How Rishi Sunak became the first Silicon Valley prime minister | Audio Long Read
The Politics Show
The New Statesman
4.2 • 1.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2023
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On 2 November 2023, Rishi Sunak closed his global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park by interviewing the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk. The mood was deferential (the PM towards the tech billionaire). Was Sunak eyeing up a post-politics job in San Francisco, some wondered, or calculating that Musk’s Twitter might be an effective campaigning tool come 2024?
In this week’s audio long read, the New Statesman contributing writer Quinn Slobodian examines the origins of Sunak’s “fanboy-ish enthusiasm” for the billionaire tech disruptors. These lie in the publication of a 1997 business book, he writes: The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State, by the American venture capitalist James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, father of Jacob. The book has become cult reading among tech leaders, and influential on the alt-right: its world view of a libertarian internet and the rise of economic freeports and tax havens chimed with a wealthy elite who saw a chance to get much, much richer. In Sunak, Slobodian argues, we see the arrival of the sovereign individual in Downing Street: “a ‘two-fer’, as they say in America: both its first Silicon Valley prime minister and its first hedge fund prime minister”.
Written by Quinn Slobodian and read by Will Lloyd.
This article originally appeared in the 2 November 2022 issue of the New Statesman; you can read the text version here.
If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion by Sophie McBain.
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Transcript
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| 0:42.0 | To find out more, search Barclays communities. You're listening to audio long reads from the New Statesman, the best of our |
| 0:58.7 | reported features and essays read aloud. In this episode The Making of a Silicon Valley Prime Minister |
| 1:05.5 | written by Quinn Slobodian and read by me Will Lloyd. This article was first |
| 1:10.8 | published in November 2022. |
| 1:13.8 | The link to read the article online is in the show notes. |
| 1:19.2 | Though he is the first Hindu Prime Minister by Faith, |
| 1:21.8 | Rishisunak is a spiritual child of Silicon Valley. |
| 1:25.3 | By his own account, his time there changed his life, living and breathing that entrepreneurial culture. |
| 1:32.1 | He described his approach to being |
| 1:33.6 | Chancellor of the Exchequer as a startup Treasury mentality. Some have described him |
| 1:39.2 | as the first Californian Prime Minister. Sunec had to travel some distance to arrive at his Tech Bro futurist Mecca, |
| 1:47.0 | but he grew up at the right time for it to happen. |
| 1:50.0 | Born in Southampton in 1980, he attended Stroud and Winchester schools, then went to Lincoln College, Oxford |
| 1:56.5 | to study philosophy, politics and economics as the dot-com boom was cresting. |
| 2:02.4 | After Oxford, he did a stint at Goldman Sachs |
| 2:05.2 | before moving to Palo Alto around the same time as Mark Zuckerberg. At Stanford University |
... |
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