Democracy Now! Audio - "Gilded Rage": Author Jacob Silverman on Elon Musk & Right-Wing Extremism in Silicon Valley

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Extended interview with Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.

This is Democracy Now, Democracy Now.org, the War and Peace Report. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermin-Sheikh. As we continue our conversation with journalist Jacob Silverman. His book is out this week in paperback. It's called Gilded Rage, Elon Musk, and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. Interesting. It's out this week with the AI summit, the tech billionaire AI leaders, addressing the UN Security Council.

And now in Washington, D.C., President Trump has received Chinese President Xi, and they're having a state dinner tonight. Among those attending that state dinner are Mark Zuckerberg of Meda, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Sam Altman, OpenAI, Tim Cook of Apple, Sundar Pachai of Google, Sachinadella of Microsoft, Lisa Sue, AMD, and Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX. That's where we want to go, Jacob Silverman, because he is in the title of your book, Gilded Rage, Elon Musk, and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. As you listen to that list of tech CEOs who will be part of this AI summit with she and Trump. If you can talk also and especially about Elon Musk and what is happening right now, you wrote this book a year ago.

Well, in the times since I finished the book, it seems that Musk has fallen out with Trump and gone back together a couple times. What I think it shows even that we're a couple years now into the new Trump regime almost is that these tech leaders are able to stick by him. They find common cause and common interests. And I think especially with AI, the authoritarian mindset, I think, comes very easily to the AI CEOs because they, they are thinking about changing the world, at least according to their own vision, which is often just communicated into abstract. We're going to create a utopia or apocalypse. But in order to do that, they need vast amount of resources,

and they need sort of nation-state level capabilities. They need unbelievable amounts of money, land, energy, the chips that only NVIDIA, and sometimes a couple other companies can provide. And that's why you see these guys like Sam Altman, who is very anti-Trump ahead of the 2016 election, but is also a very opportunity. person, come around now and go to every dinner or a public event they're invited to with Trump

because the U.S. government can provide contracts, it can provide funding and investment. It might even take an equity role in OpenAI, which is something that Sam Altman has talked about. So these aren't the tech companies of 10 years ago. These are ones that are much more like their own little nation states and need that kind of relationship with authoritarian power like the Trump regime. I think it's so interesting that you talk about these companies like nation states because these tech billionaires are now, I mean, they are dressing world leaders and may well have more power than any head of country. Yeah, in a way, it does seem a little ridiculous or discordant to me. I mean, I think their products and the power that they wield.

Yeah, I mean, it's not something that one would want to see this. I mean, this is what we see here in the United States, this fusion of corporate life and the White House, including just Trump's own business interests as a stock trader and with his World Liberty Financial and other crypto interests. And so it is disturbing, I think, to see these CEOs who don't seem to be great friends of democracy given the sort of stage of the United Nations. And they speak in such general terms. Like, if you think your product might destroy the world, well, maybe you should stop making that product. But they are afforded a kind of respect and even a kind of latitude that you don't see in other industries. If there was an energy company or a chemicals company or something like that

and their products started harming people, hopefully there would be a legal or regulatory response. And right now, what the AI industry is doing is they say, this stuff is going to get away from us and there's nothing we can do. And I don't really buy that narrative. In fact, you've said, quote, there's a quote from you, the catastrophic promise of AI has practically become part of the sales pitch in their ominous warnings of unchecked artificial intelligence escaping Pandora's box, industry luminaries can sound like Robert J. Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project scientists

who wondered if a nuclear bomb test would ignite the Earth's atmosphere. Could you elaborate on that analogy? Sure. So during World War II and the Manhattan Project, Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists working on it would sort of joke or even bet with one another that the next test might ignite the oxygen in the atmosphere and destroy the planet. Of course, those were much different stakes involving a massive global configuration like World War II.

But there's a similar kind of almost blithe attitude among a lot of the AI leaders today. And what I think is very disturbing about this is they see themselves as the inheritors of the Manhattan Project. And some of them have even talked about how AI is a bigger risk than nuclear proliferation or the use of nuclear weapons. And right now we see some definite negative externalities from AI. and there are ways, I think, in which actually Jensen Huang's right, the laws on the books could be used to crack down on companies that harm consumers, for example.

But there also is this sort of technological determinism that they operate under, which is that someone has to do this, it's going to advance on its own anyway, and you should just believe our promises that this sort of apocalyptic potential is matched by an even more utopian potential. And that is, you know,

that is not really a good answer to a public that's actually worried about how, is harming people in the here and now, whether through AI psychosis or being used in war zones. I mean, the bad effects of AI are something we're seeing right now, and they don't necessarily have to involve the end of the world. On Elon Musk, I mean, who you focused on in gilded rage, can you talk about, you know, you started part two of this conversation by saying, you know, you wrote this when he was in with Trump, out with Trump, now back in with Trump. talk about that journey and also his companies and where he stands today from SpaceX to X to Tesla and his power amongst all these tech billionaires. Of course, he's the first trillionaire. Well, I think Musk is very impulsive, as a lot of us have probably seen. And he doesn't, he has his

political beliefs, which are very right wing, anti-migrant, anti-trans. But, He doesn't, I think, have a lot of focus as a political actor. Because he's so rich, he can afford to delegate or just say, I'm going to donate $200 million to various Republican causes. But I think that's why we see that, I mean, he's a volatile person. There have been reports that he's a drug user. And so I don't think it's a surprise when you see a late-at-night tweet of him saying that Trump is in the Epstein files, but then a month or two later he's making up with Trump in public.

But what he is, it also is very transaction. which is just what Trump is. He's the most transactional politicians. So I think that's why you see these sort of combustive breakups and then they get back together, because these are two types of people who can kind of operate in that same way. I think Trump appeals to Musk because he's someone he feels like he can act through, or at least used to his own ends. And I think that's why you're going to see hundreds of millions of dollars from Musk flow into the 2028 election. And what does that mean? into the 2026 midterms, I should say. And talk about what that means.

I think it means that you're going to see a lot of, sure, I think it means that you're going to see a lot of traditional MAGA candidates with that kind of right-wing tech backing led by Musk. And you're going to see these super PACs that are supporting right-wing candidates that are doing it with tech money. I mean, what we had in the 2024 election was Musk and the crypto industry, which is the biggest donor by industry, supporting MAGA and putting a lot of money behind the Trump and Associated Republican campaigns.

The only difference in the midterms is it's going to be a lot of the same people, but now you have AI super PACs. And I think that's the main difference. But we're going to kind of see a reboot or another runaround of the 2024 financing of the Republican and MAGA cause. And Elon Musk's background. I mean, continually you see throughout the media that picture of what looks like the Nazi salute of Elon Musk at one Trump rally, when he was running. Give us a little more, though it's, you know, something you understand very well. I don't think people really do about his background, where he came from.

I did a podcast for CBC Canadian broadcasting about Elon Musk, and we focused a lot on his childhood, his political development. I mean, he grew up in apartheid South Africa. He was sometimes bullied at school. He certainly had a very abusive father, who some of us have seen in the media. who's now become a very strange figure. But he was part of the racial elite in this society. And I think he's carried this idea of his own sort of predestination,

his own inherent elitism, including, of course, his genetic elitism, because he wants to reproduce as much as possible. And that has been something that he's carried with him through his whole career in Silicon Valley. And as he's become more obviously right-wing. Yeah, he grew up in South Africa under apartheid, and he left right before college, basically, or he studied a little bit there, and then he went to Canada where his mom has citizenship, and then eventually came to the U.S. possibly via immigration fraud. But I think that South African upbringing is always going to be there. I mean, Musk clearly displays the sense of racial and genetic superiority.

You also see it now with how he talks about migrants in the U.K. He's warning people in the U.K. that migrants are going to come. kill them and they have to be violent in return. I mean, I don't know what to call that by kind of, but the anti-blackness of a guy who grew up in apartheid South Africa. Jacob, in April you wrote a piece for the nation titled The Death of an AI Whistleblower. Can you tell us about Suchir Balaji and what he sought to expose about open AI data abuses? A month after his interview with the New York Times, he was found dead with a gunshot. shot wound to his head? Yes, it's a very sad story. He was in his mid-20s. He was an idealistic

AI researcher and had jobs in AI safety and what they call alignment, which is sort of a branch of AI safety, making sure that these systems work in line with human goals and human values. And, you know, there has been a lot of skepticism or kind of conspiracizing around his story. I did not look that much into the physical evidence, but I've really tried to look at the case as, well, one, it's very tragic. I mean, this is someone who basically blew the whistle on OpenAI appeared on this front page New York Times story because what he found, which is what's happening at a lot of AI companies

or pretty much all of them, is that OpenAI was stealing data, wherever it could find it, and using copyrighted information in order to train its models. You know, when I hear about open AI, or one of these rogue open AI agents, supposedly hacking into another company. I mean, I think that's relevant, but it's also this is something controlled by humans, and it's probably part of that search for as much data as possible. So, Sushir Bellagia lived in San Francisco.

He appeared in this New York Times profile, very sort of innocent-looking face, young guy, and about a month later, he was found dead of a gunshot wound. I mean, personally, I think it was a suicide. One thing I try to talk about in the article is, I mean, is the

stress that faces whistleblowers. They're not enough protections for whistleblowers, and they're not enough actually for AI whistleblowers who, Chuck Grassley, of all people, who actually is fairly pro-whistleblower in some context, has tried to introduce a bill to protect more whistleblowers. But, you know, this is someone who I think had this big splashy front-page article and then spent the next month kind of alone,

being under a lot of stress. You're still talking to friends and family. But what I've learned sort of researching and studying whistleblowers and talking to people who work with them, it is an incredible kind of stress and fear, and it's not enough to just testify in a case or appear in an article. It's a long, trying, potentially damaging process. And I think based on the physical evidence that we've seen, he probably did commit suicide. But one thing I do also write about is his parents, who are very sympathetic people,

obviously went through one of the most horrific tragedies one can. And because the Democrats don't seem that interested in this guy, in Sucierge. Bilaji's story. The parents have actually been involved in a lot of this conspiracizing and been interviewed by a lot of right-wing media from Tucker Carlson on down. And part of that is because this story kind of plays into the Elon Musk, Sam Altman rivalry. So, Shire Bellagy obviously worked for Sam Altman at Open AI.

But it's, I think, a more complicated story about the idealism behind some people working AI, what happens when they see that these companies are just as ruthless or cutthroat as any other American corporation. And then how you deal with that when someone tries to blow the whistle. And this guy, Sushir Balagia, this young man, was definitely failed by the systems around him. Well, we'd like to go to another person who quit from a major AI company, that is to say, anthropic. Earlier this month, Jacob Coxon publicly resigned, warning that the racist.

to produce super-intelligent machines poses an existential threat to humans. This is Jacob speaking to PBS NewsHour last week. RSI, or recursive self-improvement, is the idea that we could take the discipline of AI research as currently practiced and automate it with the AIs we're building. So we could let the AIs make themselves smarter. And we've already made strides towards doing that. So right now a lot of the research that researchers at these labs do is via AIs that carry out certain tasks or experiments. Currently, we still need the human to provide taste or

judgment, but plausibly within a year, certainly within two years, we're on track to also automating away this nebulous human quality of judgment so that the AIs can rapidly make themselves smarter. And at that point, things could go very, very fast. So we get new generations of AIs very quickly without necessarily having the corresponding tech to understand what they're doing and control what they're doing. So your response to Jacob Coxon's story and what his position is. Well, I think we've seen a lot of this in recent years of researchers quitting AI companies, sometimes going to another one right afterwards. I think what we need to hear more or see is really transparency into these companies. I mean, they're speaking to us about these dangers.

We need to have responsible outside figures and especially technically competent people who can kind of audit these claims. And then we can figure out what to do. do from there. But just this promise that they're building something terrible and that they can't seem to stop, I think more alarms the public than anything else. And in some ways, it tracks good attention to these companies. Yeah, so let's go back to 2014 when the world-renowned groundbreaking physicist, Stephen Hawking issued a warning about the development of artificial intelligence. Hawking had a neuromuscular disorder known as Lou Gehrig's disease and used a computer-based communication system to speak. He was interviewed by the BBC. Again, this is 20.

The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we already have have proved very useful. But I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, could compete on what we so proceeded. So that was Stephen Hawking, world-renowned physicist speaking through a computer. He had Lou Gehrig's disease. So these warnings then about the risks of artificial intelligence are minimally 11 years old.

Your final words? I think actually they're decades old because a lot of this stuff goes back to the science fiction that people like Elon Musk or other people involved in this debate grew up reading. And what I think we have to understand is that these are technologies made by humans and hopefully controlled by humans. We don't need to bring humans out of the loop. And this idea of recursive self-improvement is certainly something to watch out for. But, you know, these are systems and companies, massive ones requiring a huge amount of resources in which humans are still involved. And humans should be legally liable and responsible for doing this kind of development.

And this idea that might just suddenly escape all of us, I think, is a kind of an abdication of human responsibility and perhaps legal responsibility. Jacob Silverman, his latest book, Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the radicalization of Silicon Valley, is just out in paperback. To see part one of our discussion, go to DemocracyNow.org. I'm Amy Goodman with Nermin-Sheikh. Thanks so much for joining us.