Jacob Silverman

A 12-story peak in 2025 Q1 preceded Jacob Silverman’s October 2025 Politico Q&A on Gilded Rage and Silicon Valley’s radicalizing elite politics.

Who they are

Jacob Silverman is a journalist and author whose coverage footprint centers on technology’s political power: crypto, social platforms, prominent tech billionaires, and the ways AI and authoritarian politics intersect. He appears both as a commentator on those themes and, in 2025, as the author promoting Gilded Rage; he is also identified as Ben McKenzie’s co-writer on an anti-crypto book.

The recent arc

Coverage was busiest in 2025 Q1, after a 2024 Q3 increase, with the surrounding news cycle heavily shaped by crypto policy and political power. The March reports on President Trump’s proposed strategic U.S. crypto reserve, which named Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Cardano, fit closely with Silverman’s longstanding prominence in coverage tying crypto to U.S. politics, the SEC, FTX and the Democratic Party.

The later phase shifted toward Silverman’s own book and a broader critique of Silicon Valley. Politico’s October 2025 Q&A foregrounded Gilded Rage, the radical politics of certain tech elites, and AI’s political effects; late-2025 coverage alongside stories about David Sacks’ White House AI and crypto policies and Elon Musk’s Grok on X kept the same tech-power frame active.

The tension

The recurring tension is between tech’s self-presentation as innovation and Silverman’s portrayal of a sector increasingly organized around concentrated wealth, crypto influence, social-media power and authoritarian political currents. That lens connects his commentary on Miami’s crypto collapse, FTX and the SEC with recurring co-entities including Trump, Elon Musk, Twitter/X, Mastodon and Bitcoin.

Why it matters

If the coverage trajectory holds, Silverman’s relevance will rest less on discrete crypto failures than on whether crypto, AI and platform ownership continue to become central mechanisms of political influence. The recent move from FTX- and regulation-centered stories toward Gilded Rage and Trump-era AI and crypto policy suggests that the key unresolved question is how durable that convergence of technology capital and state power becomes.

Related: Trump · Bitcoin · Elon Musk · Twitter · FTX · Mastodon