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Tech billionaires embraced Trump when cheap money ended, new book argues
Jacob Silverman's Gilded Rage argues Silicon Valley's Trump embrace wasn't about wokeness or Biden hostility—it was about money. When free credit ended in 2022 and regulators pushed back, tech billionaires chose Trump over constraints.
The shift wasn’t about wokeness. It was about constraints.
Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage makes a blunt case for Silicon Valley’s Trump pivot: the party really started when money was free and ended when it wasn’t. When zero-interest rates disappeared in 2022 and regulators showed a little backbone, the Valley’s most powerful turned right to protect their advantages.
What’s actually new
We’ve been told the turn was about “woke” HR, San Francisco’s troubles, or White House hostility. Silverman flips the script: follow the incentives. The cultural fireworks were the sales pitch. The underlying aim was to keep capital cheap, deals easy, and oversight minimal.
Under Biden, the ties between tech and Washington didn’t dissolve. Defense work grew. AI research marched on despite dire warnings that the administration would “destroy” it. The true friction points were narrow—antitrust enforcement from Lina Khan’s FTC, and talk of billionaire-focused tax changes that never became law. The volume of the outrage far exceeded the policy bite. That mismatch is the tell.
The Breakdown
• Silverman pins tech's Trump shift to 2022's zero-rate policy end, not culture wars or Biden hostility toward innovation
• Saudi Arabia invested billions in Silicon Valley while running spy ring inside Twitter, normalizing authoritarian governance models
• Tech billionaires tested political playbook in San Francisco recalls before scaling dark money strategy nationally
• Silverman unsealed X's shareholder list revealing 95 entities including Gulf-linked funds; no federal security review occurred
The ZIRP dependency
A decade of near-zero rates let founders and funds amplify paper wealth with leverage and clever structuring. When rates climbed and crypto cracked, the bill arrived. The grievance performance began. Silverman, who briefly ghostwrote for Vivek Ramaswamy, sketches a class accustomed to getting its way confronting limits for the first time in years. Instead of adjusting, they sought a political guarantor.
So the microphones came out. Marc Andreessen cast routine policy meetings as existential. David Sacks rebranded himself as the Valley’s tribune against “regulatory warfare.” Elon Musk adopted a maximalist free-speech posture while pursuing federal contracts and subsidies. The language was liberty. The objective was fewer guardrails. One sentence captures it: constraint, not culture, was the threat.
The Saudi template
This alignment didn’t begin with Trump. Gulf money—especially from Saudi Arabia—had become a fixture in Valley finance for years. Saudi capital sat near the top of Twitter’s cap table; Prince Alwaleed bin Talal built roughly a five-percent position and later kept it when Musk took the company private. U.S. prosecutors also documented a Saudi insider operation at Twitter: a media partnerships manager, Ahmad Abouammo, was convicted by a jury in 2022, and an engineer, Ali Alzabarah, left the United States after accessing user data and remains wanted by authorities. The platform was both an investment and, at times, a lever.
The capital flows shaped attitudes. A prominent venture capitalist praised the crown prince as if he were a startup “founder.” It was flattery, yes, but also a worldview: comfort with benevolent-autocrat logic abroad makes illiberal shortcuts at home feel reasonable. That’s the through-line Silverman wants readers to see.
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The San Francisco lab
Before going national, donors refined a playbook at home. They financed recalls of school-board members and the progressive district attorney, built a web of PACs, and elevated candidates who promised “order.” The city’s struggles were real. The narrative—progressivism ruined everything—was politically useful. It became a kit: marshal money, pick symbolic fights, frame them as competence vs chaos, and scale that frame to state and federal races. Simple. Effective.
What the access reveals
Silverman didn’t just stitch together public clips. He pried loose documents. After a successful motion in federal court, X’s private shareholder roster became visible—nearly 100 entities spanning tech founders, venture funds, and foreign-linked pools of capital. The list made a hazy network concrete. Calls for a national-security review of the deal surfaced at the time. No public decision followed. Silence can be policy, too.
The democracy question
The ideology predates the rate hike. Peter Thiel argued years ago that democracy hobbles “true freedom.” Variations of that thesis migrated from blogs into concrete projects: charter-city schemes in Central America, company-town ideas in California, crypto “exit” strategies, and, in Texas, whispers of private micro-polities. Musk mused openly about post-democratic governance. Silverman treats these as sincere ambitions, not trolling—build enclaves with their own rules, minimize the public’s veto, and operate at the edge of the state or above it. It’s a management philosophy wearing a political coat.
The performance metrics
The show often outpaced the facts. When journalist Gil Duran started a shoestring newsletter critiquing the tech right, Y Combinator’s president blasted him as a “parasite” and hinted at shadowy funders. Duran, at the time, had three paying subscribers. The rage machine needed a villain; the numbers rarely obliged.
There’s also a boomerang risk. Since the endorsement tours, Musk has hit setbacks in courtrooms and markets. Tariffs and turbulence can dent even favored industries. If the arc bends back toward normal, some may look at the Biden years—contracts humming, capital still plentiful by historical standards—and wonder what justified the crusade. Silverman’s answer is stark: a class accustomed to unbroken ascent met its first real constraints and chose to replace the referees rather than adapt the game.
Why this matters
Tech’s “right turn” reads less like an awakening than an oligarchic consolidation—wealth protecting itself by rewriting the rulebook.
Normalizing the Gulf template—easy money plus surveillance comfort—imports illiberal habits into U.S. business and politics.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is ZIRP and why did ending it trigger tech's political shift?
A: ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy) ran from roughly 2012 to 2022, letting tech firms borrow cheaply and amplify valuations through leverage. When the Federal Reserve raised rates starting in 2022, that free money disappeared. Crypto crashed, growth stocks fell, and investors demanded actual profits instead of future promises. Tech billionaires faced real constraints for the first time in a decade.
Q: How much Saudi money actually flowed into Silicon Valley?
A: Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund put $3.5 billion into Uber in 2016 and $20 billion into Blackstone's infrastructure fund. By autumn 2018, the kingdom had become the largest single funding source for U.S. startups. Prince Alwaleed held roughly 5% of Twitter before Musk's takeover, then rolled $1.89 billion into the new entity. Hundreds of millions more went to Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund.
Q: How did the Saudi spy ring inside Twitter actually work?
A: Saudi official Bader Al Asaker recruited Twitter employees starting in 2014. Ahmad Abouammo, working in media partnerships, received over $100,000 in cash and gifts for user data—email addresses, phone numbers, private messages. Engineer Ali Alzabarah had broader access and provided IP addresses revealing dissidents' locations. The FBI warned Twitter in 2015, but Alzabarah fled to Saudi Arabia with diplomatic help.
Q: What did Lina Khan's FTC actually do that angered tech billionaires?
A: Khan's FTC blocked Microsoft's $69 billion Activision deal (later approved with conditions), sued Amazon for monopolistic practices, challenged Meta's acquisition strategy, and investigated OpenAI's data practices. These were standard antitrust moves, not radical overreach. But for tech firms accustomed to a decade of merger approvals and minimal oversight, any enforcement felt like persecution. The cases mostly followed established legal precedent.
Q: Who is Jacob Silverman and why trust his analysis?
A: Silverman co-wrote Easy Money (2023), the definitive book on crypto fraud, with actor Ben McKenzie. He previously covered social media's early failures in his 2015 book. For Gilded Rage, he worked briefly as Vivek Ramaswamy's ghostwriter, giving him inside access to ZIRP-era excess. He also successfully sued to unseal X's shareholder list in federal court, revealing the Saudi-Gulf financial network behind Musk's takeover.
Tech journalist. Lives in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Got his start writing for his high school newspaper. When not covering tech trends, he's swimming laps, gaming on PS4, or vibe coding through the night.
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