Do you feel in charge?

Silicon Valley continues to exercise its control over Washington

As things go from bad to worse in Washington, the relevance of Silicon Valley’s shift to the right has only, sadly, become more salient.

Elon Musk is effectively managing the federal government’s spending while a checked out Trump is bloviating his way into one international incident after another. The president’s comments and policy proposals for cryptocurrency are acting like pump and dump schemes.

Meanwhile, the rich are only getting richer and exercising their influence over the federal government.

To that end, I’d like to share some recent media appearances I did to promote my new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left that deal with this issue and our current moment specifically.

I went on Spectrum News to discuss Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Governmental Efficiency.

Then, an excerpt at Hellworld; here’s some of Luke’s intro:

Like a lot of other people on the left another question you've probably asked yourself at one point or another is what exactly is Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald's fucking deal ? Owned puts in the work to answer that as well.

There's also a chapter in there about Substack and their shift to the right caused in large part by taking investment money from another one of these jewel hoarding dragon fucks Marc Andreessen.

At Rolling Stone, an excerpt on Peter Thiel:

Thiel, the far-right billionaire investor, adheres to an overarching philosophy — power. It’s one of the reasons he rejects the “woke” ideology of equity, as he explained to comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster on their Triggernometry podcast in July 2024. Thiel said he sees Christianity as the ultimate “woke” religion for its focus on the poor, sick, and weak.

I went on the American Prestige podcast to talk more about Elon:

And I went on CNN to chat about Jeff Bezos and his interference in the mission of the Washington Post’s opinion section. So far the only clip is on Twitter, which Musk has made hard to embed here, so you can click through if you’re so inclined.

That’s all for now—thanks for reading!