Less than a month after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, he invited the cream of Silicon Valley’s tech elite to a meeting at his transition team’s headquarters at Trump Tower.
It was an awkward affair. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s Larry Page and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had facial expressions that ranged from a semi-rictus grin to full tech-mogul-in-a-hostage-situation. But then, in a sense they were. There was a new sheriff in town – and none of them had seen him coming.
But one person was in his element. Seated next to Trump, uncomplicatedly beaming, was a South African-raised tech entrepreneur whose early investment in Facebook had made him billions.
This was Peter Thiel. And if this past week marked an inflection point, and there are many reasons to believe it did, the seeds of it were planted in the summer of 2016. This was when Trump was the outside candidate. The man no respectable west coast tech entrepreneur or east coast business elite wanted to touch.
Last week marked a decisive end to that era. A week in which Donald Trump not only appointed a tech bro to be his second in command, choosing Senator JD Vance to be his VP, but in which he received the benediction of the tech bro-in-chief, Elon Musk.
Musk has said he will donate $45m a month to Trump’s campaign, though his ongoing endorsement on X, the platform he bought and owns, is worth countless millions more.
But it’s some lesser-known figures in Silicon Valley who last week boarded the Trump bandwagon who are perhaps even more telling. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who own one of the most storied and influential venture capital (VC) firms in Silicon Valley, have declared they’re all in for Trump alongside a host of lesser-known but important names who have either followed suit or who beat them to the punch, including the Winklevoss twins and investors and podcast hosts Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks.
Back in 2016, Peter Thiel was the voice in the wilderness. And in that meeting in Trump Tower, it was Thiel’s hand that Trump picked up and stroked. (And whose data mining firm, Palantir, picked up billions of dollars in contracts from Trump’s Department of Defense, and, most controversially, Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, where it profiled and surveilled migrants.)
The principle that underpins Silicon Valley investing is to bet early and bet big. It worked for Thiel with Facebook. It worked for Thiel with Trump. And last week another of his bets paid off, though few could ever have predicted how spectacularly.
Because JD Vance, the new potential VP, is Thiel’s creature. He is a man Thiel moulded in his own image through lavish investments in his business and political careers. Thiel gave Vance a job at his VC firm, Mithril Capital, backed him to start his own venture fund, Narya Capital, then later invested $15m in his successful run for the senate. Max Chafkin, Thiel’s biographer, describes Vance as his “extension”.
The payoff from Thiel’s early gamble in Trump is a lesson that has not passed others by. As with their other obsession, crypto, the best time to have invested in Trump was 2016, and the second best time is today. We already have a word for what we’re watching now: it’s oligarchy. And we’ve already seen how this plays out. In Putin’s Russia, political and commercial interests are one and the same.
Thiel is betting – again – on the same phenomenon in America. Betting that he will be first among a new breed of tech bro oligarchs – a new super-class of broligarchs.
In Trump’s America, there will be hard choices for everyone, including the billionaires. Though it may be less hard for them. Vance has said he wants to deregulate crypto and unshackle AI. He’s said he’d dismantle Biden’s attempts to place safeguards around AI development.
And while he has it in for the legacy monopolies of Google and Facebook – the platforms that his ideological bedfellows in the “new right” see as part of the “censorship industrial complex” suffocating rightwing speech – Silicon Valley is betting on a gloves-off, regulation-free, pro-business goldrush.
Another Peter Thiel acolyte was on stage at the Republican National Convention last week, electrifying the crowd: Hulk Hogan. Hogan is less well known as one of Thiel’s longterm bets, though in some ways he’s even more instructive than Vance. In 2007, the online magazine Gawker outed Thiel and ran a series of unflattering articles about him. It took him years, but he ultimately got his revenge, covertly funding Hulk Hogan to the tune of $10m to sue the publication for invasion of privacy and forcing it into bankruptcy.
On stage at the RNC, the wrestler, a permatanned orange, ripped off his shirt for the man who increasingly looks like he’ll be America’s next president. Or, if JD Vance, is correct, the man who will prove to be the Caesar he says America needs. A man who he has already urged to fire the nation’s civil servants to “replace them with our people”, to defy the courts and rule his own way. Or, to put this in simple terms: to foment a coup.
Thiel knows what every investor knows. That a crisis is an opportunity. And that if Trump succeeds in tearing up the federal administration, there is not only billions to be made in the ensuing market turmoil but that a new breed of oligarchs, close to Caesar’s throne, will be the first to share the spoils.
And chief among them will be Thiel. It’s not a stretch to see how Palantir, his data-mining company – that under the Conservatives got its teeth into the NHS – will profile and surveil and target Caesar’s enemies. And Thiel’s track record in winning, in successfully betting on the longest of odds, on biding his time, is maybe the most chilling of all the factors in a fortnight that has started to feel like the start of a run on the bank.
Biden’s debate disaster, Trump’s victorious assassination survival, and now Silicon Valley’s ascension to the presidential ticket. The broligarchs have made their move – and the rest of us need to understand exactly what that means.
• This article was amended on 21 July 2024. An earlier version described Peter Thiel as “South African-born”; in fact he was born in Germany and grew up in South Africa and the US.
