One Month of GILDED RAGE!
My new book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, has been on store shelves for a month now, along with a CBC limited podcast series called “The Making of Musk.” I am really glad to have both of these works out in the world, and I hope you buy many copies, though libraries are great resources, too.
There have been strong reviews in Kirkus, Bloomberg, the Bulwark, and Publishers Weekly, which named Gilded Rage one of the best nonfiction books of 2025. A couple members of the financial press seemed to hate it, which I welcome. The Financial Times called the book “lively and provocative.” (No need to relate what else they said.)
You can read excerpts of Gilded Rage in Newsweek, Lithub, and The Guardian. The book also incorporates some reporting that I’ve done on this Substack and for other outlets. I narrated the audiobook.
I’ve been doing many interviews in every media format available. (Soon: Laserdisc.) I had a wonderful conversation with noted cat owner and “Get Him to the Greek” star Paul Krugman:
I’ve talked with the great Paris Marx, Brian Merchant, TrueAnon, KFPA, Politico, The Majority Report, WhoWhatWhy, and many other outlets. My voice has been heard on television and radio both terrestrial and satellite. I’ve been happy to talk with colleagues and readers in Wyoming, DC, San Francisco, and Boston.
I’ve talked a lot about tech fascism, billionaires’ affinity for the Saudi royal government, the whiplash of the last 20 years of tech politics, Republican complicity in Trump’s corruption, what the Covid years wrought, the paranoid billionaire mind, and how a bunch of centrist liberals and would-be libertarians developed a reactionary hatred of the Democratic Party and the left.
I recently published an op-ed in the New York Times about the unprecedented corruption made possible by World Liberty Financial and Trump’s crypto interests. It’s an issue I discuss in the book that has assumed huge importance in Trump’s second administration, in which white collar crime is legal, as long it somehow benefits the president and his family.
You can still follow me on X, Bluesky, and book sites like Amazon and Goodreads. As always, I am vowing to start writing regularly again on this Substack, where everything will continue to be unpaywalled and donations are welcome but not expected. I don’t like to write a lot of takes — I’ve done it too much — so I try to bring more reporting here, which takes time. I do have a few feature ideas and leads to follow. First, I have to clear away some work and promotional duties, but this will be my home base going into 2026.
Thanks for tuning in.