on it. Maybe it was good that it happened.

TONIGHT

Check out @jacobsilverman.com’s podcast on Elon Musk’s rise. Episode 2: the cult of bootstraps really means “I was born on third.” podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

When I titled my book "Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone" I really did not anticipate how hard that phrase would eventually hit.

So the $20,000 humanoid robot housekeeper actually just webcams your house to a random person in a call center with an Xbox controller www.wsj.com/tech/persona... @joannastern.bsky.social

my friend Grace is the woman who stood up to the guy in the Nazi SS uniform in those viral videos youve probably seen- he broke her nose with a beer stein - please share & donate and give her a hand with medical expenses, recovery and potential expenses gofund.me/72cb1a415

This is tomorrow.

There is both hope and horror in this but I will take the hope. h/t @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social

Tomorrow night I'll be talking about Gilded Rage with CNBC's Jon Fortt at the Montclair Public Library in the great state of New Jersey. bccls.libcal.com/event/14817832

Wednesday Wednesday Wednesday! Come to busboys Takoma for a 7PM convo with @jacobsilverman.com about his new book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and The Radicalization of Silicon Valley. To help us make sense of the DC of it all, Jacob will be joined by me, Corey Frayer (CFA), and Sandeep Vaheesan (OMI)

Great quote: “If wars are how Americans learn geography,” Silverman writes, “then elections are how they learn about plutocracy.”

Imagine the anguish in the eyes of a man as he watches his $11 sandwich receipt get classified as "vehicle fleet procurement" and then throw up a red-flag alert because only 26% of his colleagues are authorized to drive a sandwich

sometimes i remember "calque" is a loanword and "loanword" is a calque and i get so pissed off

Boston! Come to the Boston Book Festival TOMORROW to see me speak about the nightmare fantasies of the tech oligarchs, and how we can fight back against them. 5PM, Copley Square, with @chafkin.bsky.social, @jacobsilverman.com, and Saraya Wintersmith. See you there! #booksky

Publishers Weekly named GILDED RAGE one of the best nonfiction books of 2025: "It’s an essential unmasking of the growing extremism among America’s wealthy." best-books.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-book...

Publishers Weekly named GILDED RAGE one of the best nonfiction books of 2025: "It’s an essential unmasking of the growing extremism among America’s wealthy." best-books.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-book...

I'll be at the Boston Book Festival tomorrow for a 5pm panel on the political power of tech moguls. bostonbookfestival2025.sched.com/event/27cJd/...

I'm hearing that after pardoning notable crypto money launderer Changpeng Zao, former Binance CEO, the administration is going to announce crypto sanctions against drug cartels this afternoon. Clearly the drug cartels made the mistake of not becoming business partners of Trump and his family.

On Oct. 29, I'll be at Busboys and Poets in DC where I'm talking with Daniel Greene, Corey Frayer, and Sandeep Vaheesan about how MAGA and the tech right found common cause, DOGE, and this whole democracy business. www.busboysandpoets.com/events/th-ev...

"We’ve never seen anything like this before.” @jacobsilverman.com on the shocking scale of Trump’s crypto corruption It’s a system where foreign actors know “it is in your direct political interest to buy Mr. Trump’s tokens or invest” in his crypto scams. gift link www.nytimes.com/2025/10/17/o...

REIGN OF TERROR // 2021 // I TRIED, YOU GUYS, I REALLY DID

Things have evolved a bit since then, Musk has been able to raise a lot of cash for XAI, merged Twitter with it, launched a new compensation plan, and is trying to funnel cash out of Tesla and into XAI. Cash burn is way up though due to AI buildout, and Tesla is still the foundation of it all.

For @fullstopmag.bsky.social i wrote about silicon valley’s far-right turn and its ties to the White House, a tricky topic that @jacobsilverman.com covers in depth in his new book www.full-stop.net/2025/10/22/r...

“With World Liberty, Trump has created a powerful vehicle for those seeking influence. Anyone — you, me, an Emirati prince — can put money in his pocket by simply buying the tokens the company issues. The key is the convenience factor.” — Jacob Silverman, author and podcast host

About 2/3rds through @jacobsilverman.com's Gilded Rage and if you want to know how Silicon Valley political philosophy went from crackpot dismissible to ushering in mainstream authoritarianism I highly recommend www.bloomsbury.com/us/gilded-ra...

"In another era (a few years ago), we would have already had congressional hearings and law enforcement investigations into the president’s crypto business interests. But the Supreme Court’s decision related to presidential immunity signals that such moves could end up being superfluous"

You must buy the book. There are lots of versions of this story and more coming (hell I'm writing a piece of it). But Jacob's is the best because he's been following the players for so long that he can show how DOGE is one big Twitter takeover. We've been let this sinked in as a nation. Humiliating.

"Gilded Rage" is back in stock at Bookshop.org bookshop.org/p/books/gild...

Looking forward to seeing DC people.