The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s political donations and you’ll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance’s campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel’s former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.
But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance’s speeches, and you’ll hear echoes of Thiel’s voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation: declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was “the most significant moment” of his time there.
Thiel’s influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological. In the New York Times, he was recently described as the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years”. And his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape. It establishes a powerful pattern for up-and-coming figures to follow.
To “hedge fund investor” and “tech entrepreneur”, Thiel has recently added a new label: Republican kingmaker.
Well you’re going to need CEOs to manage your individual earthly monarchs for you until you can upload your consciousness and head to outer space 🚀
So is he like Elon if he was more competent?
I mean he keeps using Elon as tool and it’s like Elon keeps letting him? Not like Elon doesn’t benefit from it, but he made him the hated face of DOGE after planning all of that shit during Trump’s first administration. Now that Elon got everything set up for him, he’s still there reaping the benefits. He got the media narrative of “Elon has gone crazy, he’s not sleeping, he’s lost his mind, he’s a man child,” going strong and then within weeks Elon was stepping down.
When they both owned PayPal, he ousted Elon in a very similar coup while he was on his honeymoon. Coups are like his thing. He just does that over and over again to gain control. He’s doing it to Trump right now, and if/when he finishes crumbling democracy and we no longer have elections, he’s very likely going to do it to JD Vance’s dumbass too.