- Some prominent technology leaders are pinning their hopes on Donald Trump and tech venture capitalist J.D. Vance.
- In one interesting twist, venture capitalist Peter Thiel has supported both Trump and Vance, but became disillusioned with Trump after the 2016 election.
- So how should we think about Vance’s ties to technology, and Thiel’s ties to Trump, today? We asked Thiel biographer Max Chavkin to explain.
JD Vance’s nomination for the Republican presidential nomination is interesting for many reasons, but what I find particularly interesting is his connection to Silicon Valley, where a group of very wealthy people lobbied Donald Trump to select Vance as his running mate.
And what I find really interesting is that one of Vance’s biggest backers is venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who was also a big Trump supporter in 2016 but later publicly expressed disillusionment with Trump.
So how deep are Vance’s Silicon Valley ties, and what does his rise say about the newfound affinity some tech titans have for Trump?
I posed all these questions to Bloomberg Businessweek journalist Max Chavkin, who has covered Thiel for years and is the author of a well-written 2021 biography of Thiel, “The Contrarian.” Below are edited excerpts from our conversation.
Peter Thiel’s relationship with Trump is well known. He supported Trump in 2016 and He spoke at the Republican National Convention that year, becoming the first openly gay man to address the group.What is his relationship with J.D. Vance?
Vance hired him at his venture capital firm, Mithril, in 2016. At the time, Vance was an up-and-coming intellectual, and Thiel hired him right around the time Vance’s book was coming out. It gave Vance his start in venture capital and connected Thiel to a very important intellectual. Vance is now a bombshell politician, but at the time “Hillbilly Elegy” was considered an important memoir, and Vance had a really amazing story.
Thiel has done this throughout his career. He basically seeks out young people who are incredibly ambitious. Some of them are technologists who are interested in disrupting the business order, some of them are men who could be politically disruptive. And sometimes those two things are the same person.
So he hired Vance, who only stayed at Mithril for a few years, but at the time Thiel was a lead investor in Vance’s venture capital fund, Nalia.
Vance’s career as a venture capitalist is one that could be described as rather unremarkable, with his most notable investment being in Rumble. [a conservative YouTube competitor]and in addition to his backing for Narya, Thiel also invested alongside him in Rumble itself, which was a fairly successful investment and they successfully went public.
But you see, this is also a quasi-political investment. It’s not just, “This is a great business opportunity.” Rumble has become part of Vance’s political package. Vance, to some extent like Thiel, is going after left-leaning social media companies, and Rumble is the answer.
Were there any other ideological connections between Teal and Vance, and did Teal help shape Vance or was his thinking already formed before the two of them met?
Thiel has been a huge influence on a generation on the right. A pioneer in the critique of academia, in the mid-90s he co-wrote a book with fellow prominent venture capitalist and right-wing donor David Sachs that denounced the horrors of the left and “political correctness.” The book was pretty radical and contained some heavily criticized passages. But the critique remains relevant today, and in many ways was ahead of its time. Instead of “political correctness,” people now talk about “wokeness,” but the basics are the same.
I will say that Vance had a political history that predates Thiel. Thiel undoubtedly helped establish Vance as a viable candidate in the Ohio Senate race. Vance would never have come close to a U.S. Senate seat without Peter Thiel. But Vance has had a political education and an intellectual life that exists separately from Peter Thiel.
So they were a group of like-minded people, not Svengali or puppets.
Yes, there are other cases where Thiel is identifying and mentoring teenagers, giving them a network and a clear and powerful ideological influence, and really contributing to their development.
But I think JD Vance was on his way up the ranks, and Thiel saw him and, like any good venture capitalist, grabbed it right off the bat: he joined the Series A.
Thiel supported Trump in 2016 but was publicly disappointed when he became president. This summer, he said he would vote for him “even if they put a gun to my head.” However, he told her that he would never again support him financially. What was their relationship and why did it break down?
Thiel has this backward-looking view of America’s past, which is very similar to “Make America Great Again.” It’s because Founders Fund [a venture fund Thiel cofounded] They talked about where the flying cars were and where the promised greatness was, and the two were similar, even though Trump is a rough Luddite New Yorker and Thiel is a highly intelligent West Coast guy.
Both Trump and Thiel enjoy throwing bombs, challenging conventional wisdom in ways that may seem aggressive. Thiel is a contrarian — someone who says the unspeakable, a provocateur. Thiel thinks that’s very important.
And of course, that is the heart of Trump’s appeal.
But looking back at Thiel’s support for Trump at the time, it wasn’t a vocal endorsement — it was more, “This guy is important, and he’s saying important things. Sure, there are some things that I and many others find personally offensive, but on balance, he’s the hero we need right now.”
Thiel’s frustration with Trump is with effectiveness: Trump talks big but doesn’t follow through: “We came in with big ideas about disruptive change, and in the end we didn’t deliver enough.”
But overall, I think his involvement with Trump was very wise: he was able to position himself in a new echelon of influence and power as an early investor in President Trump, and then exit early and profit substantially before the Trump administration imploded in scandal.
In 2016, Thiel was the only prominent Silicon Valley figure to support Trump, yet now in 2024, these big names also support Trump: Elon Musk What about Marc Andreessen?
It’s not just that Trump had few supporters in Silicon Valley, but that he had few wholehearted supporters in mainstream business circles.
In 2016, Thiel had a reputation in Silicon Valley as a really smart guy. And he wasn’t just putting money into it. rear He released the Access Hollywood tape. He not only spent money, but also went to conventions and endorsed him. He put himself out there even more.
What’s changed now is that the sense of embarrassment no longer exists. American companies have no sense that supporting Trump will damage their reputations.
And in Silicon Valley, the conservative movement is much stronger and more powerful than it was before.
There’s a narrative, perpetuated by people like Thiel, that Silicon Valley is ultra-liberal, and in San Francisco, the most liberal city in the most liberal state, there are only a handful of truth-tellers taking on this ultra-left industry. One of them is Peter Thiel.
But that’s nonsense, because Silicon Valley has conservative roots in addition to its countercultural roots. Silicon Valley started as a defense industry. Many of its residents have always been conservative. Even at its most left-leaning, Silicon Valley remained politically libertarian.
I think what has changed is that in addition to the libertarian current, a right-wing populist current has emerged. Some of these libertarians are not really libertarians anymore. They are right-wing populists. This is the path that Thiel himself has walked, and now many others are aligned with it.
They are also proactive about stirring things up – really going out there and being provocative.
Some of it has to do with social media, maybe Thiel’s influence, but it also has to do with the labor market, which was very tight during the pandemic and is not as tight now. CEOs are not as scared of their employees, they’re not as scared that they can say something controversial and that it will wreak havoc on their business.
So a lot of different things have come together to create a very vocal group of far-right, populist, Trump supporters that didn’t exist before.
Is this really a change in the atmosphere in Silicon Valley, or is this just the work of a small group of very wealthy men?
It’s somewhere in between.
Like I said, the liberal nature of Silicon Valley has always been overstated. It’s not as liberal as people think, and it never has been.
People like David Sachs, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are unusual, but they are growing in number — and they feel newly empowered by the rise of Donald Trump.
And Elon Musk is clearly a very influential person who has managed to break all sorts of norms without being rewarded or punished for doing so — at least for now.
The mindset of Silicon Valley CEOs and entrepreneurs is usually to copy whoever is most successful. With Steve Jobs, they were obsessed with, “Are the wires in my computer neat? Maybe I need a uniform!”
And now it’s like, “Elon Musk posts shit every day, so maybe I should start posting shit too.” It’s partly about that, and partly about the political element that was always there, but now it’s out in the open.
when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz endorse Trump This month they went to great lengths to say:This is not just an economic issue.“It’s about regulation of crypto and startups and how capital is treated. And that’s the only reason we’re doing this.” Do you take this at face value? Do you think they believe it?
I think that money is almost always the primary reason why big corporations and the wealthy take political action, and the first place to look is money.
