Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley
You will put down Gilded Rage in frustration if you hope for an account of Musk’s personal metamorphosis. This is a group portrait ... There are intriguing nuggets throughout ... The book is at its best when Silverman sketches a portrait of a specific, lesser-known character ... That is one of the pitfalls of a group portrait. You can easily leave the reader unsure where they stand as you throw them from one person to the next or, in Silverman’s case, from one person to the next and back, time and again, over the course of 330 pages. His tendency to do so robs his work of narrative propulsion, a flaw compounded by Silverman’s other tendency: to break the fourth wall with moralistic asides, undermining what is otherwise a dogged work of reporting ... Silverman, like many modern liberals, too often sees dark money and even darker elites behind every democratic decision he doesn’t like ... This sense, of Silverman adjudicating at a remove from the real action, pervades the book. There is a limit to how much of a story you can thread together from public records and freedom of information requests. The revelatory work to be done on these men and their aims will have to come from someone with access to them, or those around them. The wait for a literary executioner of tech’s gilded class goes on.
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The suggestion that Silicon Valley’s achievements are more about market manipulation than genuine innovation is debatable, and could be interpreted as sour grapes from a former employee. But Silverman’s critique contains a truth that tends to be ignored even by the most strident Silicon Valley critics. Musk’s achievements are real...but he is no stranger to financial engineering ... This conclusion feels inevitable and...perhaps a bit dispiriting.
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Cogent ... A book that should trouble your dreams.
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