Gilded Rage Quotes

“What would they do with their power, these unelected change agents? They wanted low taxes, no regulation, enormous investments in AI and defense tech to “deter” China. They wanted to banish wokeness in all its forms. They wanted free-speech absolutism and an end to censorious liberalism, but they also wanted to imprison leakers and take away licenses from media organizations they resented. They wanted to prosecute advertisers for engaging in a supposed criminal conspiracy by choosing not to advertise on Elon Musk’s X. They wanted an end to all regulatory and legal investigations that might harm their interests. They wanted personal liberty, so they elected a party that regulated women’s bodies and was a slave to corporate power. They wanted free markets and government bailouts and perhaps a charter city in Greenland. They wanted it all—on their terms.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“The industry was peppered with sovereign citizens, anti-state libertarians, and corporatist financiers dumping worthless tokens on novice investors. Its culture tended to be misogynistic and trollish. Its product’s principal use case was crime. Despite the wreckage of the 2022 crypto collapse and a downturn in retail interest, they managed to reinflate the bubble and thought that their unpopular financial program was the one we all needed to get behind.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“A national Bitcoin stockpile was an astonishing suggestion: a direct transfer of public wealth to crypto industry whales, all to inflate the price of a digital token that, even after 15-plus years of searching, had no use case beyond speculation and being the reserve currency for global cybercrime. That the proposal happened to be completely against Bitcoin’s libertarian founding purpose, separating money from the state, was no small irony.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“They were concerned that a second trial would delay repayment for FTX customers and creditors (lawyers and investigators had been scouring FTX’s accounts for assets that could be sold off or returned). The reasoning seemed sound and in line with precedent, but it also meant that perhaps the most significant campaign finance crime in American history would simply be brushed aside. What was there to stop someone from doing it again?”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“In comparison, their American counterparts, like FTX.US and Binance.US, were derelict flea markets where no one shopped—distracting American regulators from the fraudulent behavior happening at their overseas equivalents. This was deliberate. Binance adopted something it called, in an internal presentation prepared by a consultant, the “Tai Chi strategy.” It was a classic “bait and switch,” as Forbes described it.7 The idea was that Binance.US would be served up to regulators as a compliant exchange trying to do the right thing under US law. Binance.US had to be ready “to accept nominal fines in exchange for enforcement forbearance,” according to the presentation—redirecting the energies of US law enforcement away from the mothership, Binance.com. Meanwhile, customers would be funneled to the offshore exchange, which, with its distributed global operations, could operate with greater latitude. For a time, the strategy worked quite well.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“The whole point of crypto was to separate money from the state. As Peter Thiel wrote of the early days of PayPal, “we were all obsessed with creating a digital currency that would be controlled by individuals instead of governments.”6 Crypto true believers had the same dream: money that wouldn’t be under the dominion of geriatric senators who had no idea what they were voting on. Crypto was about freedom, not compromise.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“They also described what they saw as a breakdown in the implicit bargain between big tech and the political overclass. The deal used to go something like this: Tech guys would innovate, build cool stuff, and get rich. They’d pay some of it back via foundations and philanthropic work and, sure, the minimum legally required tax payment. The government and regulatory state would cheer from the sidelines and clear the runway for takeoff. In the minds of Andreessen and Horowitz, that bargain had broken down. Additional capital gains taxes, Lina Khan’s activist FTC, and the SEC’s crackdown on crypto fraud and securities law violations were unacceptable breaches of norms.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“If wars are how Americans learn geography, then elections are how they learn about plutocracy. Within the country’s donor-driven political system, each election brings different billionaires into the public eye—chemical magnates, software executives, hedge fund tycoons, reclusive scions to old banking fortunes.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“With its faith in a utopian salvation, the AI industry sounded a lot like religion, and it had the wealth of the Catholic Church to match. Hundreds of billions of dollars were poured into AI startups, data centers, and hardware, as chipmaker Nvidia rose from being a niche provider of video cards for computer gamers to the most valuable publicly traded company in the world. Practically every public database, movie, text, website, Reddit post—every fragment of available culture and media—was ingested by AI models operated by dozens of companies, who decided that it would be easier to one day ask for forgiveness (or a legal settlement) than pause and ask for permission. While some AI companies made content deals for copyrighted materials, it was largely a free-for-all.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“The Silicon Valley Bank crisis ended up being like many in recent American economic history: created by politically influential elites, who would soon be saved by the politicians they influenced but still resented, with their losses socialized among the American people. Yet for some SVB customers, the exceedingly generous government intervention wasn’t enough.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“With AI, the potential gains were supposed to be self-evident—newfound efficiencies and productivity improvements that we couldn’t imagine. Indeed, we literally couldn’t conceive of them; they could only be dreamed up through the magic of AI.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“Soon enough, the VCs got what they wanted: a government takeover of a failing bank and FDIC backing beyond the typical $250,000 limit. It was a dramatic intervention, a bailout announced on a weekend overflowing with tension and elite hysteria. The tech industry’s preferred bank had made some mistakes amidst changing interest rates, but Uncle Sam was here to limit the damage—and the need for anyone from the bank or its tech industry partners to take responsibility.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“Miami was a matter for concern, but NYC was the heart of global finance. CityCoins was also knocking on politicians’ doors in Philly, Austin, and other cities. The token still had no use case—it wasn’t yet a vehicle for voting on city governance—except for speculating on the volatile price of a token that was difficult to trade. Like many crypto projects, CityCoins was mostly about hype, promises of future utility, and betting on price fluctuations. Like a classic pyramid scheme, the risk would fall mostly on those coin holders who could least afford to lose their money. It was a prime example of what the economist Tonantzin Carmona called “predatory inclusion”: “marginalized communities gaining access to goods, services, or opportunities that they were historically excluded from—but this access comes with conditions that undermine its long-term benefits and may reproduce insecurity for these same communities.”5 Crypto claimed to offer financial liberation, but it came with a price tag, including, Carmona wrote, “high risks and insufficient consumer protections.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“Miami was a matter for concern, but NYC was the heart of global finance. CityCoins was also knocking on politicians’ doors in Philly, Austin, and other cities. The token still had no use case—it wasn’t yet a vehicle for voting on city governance—except for speculating on the volatile price of a token that was difficult to trade. Like many crypto projects, CityCoins was mostly about hype, promises of future utility, and betting on price fluctuations. Like a classic pyramid scheme, the risk would fall mostly on those coin holders who could least afford to lose their money. It was a prime example of what the economist Tonantzin Carmona called “predatory inclusion”: “marginalized communities gaining access to goods, services, or opportunities that they were historically excluded from—but this access comes with conditions that undermine its long-term benefits and may reproduce insecurity for these same communities.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“That we live in a society seemed lost on some evangelists of exit—the people talking about the need to start new cities or new currencies. They wanted an à la carte approach to the social contract, to enjoy the benefits they preferred with few of the compromises or responsibilities toward others. For that reason, however much they may have wanted to overthrow or destroy existing political institutions—or simply bypass them—these ideological entrepreneurs tended to crop up in city halls and legislatures, looking to make a deal. For now, that’s where the money and power were. That’s why it somehow made sense that, even in the financial capital of the world, the heart of US dollar dominance, a crypto executive would try to convince New York City’s new mayor to allow a company to start issuing digital money to city residents.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“This kind of dizzying, circular integration—of big-time tech and military investments, Heritage Foundation-style policy advocacy, educational activism, nonprofit payroll processing, and old-fashioned influence peddling, much of it taking place under the same roof, all of it reinforcing shared concerns and ownership interests—is not necessarily illegal or even unusual. But it’s revealing of how wealthy entrepreneurs operated in multiple related domains at once, sometimes with a great deal of self-promotion, sometimes more quietly. Their interests tended to converge, if not share office space, with the fortunes of one raising the fortunes of others. And without much notice, a company that was a payroll and accounting firm for a billionaire’s nonprofit foundation could become a lobbying firm representing his other investments.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“He described it as “a reflection or a microcosm of our deeper democratic problem here in the United States, where you have private interests with a lot of private capital, being able to effectively influence politicians by virtue of their wealth and dominate the political system, while the vast majority of the population are sinking into greater despair and greater poverty.”10”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“As Andreessen described the members of the PMC, they were “aggrieved” that they were not properly recognized and appreciated. It was not enough that they had accumulated vast wealth and the resources to enact their authoritarian dreams. They wanted to be recognized as builders, as great capitalists contributing to History through their visionary work.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“It was all the same. The incredibly rich, well-connected guy talking to you, the one who might have helped create the very interface through which you were consuming his thoughts, was actually pretty powerless, culturally marginal, easily canceled. Same went for the billionaire ex-president, unfairly kicked off Twitter before having his megaphone restored by a sympathetic owner.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“In October 2023, Andreessen published what he called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” in which he wrote, “Our enemy is the ivory tower, the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” Andreessen didn’t consider that the archetype he most despised—unelected technocrats remaking the world in their image from a luxurious hilltop redoubt—might have been an accurate description of Silicon Valley venture capitalists.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

“It seemed to me that the inability of the political mainstream to articulate, much less enact, a genuinely populist economic program was one reason why American democracy was approaching the precipice. If given two competing visions of America as a bleak, hobbled country waiting for its strongman savior and a sclerotic liberal party trying to scold its disaffected base into compliance, the tech industry’s leading lights understandably chose the former.”
― Jacob Silverman, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley