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Hey guys, hope everyone is doing well. I have a fantastic interview I want to share with you that I think is extraordinarly 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 immediate electricity price hikes because of the data center build out, the way our whole economy is apparently now just one big bet on AI, the stripping up back of all regulations to rein in or have any sort of democrat 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 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 two point zero. 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 Teel, Sam Altman, Mark Andresen 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 guests, 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 CBC was at ced DC 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.
Thank you, glad to be here.
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 some of the billionaires and some of the specifically 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 has been writing on the tech world for about the tech world for quite a while 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.
Well, 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 opportunistic group and then some into the more died in the world ideological people. But they're all kind of moving in the same direction and seek the same favors from the Trump administration. And if any of them ever had liberal politics, all
war them pretty thinly. So you know, 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, you know, going to the inauguration, going to Trump's oval office and presenting him with gold gifts. So you know, I consider it as a possible.
Book cover, 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 two point Oh, there was a lot to focus on going into Trump two point zero. 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 ten years.
So I wonder how you see this project in Trump two point zero and how central you see it as being.
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 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, you know, the kind of high tech corporate 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 you know, 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 a kind of a solution to that and is exactly what the tech industry wants right now.
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.
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 tel for example. We'll 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 you know, 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 more specific sense about Silica, 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 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 Tile and Mark and Dreesen, 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 Prospero is suing the government of Honduras for more than the GDP of Honduras, and someone like Joho and his party would probably be
much more minimal to preserving that relationship. So like that is probably the most advance of these charter cities or city states. But you really see that exit in all kinds of forms. You know, it can be more metaphorical 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.
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 do they think that the AI future is going to look like and what sort of power do you they expect to consolidate in their own hands if their company is the one that wins the race to superintelligence.
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 the basically the current methods largely focused around LMS, that super intelligence 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 may not happen, that this may
not be the proper path for that. What we're more likely to see is some sort of big bubble bursts in the next year, perhaps or eighteen 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 open ai can't fulfill its promises and it's huge spending promises, so you
know it. For some reason, the tech industry has aside, 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 you know is probably the top Trump ally actually in the
tech world. In some ways this 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 they'll be knock on effects to 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, let's back up a little bit and talk about some of the subject matter or the book, which really tracks kind of how we got to this place, and 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 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 wins 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.
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 ten years ago or fifteen 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 twenty sixteen 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 or 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 and also me too, and some of these issues were not handled well. None of them are 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 so his allies have. We should also note that this is someone who during the first Trump administration resigned from a Trump advisory board, you know, one of these kind of meaningless advisory boards. But because Trump pulled out of the Paris Climate Treaty, I mean this, there was somewhat of an authent.
Them all today have that reaction.
Yeah, yeah, there was an authentic like belief in climate change at least there. And you know, then you cut to the twenty twenty four cycle and he basically was doing climate change denial on of Twitter spaces or x spaces.
Event during the twenty twenty four campaign cycle, we'll talking to Trump and so you start seeing things like the fight over his factory in Fremont, 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 that this is when Mosque is going on Twitter, which he didn't yet and was saying that COVID was gonna be gone by the end of April twenty twenty. You know, this was speaking of delusion
perhaps but also self interests. 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 applications, says I no longer wish to
be associated with my father. Over the year, summer 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, you know, this guy bullied her for being queer, and that I think really did break something or change something in Musk. You know, he became very
openly transphobic after that. It became one basically his main cultural issue into like lane cultural lane, into maga reactionarysm 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 Geordan Peterson I think summer of twenty twenty four, 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 is 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 you know, 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. Like that is actually something I think to listen to, to pay attention. These people even think.
As sort of silly as it sounds, Yeah.
They think that that America's institutions, and especially it's liberal institutions, have turned their kids into you know, lefty trans radicals. Moscas said some things about la private schools where Vivian went to school. So that's the mix I'm kind of bringing here to the analysis.
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 experience as a personal trauma. With Musk, you know, how much of his radical I have a bunch of Musk questions, but 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 what, 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.
Yeah, I think that that's correct. I think you could see him trending that way. I meant in tech, you know, he's surrounded by people who are sort of tep at social liberals, you know, billionaire philanthropic types, but you know, 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 to 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 change during COVID to one degree or another. And sometimes it's your friend or your eccentric cousin who becomes kind of conspiratorial, right ring radical and sometimes it is the richest man in the world because he's online, as you said in this 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 you know, that is one thing in a way that's kind of useful for analyzing what happened here to 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 you know, the black pilling of Elon Musk, the same way it would be of anyone else on a four chan like environment. But you know, 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 slash 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.
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 their thing, 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 a certain sense. But so how much of it is
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. 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?
Yeah? I think, you know, I divide them and 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 yeah, at that moment when he showed up on Rogan with like his like chain and his after he's doing this heavy T shirts.
Oh my god, So I'm wearing sort of a heavy sweasher. 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 wanted me to say about his data center investment, like how many hundreds of
billions of dollars? But you know, I think it's worth also looking at you have the died in the wool ideological conservatives and right wingers and p but like Peter Teel or David Sachs who was his Teal's friend and writing partner at college at Stanford and in the early nineties 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 you know, those people have always been there, and Teal sometimes has been the lonelier figure, especially during the twenty sixteen election. But I think what we've seen is that yes, there is a great deal of opportunism and of a typical like corporate billionaire type, but there's also what 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's not a household name necessarily, but he's a partner Sequoia, the most important VC firm in the valley. He was a longtime Republican supporter, supported Trump in twenty sixteen after January sixth said Trump had to kind of had to go. Elon Musk said the same thing in more gentle terms, and that Trump should was a little old and should write
off into the sunset. But then we see these guys come back and Doug Leon became a very vocal Trump supporter in the valley. So you know, I think that that specific cocktail of opportunism and ideology is important with some of these guys. But you know, ultimately it is about class, you know, as as you were kind of alluding to, I think venture capitalists. 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.
Yeah, I 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, a core and just authoritarian, like that is every instinct and his body thinks that it should be basically legal to criticize him constantly consolidating power in his own hands and in the executive branch constantly you know, flouting 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 alignment fits here? Why is the authoritarian bent of this administration such as sort of natural fit for tech oligarchs.
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 I try 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 of decades, but for at least, you know, perhaps the last ten years, maybe a little bit less.
Saudi Arabia has been probably the biggest funder of tech startups, with the UAE and Katark contributing a lot of money to 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 you know this is not just metaphorical.
I mean Ben Horowitz, who is Marc Andreessen's business partner at Andresen Horowitz major venture capital firms, said at one of these Saudi business summits a few years ago to his Saudi counterpart, he said, you have a founder also usually call him your highness, And I think you know, 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 you know, Trump is more gearish and stupider and more easily bought and stuff, but they they don't mind and you know, so they're still willing to work with that, and his authoritarianism hasn't encroached on them yet, you know, hasn't washed up on their shores. Quite the opposite, as we talked about earlier. You know, he is pushing AI because it's sort of 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.
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.
So this is really starting around twenty nineteen, twenty twenty. Of course, COVID is always a marker here when tech elites really start 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 a kind of different topic. But you know, less the sense of, you know, 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 have. So what happened was they discovered recall politics, really, which is that especially David Sachs, who a lot of us know better now as the and ai zar 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 radical, as 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 work now. And then you had the recall Chase A. 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 you know, 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 increased and has continued beyond him.
But anyway, he was tarred as this person who had left San Francisco's to die or cared more about, cared more about criminals supposedly than crime victims, and the establishment right made it a point to, you know, get rid of this Soros da as they called him, but also really the tech elites, and Sacks was the ideological and at times the mon monetary leader here, donating millions of dollars. I think at one point something like sixty percent 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, Sax went on Tucker Carlson who thanked him for saving democracy. This was on Fox News. He went on Megan Kelly and said, this is a model that we play.
Realized democracy had been saved, has greatiny.
Right by a billionaire's cash. And this also, I think was very reflective, and he went to Megan 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 on right wing politics, which is that elections
are going to be contested everywhere. You know, there's going to be of course the normal electoral process, there'll be disinformation, they'll be you know, at the ballot box, but also afterwards with you know, election denial and then recalls whenever recalls present an opportunity. And that's something that we've seen more nashally, and I think that the money right wing elite now sees as another way to pull on the
levers of powers. You know, you pour a few million dollars into some local election that isn't used to seeing that, and that is in a sense what happened in San Francisco with some of these smaller elections, and that provided this this model for them to go nationally and both I would say rhetorically and as a matter of strategy.
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 very much.
So, you know, again this is something where we can go to the tape of these guys saying what they
actually believe, which is sometimes rather paranoid. Mark and Dreesen has said in interviews that he was speaking to the CEO of one of his portfolt Olio companies, someone he had invested in, and the guy said, you know, 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 Mark and Dreesen talks about communism too, like it's this weird almost fifties throwback red scare throwback kind of thing, or even in an earlier era of
anti communist fervor. But so they do think. They do both think this that people are kind of infiltrating their companies, and they also at of just very fed up with any visible form of activism. And a great example is at Google, you know that 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 drum
imaging and had targeting air strikes. And in twenty eighteen a number of Google employees signed a petition and protested against Google's participation 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 Gouzea. But this started really in twenty twenty fourth on the protests and Google fired forty people in one day who participated in a silent protests in an office that of course didn't disrupt anything. So the ad to has completely changed, both within the ostensibly kind of liberal companies. It's really worth watching what's happening in Microsoft.
They've had protests over the last few months. You know, I've heard of people trying to emerge as whistleblowers, you know about because there's a lot of internal surveillancebably violations of labor laws. I mean, all the big tech companies have insider threat programs, which is a term we started hearing after the Stone revelations, which was something that was supposed to only exist within the NSA or CIA or something like that, Like you know, 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 Palenteer on Durill and the people we know associated with them who are saying, you know, 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, can you talk a little about Alex karp Is, the CEO of Palenteer. 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. W kind of par for
the course for him. He's another one. He always pretends like I don't know, you could 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?
Yeah, he's a really representative figure I would say of this type as this very jingoistic nationalist tech elite type that you see in venture capital and in the more defensive line 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, you know the company he keeps, the work he does.
Yeah, and is there any evidence that you like, contributed to her or anything like that, Not.
That I know of, but you know, I should go back and check the donations. But yeah, he Anyway, he routinely appears, let's say, very amped and pop and I think also, you know, 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 you know, 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 like 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 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 you guys PhD and they refer to him as doctor Karp sometimes at Pallantier, he supposedly studied under Jurgen Haber Moss, a great German philosopher and intellectual.
I think that relationship has been overblown, but you know, he was this intellectual of sorts, and somehow he ends up in charge of the startup Palanteer, which is comes from Peter Teel and Joe Lonsdale I mentioned earlier, and is really I mean, there is a larger history here, but of the kind of recent defense tech boom, this company cannot 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 making people afraid, you know, China will be too afraid to attack us. And it's a very juvenile vision, but it's one that he's very willing to dispense at a really rapid 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 will be more nimble, and that's part of the appeal as well.
They're using that silicon valley, the traditional kind of silicon valley model which even those use, yeah, which those use too,
like disruption bringing efficiency. They talk about how the prime defense contractors, which is an industry term for you know, Boeing and raytheon and those big ones are expensive entrenched, and this is the something you hear from, you know, some liberal Democrats, more like centrist Democrats or anti trust democrats even but they're not of course necessarily better and then producing their own you know, 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 tracks. One thing I'd write about my book is that, you know, there was that big meeting of Trump and a lot of tech CEOs in November twenty sixteen, right after the election at Trump Tower, and this was one of those resident images where you had a dozen or more 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 KRP was there and Teal had set up the meeting. Trump was praising Teal, but at the time Pallenteer 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 Carping at the table, but I think if you sort of track that arc from twenty sixteen to now where it's it's a publicly traded company with a market cap of hundreds of billions of dollars, it really reflects this what this era has become and that right wing tech and Trump Union has 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 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 antitrust direction with Jonathan Canter 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 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 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 way.
Yes, someone recently summarizes to me is they don't want to be governed, and yeah, we see that very much in practice where they any criticism they cannot tolerate. You see this especially people like Mark and Dreesen or Musk himself. You know, some times it is baffling, I think are striking to most normal people that you know, Like is this it? Like was did Musk really get so angry
because he wasn't invited to abiden Ev summit? And like, yeah, like you know, these are 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 you and are not only yeah, as you described, they're not only just so rich, but they there's a constant, there's a greed and resource accumulation of drive that is never ending. I mean, Musc has said that he needs to be a trillionaire so that he can get to Mars.
I mean the ridiculousness of that vision and the very much grounded in the laws of physics reasons why it
won't happen is the whole other thing. But like this is the pretense of why he supposedly needs as much money as possible, and they are no longer content with the whatever might be the conventional checks and bounces and regulations of the democratic system, and they certainly saw that or thought that the the Biden administration in what we would probably agree or some pretty modest reforms or you know, effective in the forms of Lena Kon johnthan Canter. But overall,
you know, they weren't so aggressive. They didn't break any up any companies are putting on it in prison, besides some obvious crypto criminals. But this is all unacceptable to them and they cannot deal with any of that. So, you know, we talked about exit earlier. You know, they're pursuing two lanes at once. Some of them want to exit. At the same time, they're also willing to kind of 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, like, you know, it's almost like the 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 an example of Musk he opened 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 you were, 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, ah, 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 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 is sort of an authoritarian bridge figure because he's nominally a 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 him ai and then get lawyers to clean it up later. Like that. That's very much
the attitude. Yeah, that that thought problem 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 out well.
And the irony of them simultaneously like celebrating actually their own law breaking and wearing it as a badge of like were 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 common folk is an incredible irony. I Mean, one thing I've always found instructive about Elon Mush is 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 so much. He has this sort of like delusions of grandeur and main character syndrome.
Yeah, and you talk to people like Adam Becker and astrophysicist and journalists has a good book. You know that stuff is never going to happen. You can no one can can live on Mars, and the worst day on Earth is going to be better than the best day ever on Mars. But they this is where they become aristocrats for 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 Tela and Founder's Fund is we were promised flying cars. We
got one hundred and forty characters like there. And this is actually you know, you see some some analogs to this in like nineteen twenties 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 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 and policy Trump's executive order, or in the industry, they all talk about how it concerns about AI safety or bs like or at least among the like the right wing tech people like 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 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 the 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 LM. Like, how do you see the project of DOGE and how we should think about 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 crimes. 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 survealed by tech comanies all the time, but this is like
really important stuff. Someone who used to work at the SEC told me, you know what, or texted me earlier this year and said, dog is supposedly coming to the
SEC today. They are going to get their hands on so much sensive like private market data, things that the government knows that industry doesn't know, you know, like important big picture or even really graining their stuff, you know, things about the American economy or its people, or you know, plans for the government, and that 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 fuel AI.
The other thing I wonder about, and this is you know, we don't I 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 normal government would be audited in some way, but obviously
the audits don't matter here. The inspector generals were all fired illegally at the beginning of the Trump administration. So I think, you know, it succeeded in creating this disruption. This may be a proof of concept that I mean, at least there's 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 administry of state, you could profit from it, you could get out some of the people you don't like,
and there would be no punishment. They you know, a lot of people we you know, have 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, you know, there's been especially in the whole cell example, USA D or some of these other agencies,
but where the now Trump Institute of Peace. But you know, I think they got a lot of what they wanted and a lot of 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 are still twenty two year olds with the resume of cyber criminals who have incredible access.
Terrifying talk about the meshing of the work of ice and this, you know, this tech world of palents here 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 capitalism.
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 a deep, you know, an intrinsic part of the tech industry for
many years. But there's such big contracts being handed out now, not 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 processes and that goes with it. So you have companies like Palenteer 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 this for the border patrol for years, I think since at least the first Trump administration maybe And sometimes you know, this just means like we're going to help you recruit more people by through online ad campaigns and ad targeting and stuff like that. I mean, it is, it is important it's still work. You're still you know,
bringing in bodies for the modern data just stoppot. But you know, 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. You know, they're all using Microsoft computer 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 you know 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 you know, 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, you know, 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 Palenteer, or surveillance and or just running the day day functions.
Yeah, and I think Palestine has been a you know, a test run or a test and ground for a lot of this tech as well, because on 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 what these guys want to do with AI, and perhaps they're delusional, very possible
they're delusional. It all just blows up in some bubble and we never really get beyond you know, making AI slot videos or whatever. The night marriage healthscape 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 you know, we can all keep our heads.
Yeah, I think that. I don't think that's too conspiratorial. I think it matches a lot of things we've heard from these people or even you know, reporting from people like Douglas Rushkov, a longtime tech writer and critic who has talked to some billionaires about their sort of doomsday island plans. And you know they do they need to kill the pilots who fly them to their doomsday bunkers so no one knows where they are. Like just bonkers stuff.
But you know, Larry Elson 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. You know. 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 turned into
goog for the billionaires. But it's in a way and 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 from you know, on a corporate level of course on a government federal level. And it's still but it is also
at the same time like deeply dysfunctional. You know, it's all the AI will still be hallucinating, like it's not necessarily it won't even be sort of the perfect dystopia. It's just going to be a mess. And it will but it will enable forces of repression and fascism. And I think you're exactly right that they've made a choice.
You know, you can sort of embrace reform, you can try to make societies safe for capitalism or their vision of runaway capitalism, or you can choose some kind of repression. And I think they essentially chosen the latter.
My last question for you, Jacob, is, you know, 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 valance. What is it possible at this point to rain these guys back in and get them under 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 must saying if she wins, I'm ft, you know, I'm going to prison? Will my kids be able to visit me? 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, yeah, their sense of a binding by the law has gone any better. The problem is we haven't talked a lot about Democrats here. I assure people that in my book, you know, I write a lot about how they've contributed this problem. And I think the Democrat Party is so fractured on some of the core questions here of tech power, you know, is Silicon Valley an adversary, you know, very I think very few people in the Democratic Party actually see the
industry or as leadership, as an adversary. They see it as somewhere they based. Does Yeah, I.
Think the base does matter, and I think this will probably be a litmus test in twenty twenty eight if I had to 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? Like you don't have to get too specific or means tester or wonkish or whatever. It's those few things, you know, besides also getting big money out of politics. I mean, there's a lot of wish casting here. But you know, do you want not want to build more data centers and instead invest in healthcare and other public goods? You know, we are actually seeing right now,
as you said, you're referring to a litmus test. We're seeing in I was in DC recently. There's some sort 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 frauding of the mouth, but mostly you know, against it from a public interest standpoint, So like.
Yeah, there are general 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 basis becoming pretty potent.
Yeah, I think so. And you know, people don't like that in their communities, and there's sort of a local aspect to this, where you know, there are Republicans who hear their constituents complaining 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 twenty or fifty billion dollar projects that are not going to produce jobs in the long term and are just going to make most people's lives worse. So you know that 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. You know, 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 you know, the rule of law is really gone, and a lot of criminals have been just straight up released from prison that you know, there's so much makeup work to do in a way before we talk about moving forward or even just like tamping down the power of these guys. I mean, I hope
those things can be done at once. I hope you know, there are prosecutions and breakup of companies and wealth taxes, big sweeping gestures that say there are other ways of relating to these people, like you don't have to surrender power to them.
Yeah, it's just really reasserting, you know, 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 that's fully nimby when it comes to data centers, and they're trying to build too 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 concerance, 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 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 the idea of like what are we getting for all this that we've 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 and 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 you know, that's where I think there is kind of room for optimism for the future or just political you know, focus and strategy. Is 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 that.
I lie, I do have one more question for you, which is JD vance like? Is he just I know Teal was involved with 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?
I think so. I think he's an important bridge figure for the kind of new right, the religious right, because he you know, he that as he's taken on multiple identities, that was one of them. But the VCS really like him. You know, they pushed hard, of course, to have him be the VP. They all in front of Doug Bergham.
Apparently there was a dinner at David Sachs's house during the twenty twenty four campaign and the Bergram was kind of hoping he was a dark horse VP candidate, and all the tech guys there said, you gotta choose JD. And you know he is Teal's guy. And he's a former VC, and so I don't think they see much you know, daylight between their views and he may not have.
The question I think is like does he have sort of the unifying or rough charisma of Trump to like unify Nagar, you know, but that there may be abillity there for something to fall apart. But the tech guys I think would be perfectly happy unless someone surprising emerges. You know that they try. They road tested DeSantis and Ramaswami and a couple other folks, but I think JD is really their guy. I mean, some of them have
money invested in him. Teel put money into his into JD Vance's venture capital firm.
Yeah, that reminds me. There are some great scenes there with the vivig Ramaswami in your first hand experience with him in the book that people definitely need to check out. The book Guys is Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Jacob Silverman, thank you so much. Fascinating look at these extraordinarily powerful and malevolent, frankly characters.
Well, thank you so thanks so much for your interest