This is a situation where you could be a CEO of a billion dollar startup that everyone wants to be a part of.

And someone who works for your investor can call you a Nazi and a terrorist online and like nothing happens.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to Takal Tsebus, made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Jacob Silverman.

Jacob is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book, Gilded Rage, Elon Musk,

and the radicalization of Silicon Valley.

He'll certainly be back on the show in the next couple of months to talk about it.

But in the meantime, I wanted to have him back because he's been doing a lot of reporting on the tech industry's adoption of this really right-wing politics, its links to Donald Trump,

and how Donald Trump is enriching himself from this relationship, not just with the tech

industry more broadly, but from the crypto industry in particular, as he is increasingly

engaging in these scammy cryptocurrency schemes that are making him millions of dollars in the

process. So we start by talking about this guy,

Sean McGuire, who is a partner at Sequoia, one of the leading venture capital firms in Silicon

Valley, who you might remember recently sent some tweets about Zoran Mamdani, the Democratic

candidate for the mayor of New York City, calling him an Islamist, and ultimately not really

backing down on his racist characterizations

of Mamdani. And I wanted to discuss that with Jacob for a few reasons, one to understand who this

guy actually is and to see his evolution, but also because I feel like it acts as this

illustration of this broader dynamic in Silicon Valley where not only is it acceptable

to express these kinds of opinions, but it seems almost encouraged and rewarded. And that also

leads us to have a conversation about the ways that it can be completely acceptable for someone

like McGuire to say racist and Islamophobic things about someone like Mandani,

...