What Really Drove Silicon Valley’s Shift to the Right
In Gilded Rage, journalist Jacob Silverman argues that a decade of free cash turned tech’s utopians into power brokers and made Trump their unlikely ally.
Illustration: Dave Murray for Bloomberg
From the moment in October 2024 when Elon Musk stepped on stage at a political rally in Pennsylvania — giddily jumping up and down while encouraging thousands of Trump supporters to “fight, fight, fight” — journalists, political analysts and politicians have puzzled over what exactly prompted him to shift his political allegiances so dramatically.
How did the chief executive officer of what was once the world’s most visible green energy company, who’d for a time styled himself as a pro-immigrant, pro-gay rights environmentalist, come to support a candidate who opposed all of those things? Why did Musk, who’d previously seemed most animated by technological questions rather than political ones, suddenly seem fixated on the supposed sins of the left and the so-called “woke mind virus?” What, exactly, had made him so angry?