JD Vance first met Peter Thiel in 2011, when Vance was a student at Yale Law School and the venture capitalist was giving a speech at the university criticizing modern society.
Vance later wrote that he had been trying to find his place in a highly competitive environment, but Thiel’s speech woke something up in him that made him realize he didn’t want to practice law.
Vance later worked for Thiel at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. More than a decade after they met, Thiel poured $15 million into Vance’s campaign to help him win a U.S. Senate seat, and the money helped Vance get tapped Monday to serve as former President Donald Trump’s running mate.
Vance’s initial claim to fame may have been his rise from poverty to wealth, but it was Thiel who was key to his political success.
“At the time I had no idea what to expect,” Vance wrote of their first meeting.
Who is Peter Thiel and what does he believe?
Thiel made his fortune as an early investor in PayPal in the 1990s and Facebook in the 2000s, and is also known as a litigation funder who bankrupted the website Gawker and as a longtime Republican donor who has spent more than $49 million on election campaigns since 2000.
A self-described libertarian, Thiel has had connections with far-right extremists. “I believe freedom and democracy are incompatible,” he wrote in a 2009 essay, arguing that women’s right to vote “has made the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ an oxymoron.” In 2016, he hosted a “Right-Wing Dinner Squad” that included white supremacist Kevin DeAnna.
According to TechCrunch, Vance relocated to San Francisco in 2013, where he worked for Thiel’s company.
Thiel is a strong supporter of a range of right-wing Republicans, including former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who says the U.S. should return to the gold standard, and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, an immigration hardliner who gained national notoriety for tightening state voting laws while he was secretary of state.
In the 2022 midterm elections, Thiel endorsed Rep. Harriet Hageman, who defeated Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, and Joe Kent, the losing candidate for Congress in Washington who promoted the racist and anti-Semitic “Great Replacement Theory” during his campaign.
Thiel did not immediately respond to requests for comment, nor did the Trump campaign or Vance’s office.
Peter Thiel invested in Rumble alongside J.D. Vance.
Vance and Thiel’s first joint foray into politics may have come in 2021, when they invested in Rumble as a conservative alternative to YouTube after social media companies blocked far-right groups from accessing their platforms following the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol.
The investment was made through Vance’s Cincinnati-based private equity fund, according to The Wall Street Journal. Vance’s financial disclosures for 2022 value his company’s shares of Rumble at between $15,001 and $50,000.
“This is going to be a big fight against big tech,” the company’s CEO, Chris Pavlovsky, told The Wall Street Journal in 2021.
By 2022, Rumble had become one of the leading right-leaning social media news platforms, according to the Pew Research Center, with more than three-quarters of people who got their news from the site identifying as Republicans.
Peter Thiel backs J.D. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign
When Vance expressed interest in running for the Senate seat to be vacated in 2022, he faced off against a crowded field of primary candidates, including several wealthy individuals who had donated tens of millions of dollars to his campaign. Already wealthy from his career in venture capital and sales of his book “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance contributed $1.4 million to the campaign.
But Thiel, whom Vance once described as a “good friend,” became a huge supporter of Vance. Thiel donated $15 million to Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC that ran ads in support of Vance’s candidacy. The PAC spent more on ads to elect Vance than Vance’s campaigns combined, making it the most Thiel has ever spent on a single candidate.
During the election, Vance Provided to top donors An invitation was sent to his campaign for a small dinner with him and Thiel.
Among the ads Thiel’s PAC ran on Vance’s behalf were ones that touted former President Donald Trump’s endorsement and said Vance would help secure elections, while other ads said Vance would help Trump complete his border wall, “end welfare for illegal immigrants” and defund sanctuary cities.
Though Thiel was an enthusiastic supporter of Trump in 2020, he expressed disappointment with Trump’s time in office and spent 2020 on the sidelines.
Thiel has not endorsed any candidate in the 2024 presidential election, and said last month that he would vote for Trump “even at gunpoint.”
