Chances are you already know some random things about the Silicon Valley technology billionaires who have embraced—and been embraced by—the Trump administration: that, for example, Peter Thiel’s data mining company, Palantir, supplies surveillance software to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, that the recent public stock offering for SpaceX briefly made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, or that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a former Democratic Party stalwart, turned to Trump after he saw, he said, the most successful people sending “their kids to the most politically radical institutions, which teach them how to be America-hating communists.” You may even know that Thiel, in contrast to most of his Silicon Valley peers, supported Trump’s 2016 campaign, or that during the 2024 campaign Musk was Trump’s largest individual donor, giving $239 million to his pro-Trump America PAC and around $50 million to other Trump-aligned groups, or that Andreessen helped staff the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), Musk’s predatory duchy within Trump’s second administration.
Yet in the fractured attention economy in which we all now reside, it’s easy to know these disparate facts and still have only a vague understanding of their larger significance. It is the mastery of such diverse particulars that makes Gil Durán’s new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, so valuable. Durán, the former editorial page editor of the San Francisco Examiner, has taken a tremendous amount of previously reported information that, on its own, might have looked like dots on a pointillist’s canvas, and created a haunting picture of the political project pursued and abetted by a confederacy of Silicon Valley elites. Their goal is nothing less than to destroy liberal democracy. Their money, in tandem with a Republican Party establishment that shares many of their objectives and a president with an insatiable lust for riches, has pushed a fringe ideology—what is popularly called technofascism but is closer in aspiration to straight-up totalitarianism—into the affairs of state.
Democracy has always been vulnerable to capture by those who would use its own apparatus to undermine it. While the United States has long harbored people and parties that have espoused antidemocratic sentiments—the Know-Nothing and Communist parties come to mind—the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission presented an unprecedented opportunity for those willing to spend whatever it takes to elect politicians to do their bidding. According to a report by the Roosevelt Institute,
The 2024 federal elections saw the highest level of billionaire spending in American history. In an effort to influence outcomes, billionaire donors and their families spent over $2.6 billion—a figure amounting to nearly 20 percent of total federal election spending that cycle.
Most of this money went to support Donald Trump’s reelection. Trump’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act then rewarded his billionaire friends (as well as his own family) with enormous tax cuts. But Trump’s Silicon Valley backers, who together donated nearly $400 million to his campaign, wanted something more: for the newly reelected president to demolish the federal bureaucracy and its pesky regulatory regime.
Decimating the so-called administrative state has long been advocated by right-wing partisans. In his 1981 inaugural address, for example, Ronald Reagan vowed to “curb the size and influence of the Federal establishment,” and the following year he convened the Grace Commission to root out “government waste.” (It did not, as Congress failed to implement most of its recommendations.) Twelve years later the Republican campaign platform Contract with America promised to “transform the way Congress works,” which “would be the end of government that is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public’s money.” Though Republicans were able to win a majority in the House—their first in forty years—their ambitions were largely stymied by a resistant Senate and the veto power of the Democratic president, Bill Clinton.
In 2024 Musk, fresh from pulverizing Twitter and imbued with the “move fast and break things” ethos of Silicon Valley, was not interested in such niceties as advisory boards or legislation. As he ingratiated himself with Trump by becoming his biggest donor, Musk pitched him on creating a strike force aimed at eliminating what he believed to be the excesses of the federal government. In keeping with the quid pro quo that has come to define Trump’s presidency, Trump issued Executive Order 14158, “Establishing and Implementing the President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency,’” on his first day in office. And he put Musk in charge, along with the tech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy (who soon departed and is now running for governor of Ohio).
DOGE was a first run of what Durán calls “the nerd reich”: two incredibly rich guys who worship at the altar of money and technology taking an ax to federal agencies they didn’t like, such as USAID (which Musk called “a criminal organization”), slashing the budgets of the National Institutes of Health (too woke) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (whose functions, Project 2025 claimed, could be privatized and monetized), firing tens of thousands of workers, and causing hundreds of thousands of others to take buyouts or early retirement. It was disruptive, cataclysmic, and cruel—so in that sense it was a roaring success. Financially, on the other hand, it was an abject failure. Though Musk promised that DOGE would cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, not only did it not come anywhere close to that figure, its “savings claims [were] overstated, inaccurate and rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how the federal budget works,” according to a report by NPR, further substantiated by a recent Government Accountability Office investigation. Musk stepped down after 130 days.
Musk’s departure was not the end of DOGE. Russell Vought, one of the main architects of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for restructuring the government, whom Trump installed as director of the Office of Management and Budget, took over. A canny right-wing operative and avowed Christian nationalist who harbors a persistent disaffection for democracy, Vought was in a position to set DOGE (through the OMB) on a course to implement his vision of an autocratic, post-constitutional government. In a private speech in 2023, he said:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
Vought championed what Trump called the Merit Hiring Plan, which required applicants for government vacancies to write short essays professing their patriotism and fealty to the president and his policies; seeded slash-and-burn emissaries throughout the government; and strong-armed Congress into accepting a $9.4 billion rescissions package that eliminated funding for programs maligned by the right, such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the US Institute of Peace. According to a study by The American Prospect, drawing on a study by the Revolving Door Project, “DOGE was—and remains, through Vought’s OMB—an effort to extinguish the existing government and create a new one in the image of oligarchs and far-right ideologues.”
It would be inaccurate, though, to suggest that Musk’s departure from DOGE and Vought’s ascendancy represent the supremacy of the inveterate right-wing establishment over the upstart tech billionaires. Not only are the two in many ways ideologically aligned; Vought’s think tank, the Center for Renewing America, operates within a conservative ecosphere that benefits from dark money groups such as DonorsTrust and the Rockbridge Network, a “political venture capital firm” cofounded by J.D. Vance. Both DonorsTrust and Rockbridge are bankrolled in large part by Silicon Valley’s most prominent Trump supporter, the man who once famously wrote, “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible”: Peter Thiel.
As Durán points out, Thiel’s politics precede Trump—indeed, they precede his own engagement with electoral politics by decades. As a Stanford undergraduate in the late 1980s he cofounded The Stanford Review as a counterweight to what he later said was the “wokeness” of the university (though the pejorative shorthand for progressive views hadn’t yet entered the right-wing lexicon). The Stanford Review attracted a group of like-minded students, many of whom later joined Thiel’s tech ventures and became very rich and aggressively doctrinal themselves.
David Sacks, for example, the editor-in-chief of The Stanford Review a few years after Thiel and the coauthor with him of the 1995 book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus (in which they argued, among other things, that the definition of rape had been expanded to include “seductions that are later regretted”), became an executive at Confinity, the precursor to PayPal, of which Thiel was a cofounder. When PayPal sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002, he became an extremely wealthy man. Sacks is now the cochair of Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, after a turn as the administration’s special adviser for AI and crypto; in that position he, among other things, worked to preempt state AI regulations. Crucially, as The New York Times reported, Sacks’s dual roles as the administration’s AI and crypto “czar,” influencing policy for both technologies while also investing in them, “laid the groundwork for his investments to flourish.”
Trump, who once called Bitcoin “a scam,” embraced cryptocurrency in his second term, creating his own crypto company with the members of his family; according to Durán, “Within a few months of his return to the White House, the Trump family’s net worth increased by $5 billion.” A recent New York Times investigation found that another crypto scheme, a Trump meme coin, netted the president hundreds of millions of dollars, while his wife took in $6 million from her cryptocurrency. In contrast, the Times noted that many of the small investors who bought these coins lost their money.
Beyond Trump’s self-dealing, his sudden affection for cryptocurrency has created an undetectable way for foreign nationals to ingratiate themselves with him, raising national security concerns. Consider Guren “Bobby” Zhou, a former flooring salesman and failed investor from China who had come under investigation for money laundering in the UK. Zhou put $100 million into Trump’s World Liberty Financial cryptocurrency. As the Times noted:
In any prior era, a windfall for the president of that size from a foreigner with no public signs of access to that level of wealth would have certainly gone against norms and might have spawned a congressional investigation.
Instead, the curious case of Mr. Zhou illustrates the ease with which buyers with unknown backgrounds and motivations can use the anonymity of cryptocurrency to shower Mr. Trump with money.
It remains unclear who fronted Zhou the money.
Though it may not have been obvious to the public when Thiel and his partners started Confinity, their mobile payments app PayPal was also aimed at bypassing the traditional banking system. (Confinity later merged with Musk’s digital payment platform, X.com, and took the name PayPal.) As Max Chafkin points out in his book about Thiel, The Contrarian (2021):*
From its earliest days Thiel understood that it could be a lot more than a clever way to split checks…. If it took off, it would make it impossible for governments to regulate their economies, leading to, he boasted to a reporter, “the erosion of the nation-state.”
It was the first volley in an attack on state control that almost no one buying stuff on eBay knew they were engaged in.
Durán traces Thiel’s antiestablishment heterodoxy to a 1997 book called The Sovereign Individual, written by James Dale Davidson, an American venture capitalist and the founder of the conservative National Taxpayers Union, and William Rees-Mogg, a former editor of The Times of London and a life peer in the House of Lords. The book, Durán writes,
laid out a dramatic thesis, hyping the arrival of an information age in which technology would upend both economics and politics, eliminating most jobs, reducing work to piecemeal gig assignments, and sparking widespread decline, chaos, and violence as tens of millions of people struggled to survive without work.
He continues:
Davidson and Rees-Mogg argued that technological disruption would accelerate the sorting of humanity into inferior and superior people. Their cognitive elites would be investors and tech entrepreneurs with the skills and knowledge to prosper in the new decentralized tech economy. They would become a powerful new political force, a class of “sovereign individuals” whose intelligence and wealth freed them from democracy, nationality, taxes, and regulations. “Cybercurrency”—an early term for crypto—would aid their escape and fuel their rise.
Certainly, as prescient as this seems now, it’s also possible to see the book as a formula followed by those “cognitive elites” to create the conditions to promote their domination. Bitcoin, the first mainstream cybercurrency, wasn’t “mined” until 2009, twelve years after The Sovereign Individual was published. Thiel’s Founders Fund was one of the earliest venture firms, along with Andreessen Horowitz, to invest heavily in it, thus offering Bitcoin legitimacy, which encouraged public and institutional adoption, which then increased its “value.” Both companies also hold significant amounts of Ether, the native cryptocurrency of the blockchain network Ethereum, Bitcoin’s nearest competitor. Ethereum was invented by the Russian Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin while he was supported by the Thiel Fellowship, which rewarded young people—Buterin was twenty—with $100,000 to drop out of university or forgo it altogether to build new technologies.
Meanwhile, the gig economy Davidson and Rees-Mogg imagined came to fruition with the introduction of such platforms as Uber (2009) and Airbnb (2008), which received investments from Sacks (Uber) and Thiel (Airbnb), who were not averse to making scads of money while disempowering workers. Even the newsletter platform Substack, which established a gig economy for journalists (including Durán) just as the newspaper business was shrinking, traces its creation to the tech incubator Y Combinator, which was run by Sam Altman, the guy who keeps warning that the product being developed by his current company, OpenAI, is an existential threat to humanity or at least to workers everywhere. (Altman, who was a six-figure donor to Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign but on July 4, 2025, declared himself “politically homeless,” donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and $5 million to his super PAC, MAGA Inc.) Thiel was a partner at Y Combinator at the time, and Andreessen Horowitz was one of Substack’s initial major investors. While Substack newsletters enable writers to monetize their work, they also shrink the public square—which, in Durán’s estimation, is the actual point.
Here’s Balaji Srinivasan, a former partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the author of The Network State: How to Start a New Country (2022): “We replace media with parallel media…. They’re gaining strength. They’re pulling away users—until they become the new thing. So this is how we turn that seemingly impossible thing of building a new country.” A network state, as Srinivasan defines it, is “a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.” Or as he said on a podcast called Moment of Zen, “What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism.”
A more functional definition is offered by the St. Lawrence University professor Zane Griffin Talley Cooper: “The Network State model seeks to eschew most forms of social and environmental regulation, instead promoting a libertarian fantasy of rapid privatized innovation and development.” That fantasy is becoming something of a reality, thanks in part to Pronomos Capital, a venture firm run by Patri Friedman, the grandson of Milton Friedman, that supports a worldwide collection of what its website calls, with ardent vagueness, “the cities of tomorrow.” Srinivasan is an adviser to Pronomos; Thiel is an investor. (Friedman has also promoted building autonomous, extrajudicial cities floating on the ocean.)
Not long after the publication of his book, Srinivasan convened a conference in Amsterdam that highlighted network state projects already underway in San Francisco, Arizona, Texas, Honduras, and Zanzibar. There have been other conferences since; the 2025 Network State Conference attracted over eight thousand participants and featured such speakers as Buterin, Ben Horowitz, and Bryan Johnson of “Don’t Die” fame. Durán writes that a Pronomos-backed project called Praxis, led by a twenty-eight-year-old named Dryden Brown, “announced plans to build a tech city in the Mediterranean backed by Sam Altman, Joe Lonsdale, and Srinivasan himself, along with investments from Thiel and others.” (Lonsdale, another Stanford Review and PayPal alum, is a cofounder of Palantir.) It’s not clear exactly how California Forever, a real estate venture funded by a group of tech billionaires who secretly bought around 60,000 acres of land sixty miles north of San Francisco in order to build a new, improved city, fits into Srinivasan’s vision, but Durán reports that on the Moment of Zen podcast, Srinivasan “added that a major new network state project was already underway ‘on bare land’ in California,” a claim its CEO, Jan Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader, has denied.
Most recently, Durán reports, proponents of what are also known as “freedom cities” have been eyeing Greenland as an outpost for an unregulated tech haven where artificial intelligence and bio-hacking experiments could be developed without guardrails or government interference. In response to Trump’s interest in claiming the Danish autonomous territory for the United States, Brown tweeted:
Praxis would like to support Greenland’s development by coordinating talent, companies, and capital to help secure the Arctic, extract critical resources, terraform the land with advanced technology to make it more habitable, and build a mythical city in the North.
The previous summer Brown had gone to Greenland “to try to buy it,” but was rebuffed, as was Trump’s emissary, Vance. (Vance, of course, is yet another Thiel protégé, and Thiel’s $15 million donation to Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign was the largest ever given to a Senate candidate. Two years later Thiel lobbied Trump to choose Vance as his running mate.) Still, despite Greenlanders’ hostility to these overtures, the Greenland saga is not over. Brown told Reuters that even after his ill-fated trip other groups had expressed their interest in establishing a new domain in Greenland, and Trump himself has not given up on his territorial ambitions, as he made clear to the Danes and other erstwhile allies at a NATO summit in early July. In August an oil company linked to Trump began setting up drilling infrastructure on the island’s east coast without permission from Greenlandic authorities.
Srinivasan’s notion of parallel institutions also extends to money and banking, education (replace Harvard with the Thiel Fellowship), and the government itself. In June 2022, shortly before the publication of The Network State, a group of tech billionaires and venture capitalists led by Garry Tan, one of the original Palantir employees, who later became the head of Y Combinator, pursued a multimillion-dollar campaign that ousted San Francisco’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, and three members of the school board. It was a bald demonstration of the power of tech money to bend politics to its will. For Srinivasan, though, it was not enough. “It may be easier to start a new city than to reform San Francisco,” he tweeted to his one million followers, during the recall campaign. On the Moment of Zen podcast, Durán writes, Srinivasan was more explicit: “The goal, he said, was to do to San Francisco what Musk had done to Twitter: Gut it, purge it, and harvest its power.”
More than Srinivasan, the most influential proponent of gutting and purging is the lachrymose, self-appointed philosopher king Curtis Yarvin, who, writing online as Mencius Moldbug, dispensed his nihilistic, burn-it-all-down militancy on a blog called Unqualified Reservations. “The other day I was tinkering around in my garage and I decided to build a new ideology,” he wrote in his first post in 2007. That ideology, which owes a debt to Ayn Rand, Carl Schmitt, Murray Rothbard, and a mash of other libertarian, fascist, and authoritarian janissaries, portrays democracy as a failed system that needs to be replaced by a national CEO, also known as, he wrote, “a dictator.” Durán points to an early essay of Yarvin’s in which he imagines a San Francisco governed by “a totalitarian corporation called Friscorp. This corporate overlord would keep its residents under constant surveillance and exercise total power over their lives. Friscorp could even execute its residents without cause.” (After the unprovoked shooting deaths of Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and Johan Guerrero by federal agents without consequences so far, this scenario feels less theoretical.) Anticipating Srinivasan’s network state concept, Yarvin also argued that people should array themselves in small city-states governed by joint-stock corporations where they would have no rights. If they were unhappy, they could vote with their feet by relocating to a different corporate entity.
As outlandish as Yarvin may seem, it would be foolish to dismiss him. Yarvin is widely credited as being the resident philosopher of what’s known as the “Thielverse,” which includes Vance, Srinivasan, Buterin, and Andreessen, among many others. (In 2013 Thiel and Andreessen Horowitz funneled more than $1 million into a company Yarvin was starting.) And as Thiel and his associates have insinuated themselves into Trump’s world, they have brought Yarvin’s ideas with them. “With the help of men like Thiel,” Durán writes, “Yarvin’s radically unhinged ideas evolved from a blogger’s musings into a serious effort to undo democracy that would be adopted by a presidential administration.”
Two days before Trump’s second inauguration, at a party at Thiel’s D.C. redoubt, the incoming vice-president, Vance, greeted Yarvin with the hail-fellow-well-met salutation “Yarvin, you reactionary fascist.” That was the same day The New York Times ran a discursive interview with Yarvin under the headline “Curtis Yarvin Says Democracy Is Done. Powerful Conservatives Are Listening.” Two of those, in addition to Vance, were Musk and Vought, who incorporated many of Yarvin’s schemes into Project 2025. “DOGE was one among many shocking triumphs for Thiel’s network in the second Trump era,” Durán writes.
For example, Yarvin had called for “a total shutdown of international relations, including security guarantees, foreign aid, and mass immigration,” all of which quickly became marquee policies of the Trump administration.
So here we are, less than halfway through a presidential administration already considered to be the most corrupt in US history. Much of that corruption has been facilitated by Silicon Valley elites who have helped Trump and his family make billions of dollars in exchange for the freedom to operate with little regulatory friction. Artificial intelligence companies, cryptocurrencies and crypto exchanges, prediction markets, and media conglomerates have all benefited. Palantir has obtained over $1 billion in government contracts from, among others, the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Energy, Transportation, Health and Human Services, Commerce, Agriculture, Transportation, and Veterans Affairs. Musk has cashed in prodigiously: an investigation by Senator Elizabeth Warren discovered more than a hundred ways Musk profited from his proximity to the Trump administration, including apparently getting Trump to fire the inspector general of USAID, who was investigating claims that Starlink had provided Internet services to Russia as it waged war against Ukraine. Less well-known players have also gotten in on the grift. A report from the top Democrat on the House Committee on the Judiciary, Jamie Raskin, found among other things that
the Trump Administration has intervened to halt or terminate federal investigations and enforcement actions involving multiple cryptocurrency firms that have donated to the President or invested in his companies…issued pardons and rolled back sanctions for known bad actors that have provided financial support to his ventures…[and] systematically dismantled anti-corruption and financial integrity safeguards.
Is it ideologically inconsistent that companies led by men who excoriate the federal government, profess a desire to see it dismantled, and lobby hard to skirt taxes are being enriched by our tax dollars through generous government contracts? It is not. When it comes down to it, their politics have always been motivated by the desire to amass as much money as possible; democracy is just an impediment. But cultivating the conditions for its demise takes time. A good first step is to install an executive who has no respect for the norms of democracy and prop him up with cronies who will defer to him. Is it any surprise that the largest donor in the 2026 midterm elections is Andreessen Horowitz? Again, it is not.
Money is power—that’s axiomatic. Gil Durán believes that “to create a better future, we must create a world without billionaires. We can have billionaires, or we can have democracy.” But here, I think, Durán overstates his case. He writes:
We do not allow private citizens to own nuclear weapons because such power does not belong in the hands of individuals…. A single nuke might kill hundreds of thousands of people, but the billionaires will kill millions or billions.
The problem is not that we live in a world with billionaires—it’s that we live in a world where a small coterie of billionaires with totalitarian aspirations have gotten so close to power. Durán is not wrong to repeat what have become “resistance” shibboleths—that we need to eliminate the influence of money in politics, institute real and effective regulation on artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, and other dangerous technologies, and then, if these projects succeed, hold technofascists accountable for the damage they have done. These are all crucial.
In the short term, though, so is understanding to whom candidates vying for election in the midterms are beholden and how this support will determine their efforts to rein in hazardous technology—or not. Practicing democracy is the only way to preserve democracy. It is also a reminder that the dystopia celebrated by Thiel, Yarvin, Musk, and the tech bros in their thrall is not a given.