From the pursuit of potentially apocalyptic artificial intelligence to life-extension start-ups that promise billionaires eternal youth and those who encourage the political far right around the world, the Silicon Valley techno-utopian dream has curdled. The global innovator class has the world in their hands, but they can’t stand the touch.

In Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, New York Times bestselling author Jacob Silverman leads us on a critical investigation into the radicalization of Silicon Valley and the billionaires that increasingly run our lives, shape the global economy, and support Donald Trump.

At the center of this book lies Elon Musk, but this is about more than just one man and his obsession with the “woke mind virus”, as Silverman reveals a network of tech and finance oligarchs, emboldened by the zero-interest rate years, now using their wealth to exert an increasingly radical political program.

Transiting San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Austin and Miami, New York, Washington DC, and various global capitals of tech, finance, and political power, Silverman talks to the people who are already living with the real-life consequences of the political revolution underway. It’s a bizarre, sometimes frightening, darkly humorous world where moguls preach populist revolt while dismantling the few remaining checks on their influence.

Gilded Rage offers essential reporting and insight for anyone who wants to know what’s happening to Silicon Valley. As the erratic influence of tech elites continues to spread around the world, the story that Jacob has to tell will have a profound relevance for us all.

“Riveting”–New York Post

“A masterful achievement.” –Booklist (starred review)

On the 50th  anniversary of Talking Heads, acclaimed music biographer Jonathan Gould presents the long-overdue, definitive story of this singular band, capturing the gritty energy of 1970s New York City and showing how a group of art students brought fringe culture to rock’s mainstream, forever changing the look and sound of popular music.  

“Psycho Killer.” “Take Me to the River.” “Road to Nowhere.” Few musical artists have had the lasting impact and relevance of Talking Heads. One of the foundational bands of New York’s downtown 1970s music scene, Talking Heads have endured as a musical and cultural force for decades.  Their unique brand of transcendent, experimental rock remains a lingering influence on popular music-despite their having disbanded over thirty years ago.

Now New Yorker contributor Jonathan Gould offers an authoritative, deeply researched account of a band whose sound, fame, and legacy forever connected rock music to the cultural avant-garde. From their art school origins to the enigmatic charisma of David Byrne and the internal tensions that ultimately broke them apart, Gould tells the story of a group that emerged when rock music was still young and went on to redefine the prevailing expectations of how a band could sound, look, and act. At a time when guitar solos, lead-singer swagger, and sweaty stadium tours reigned supreme, Talking Heads were precocious, awkward, quirky, and utterly distinctive when they first appeared on the ragged stages of the East Village.  Yet they would soon mature into one of the most accomplished and uncompromising recording and performing acts of their era.

More than just a biography of a band, Gould masterfully captures the singular time and place that incubated and nurtured this original music: downtown New York in the 1970s, that much romanticized, little understood milieu where art, music, and commerce collided in the urban dystopia of Lower Manhattan. What emerges is an expansive portrait of a unique cultural moment and an iconoclastic band that shifted the paradigm of popular music by burning down the house of mainstream rock.