Peter Thiel speaking at the 2022 Converge Tech Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona. Credit: Flickr/Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
JD Vance, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, David Sacks — the ultra-rich tech industry capitalists filling top positions in the incoming Donald Trump administration indicate that Silicon Valley will hold enormous influence in the U.S. government in the coming few years. But the tech industry veteran poised to wield the most influence of them all does not actually hold any official governmental positions, but is a close friend and associate of these four. That man is Peter Thiel, billionaire technocrat and seasoned venture capitalist behind many of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.
Who is Peter Thiel?
While not usually directly in the spotlight like some of his proteges like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg or OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Thiel has been a huge driving force behind many of the major trends in the tech industry for decades. Thiel originally amassed a massive fortune from PayPal, the online e-payment company. This well-known fintech pioneer was created in 2000 when Confinity, founded by Thiel, merged with X.com, the online bank founded by Elon Musk in the late 1990s. After selling PayPal to eBay in 2002, the two made huge amounts of money and immediately went on to found new companies: Thiel created Palantir, a military intelligence company created to “reduce terrorism while preserving civil liberties,” and Musk created SpaceX. Many of the original employees of PayPal went on to found their own majorly successful companies like Airbnb, Tesla, LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp and more, generating a vast network of influence for Thiel and Musk. This group of highly influential Silicon Valley figures is known as the “PayPal Mafia,” and Thiel, the man who has funded many of their ventures with his multiple venture capital firms, is known as their “don.”
Since his PayPal days, Thiel has continued using his vast fortune to fund and influence a huge number of tech industry mainstays, including a large and ever-increasing proportion of investments in weapons manufacturing and AI. He has held board seats on many large tech companies, including Facebook. It’s undeniable he is one of the most influential figures in the tech industry today.
The far-right views of Thiel and his circle
As a rich venture capitalist with huge investment in the military-industrial complex, one could reasonably guess some of the more obvious policies and governmental shifts Thiel wants to influence through his connections in top government positions. At the end of the day, he wants to increase his fortune even more and ensure the United States continues funding military and war so that his military startups make higher profits. But looking at Thiel’s politics more closely, things start to look even more sinister.
For decades, Thiel has been championing his libertarian worldview, using investments in technology as a means to grow political influence. PayPal, for example, was always more than a means to gain profits in the current system — it was a way to exchange money outside existing international monetary systems. As early as 2001, he clearly said of PayPal, “The ability to move money fluidly and the erosion of the nation-state are closely related.” Thiel’s preference for a monetary system free of government intervention continues to motivate his major financial backing of cryptocurrency companies today.
As years have progressed, Thiel has only dug in deeper in his far-right worldview. As early as 1995, Thiel co-wrote “The Diversity Myth” with another future member of the PayPal Mafia, venture capitalist David Sacks, who Trump recently announced would serve as the “AI and Crypto Czar” in the incoming administration. The book denounced multiculturalism and so-called “political correctness” at Stanford. Thiel also openly supports gutting social welfare programs on which working people in the U.S. rely, like Social Security, and opposes almost any restriction on the rights of corporations to profit from the labor of working people.
Today, Thiel continues to advance these political thoughts through his backing of the National Conservative Conference, an annual conference sponsored by right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the Claremont Institute. Thiel has been prominently featured as a keynote speaker at multiple meetings of the National Conservative Conference, which began in 2019.
A wide array of far-right-wing figures attend each year, but one of the most revered regular attendees is a political blogger, former software engineer, and close personal friend of Thiel’s named Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin is a self-described “neo-monarchist” and “neo-reactionary.” He is also an advocate of what he calls RAGE, or Retire All Government Employees, an idea that parallels extremely closely features of Project 2025. Both RAGE and Project 2025 include calls to abolish most of the federal institutions regulating corporations, a move that would massively increase corporate profits and inequality in the U.S. Yarvin, a proponent of unrestrained corporate rule under capitalism, has previously advocated that what the U.S. needs is a “national CEO, [or] what’s called a dictator.”
Unsurprisingly, Yarvin hates working-class and oppressed people, claiming that non-white people have naturally lower IQs. His vitriolic statements on poverty are often intentionally insane and inflammatory. For example, when writing on his solution to the homeless and underemployed people of San Francisco, he wrote that instead of working to provide people with homes and employment, it would be better to somehow eliminate those people from society. Yarvin wrote, “Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide. That is: the ideal solution achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society), but without any of the moral stigma.”
Yarvin has been called the “house political philosopher” of Thiel’s “budding movement.” Vice President-elect Vance has himself admitted that Yarvin was influential in shaping his own thinking.
A far-right network backed by venture capital
Thiel has long been a prominent libertarian voice in the tech industry voicing ideas very similar to those put forward by Yarvin. Thiel has been outspoken that his business goals extend beyond the scope of growing companies he invests in. Speaking on his reasons for starting PayPal, Thiel has said,
“The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world … We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
Realizing that others sharing his extreme views are in the minority, Thiel set out building a network of far-right institutions to influence politics.
With the millions he made from selling PayPal, Thiel began the most prominent of his multiple venture capital firms, Founders Fund. Almost immediately, Founders Fund began to fund technology startups whose only customers were the U.S. government. Two of the first were SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, and Palantir, founded by Thiel. Palantir quickly became one of the foremost suppliers of data to the CIA, U.S. Department of Defense and ICE. For years, Palantir’s only customer was In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, before it branched out into contracts with the NYPD and, most recently, the state of Israel.
Founders Fund backs a wide swath of tech startups in Silicon Valley, mainly those focusing in AI and/or military technology, and even extending into sectors like biotechnology. Through these investments, Thiel holds a wide net of connections to businesses in which he invests, for example biotechnology businesses owned by figures like Vivek Ramaswamy.
In 2008, Thiel and fellow venture capitalist Evan Baehr began the Teneo Network. Their goal, Baehr stated, was to create a network of conservative CEOs, bankers, politicians, media commentators, and more who would coordinate to, in the words of current chairman Leonard Leo, “crush liberal dominance.” Baehr imagined “a world in which Teneans serve in the House and the Senate, as governors — one might be elected president.”
Leo has headed up Teneo since 2021. Before that, he built a reputation as someone capable of effectively pushing through his far-right agenda in his role as co-chair of the Federalist Society, an ultra-conservative network of lawyers and judges committed to bringing about increasingly conservative law through the courts. Leo is most well-known as the architect behind the Supreme Court’s current conservative super-majority that has pushed through major, horrific decisions like pulling back federal abortion rights. But, Leo realized, why stop there? After his major successes with the Federalist Society, he asked himself, “Well, if this can work for law, why can’t it work for lots of other areas of American culture and American life where things are really messed up right now?”
No public lists of Teneo members exist, and its website is extremely barebones. Membership lists that do exist are far from exhaustive, but include Vance as an official member, confirmed by internal Teneo documents. Additionally, many prominent conservative politicians and businessmen have documented ties to Teneo, especially as featured keynote speakers at Teneo events. Vance and Ramaswamy have both reportedly attended and given speeches at the annual Teneo retreat. Other notable Teneo retreat speakers have included a wide array of right-wing political voices including New York Times columnist David Brooks, federal judge Trevor McFadden, and Blackwater founder Erik Prince.
Thiel’s first forays into mainstream politics
Thiel shocked many, particularly the more liberal wing of Silicon Valley, when he, a gay man, publicly endorsed Trump at the RNC in 2016. He immediately was treated as a sort of a pariah in Silicon Valley at a time when, publicly, most tech industry leaders disavowed Trump. In his RNC speech, Thiel voiced support for Trump for being a political outsider, painting himself similarly for daring to go against the liberal mainstream of the tech industry. He claimed, “Now I don’t agree with everything Trump has said and done, and I don’t think the millions of people voting for him do either. We’re voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed.”
How exactly two billionaire titans of industry can be considered outsiders in the ruling class remains unclear. Even solely within the political realm, Thiel was no outsider in 2016. By 2012, he was attempting to get his hand-selected candidates into office via large monetary donations to their political campaigns. For instance, Thiel contributed $2 million to Club for Growth PAC in 2012. This PAC was, in turn, the main financial backer in 2012 for Ted Cruz’s first Senate run, contributing nearly $700,000 to Cruz’s campaign. By 2016 Cruz had risen to a level of national prominence. Later in 2016, Thiel backed future Senator Josh Hawley’s run for Missouri attorney general, helping to grow Hawley’s political career, with a $300,000 contribution.
Once Trump took office, any claims Thiel could previously make for being an outsider in Washington totally vanished when multiple of his proteges and close associates filled top positions in the Trump administration. Michael Kratsios, the former Chief of Staff for Thiel Capital, became the Chief Technology Officer of the United States. Trae Stephens, one of the first employees of Palantir and a partner at Thiel’s Founders Fund, led Trump’s transition team for the Department of Defense. Stephens recruited many of the connections he made while in this role to found his company Anduril, a startup focused on autonomous weapons that makes its money solely from selling to the U.S. government.
Trump’s 2024 campaign: Thiel begins to reap what he has sown
In the years following Trump’s first term in office, Thiel poured money into his closest allies making their way into national politics. In 2022, Thiel spent millions on Senate races, among them campaigns for venture capitalists Blake Masters and the future vice president Vance. In the 2022 race, Thiel contributed approximately $15 million to the Vance campaign, and about $20 million to Masters.
Thiel had been nurturing the opportunity for one of his proteges to gain federal office for many, many years. Vance and Thiel first met while the former was at Yale Law School in 2011. Thiel then jump started Vance’s career just a few years later by giving him a top position in one of his many venture capital firms, Mithril Capital. One could say Vance owes his entire political career to Thiel. In fact, during Trump’s initial run for office in 2016, Vance was an outspoken “never Trump” Republican. It was not until 2021 when Vance began to warm to Trump after a sit-down at Mar-a-Lago between Trump, Vance and none other than Thiel himself.
Trying to signal that he will prioritize favorable conditions for tech billionaires in his second term, Trump has repeatedly voiced his support for cryptocurrency and AI on the campaign trail and since the election. Following up on his campaign promises, Trump has recently named venture capitalist, close Thiel associate, and cryptocurrency industry pioneer David Sacks as his official “crypto czar” and the leader of a newly created presidential council of advisors on science and technology. Of Sacks’ new roles, Trump said, “David will focus on making America the clear global leader in [crypto and AI]. He will safeguard Free Speech online, and steer us away from Big Tech bias and censorship. He will work on a legal framework so the Crypto industry has the clarity it has been asking for, and can thrive in the U.S.” Cryptocurrency has long been touted by opponents of government regulation as a utopian stateless currency, but so far has not proven to have much use other than as a purely speculative asset capable of generating extreme profits for the few wealthy enough to afford the costly GPUs and other computer hardware required for cryptocurrency production. Artificial intelligence, similarly, threatens to put millions of working class people out of their jobs by automating tasks. Capitalists continue to invest in AI for a chance of making even more money by avoiding the expense of having to pay workers wages. Trump’s move clearly shows his administration will pave the way for even greater profits for tech billionaires like Sacks, Thiel, Musk, and others.
The new Department of Government Efficiency might turn out to be Thiel’s biggest impact on the U.S. political system yet. Led by Musk and Ramaswamy, two of Thiel’s long-term business partners whose companies have collectively received billions of dollars in venture capital from Thiel, the department’s goal is to fire thousands of federal employees and divert those funds to other areas. This department plans to gut and shut down essential areas of the federal government, including the Department of Education. What is certain to continue receiving huge funds is the U.S. military apparatus. In 2024 alone, Palantir stock soared by 270%, up $23 billion in the few weeks since Trump was elected, reflecting investors’ anticipation of an increase in military spending in the near future. Thiel certainly made millions off the higher stock valuation, and the sudden rise minted two new billionaires from Palantir executives, Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen. This new department represents the solidification of long-term political goals of people like Peter Thiel, and the entry into the mainstream of the ideas of formerly fringe Internet personalities like Curtis Yarvin.
What does Thiel stand to gain?
Although Vance, Trump, Musk, Ramaswamy and the other far-right capitalists in Thiel’s milieu of the ruling class describe themselves as a “counter-elite” trying to “drain the swamp,” everything from their history to connections to stores of wealth should make it clear that they are very much insiders who benefit immensely from their status under capitalism. There are some kernels of truth to their political ramblings — Democrats don’t care about working people and power does lie in the hands of a small cabal of the super rich. But scapegoating migrants, Black and brown people, women, or any other oppressed group does nothing to address the root problem. It only serves to deflect attention from the ultra-rich capitalists like Thiel or Trump fighting to take away the rights of working people, defunding the people’s needs to fund sectors like AI and military technology to line their own pockets.
Thiel’s entire history, his network of far-right elites, and his venture capital empire funding the military-industrial complex make clear that he only wants to influence politics to enrich himself.
Despite their faux populist rhetoric, Vance and Trump’s links to capitalist billionaires like Thiel make it clear they don’t care about working people, nor intend to fulfill their campaign promises of helping the working class.
The deep involvement of tech industry billionaires in Trump’s administration backed by a network of far-right organizations reveals the high level of organization of the ruling class, which they always use to consolidate their wealth and power. If our class wants a system that works for us, we need to build it independently of the ruling class CEOs and venture capitalists. We’re not outnumbered, we’re just out-organized — but if we fight together against the billionaire agenda, we can win!
