- Several prominent tech leaders are enthusiastic about Donald Trump, including JD Vance, a tech VC.
- One interesting thing: VC Peter Thiel had supported Trump and Vance but became disillusioned with Trump after the 2016 election.
- So how should we view Vance’s relationship with tech and Thiel’s relationship with Trump today? I asked Thiel biographer Max Chafkin to explain.
The nomination of J.D. Vance as the Republican presidential candidate is interesting for many reasons. But I am particularly interested in Vance’s ties to Silicon Valley, where a group of wealthy individuals lobbied Donald Trump to pick Vance as his running mate.
And I was particularly interested in the fact that one of Vance’s biggest backers is venture capitalist Peter Thiel — who was also a big Trump supporter in 2016, but has since publicly expressed disillusionment with Trump.
So how deep are Vance’s ties to Silicon Valley? And what does his rise suggest about some tech figures’ renewed affection for Trump?
I put all of these questions to Bloomberg Businessweek journalist Max Chafkin, who has covered Thiel for years and wrote The Contrarian — the excellent biography of Thiel that he published in 2021. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
We know about Peter Thiel’s ties to Trump — he supported him in 2016 and spoke at the Republican National Convention that year, where he was the first openly gay man to speak before the group.What does this have to do with JD Vance?
He hired Vance at Mithril, one of his venture capital firms, in 2016. At the time, Vance was a rising intellectual, and Thiel hired him just as Vance’s book was coming out. And that gave Vance a head start in venture capital, and it connected Thiel with a very important intellectual. Vance is now a kind of bombshell politician, but at the time, “Hillbilly Elegy” was seen as an important memoir, and Vance had a really fascinating story.
Thiel has done this his entire career. Basically, he looks for very ambitious young men—sometimes a few women, but often men—who are technologists and interested in disrupting the business order or disrupting politics. And sometimes they’re the same person.
So he hired Vance, and Vance only lasted a few years at Mithril. But Thiel went on to become a major investor in Narya, Vance’s venture capital fund.
In my opinion, Vance’s career as a venture capitalist is not particularly notable. His most notable investment was in Rumble [a conservative YouTube competitor]and Thiel, in addition to backing Narya, also invested with her in Rumble itself. It was a pretty successful investment, and they went public.
But you can see that it’s also a pseudo-political investment. It’s not just, “Oh, this is a great business opportunity” — Rumble is part of Vance’s political package. Because Vance, like Thiel to some extent, has been pursuing — in his view — left-leaning social media companies, and Rumble is the answer.
Are there any other ideological connections between Thiel and Vance? And did Thiel help shape Vance, or were his views already formed before they met?
Thiel has had an enormous influence on a generation of people on the right. He was a pioneer in terms of criticizing universities — he wrote a book in the mid-’90s with David Sacks, another prominent venture capitalist and right-wing donor, that denounced all the horrors of the left and “political correctness.” It was quite incisive and contained some passages that have been roundly criticized. But it was way ahead of its time in many ways because the critique was still very much alive and kicking. Instead of “political correctness,” people were talking about “wokeism,” but it was the same fundamental thing.
I would say that Vance has his own political history that predates Thiel. Thiel certainly helped make him a viable contender in that Ohio Senate race. Without Peter Thiel, Vance would not have gotten anywhere near the U.S. Senate. But Vance has had a political education, and an intellectual life, that exists outside of Peter Thiel.
So, they are like-minded people coming together. It’s not a Svengali/puppet thing.
Yes. There are other cases where Thiel finds people and mentors them when they are teenagers. And really helps shape them, gives them a network and has a clear and large ideological influence.
But I think JD Vance was on the rise, and Thiel saw that and, like any good venture capitalist, he got him started. He went to Series A.
After endorsing Trump in 2016, Thiel has publicly expressed his disappointment with Trump while he was in office. This summer, he said he would vote for her “if you put a gun to my head” but he doesn’t want to support her financially anymore. What was their relationship, and why did they break up?
Thiel has a kind of backward-looking idea about America Past, which is very similar to Make America Great Again. Similar to what Founders Fund [a venture fund Thiel cofounded] talked about — where are our flying cars? Where is the greatness we were promised? The two are similar even though Trump is a crude New Yorker Luddite, a million miles away from Thiel, who is a very intellectual West Coast guy.
Trump and Thiel both like to drop bombs, challenging conventional wisdom in ways that seem offensive. Thiel is a dissident — someone who says the unsaid, who is a provocateur. Thiel thinks that is very important.
And of course, that’s part of Trump’s appeal.
But if you look back at Thiel’s endorsement of Trump at the time, it wasn’t all-encompassing. It was: This guy matters. And he says important things. And yes, there are things about him that I and many others may find objectionable. But when you look at the whole thing, he’s the hero we need right now.
Thiel’s problem with Trump is about effectiveness. The problem is that Trump feels like he talks a lot but doesn’t follow through: We came up with big ideas about disruption. And in the end, we didn’t go far enough.
But I think his involvement with Trump, overall, was pretty smart. He was able to put himself in a new echelon of influence and power by being an early investor in the Trump presidency. And he was able to get out early, and basically cash out before the Trump presidency collapsed into scandal.
What do you think about the fact that Thiel was the only prominent figure in Silicon Valley to support Trump in 2016 — and now, in 2024, you have big names supporting him too, like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen?
It’s not just that Trump has few people in Silicon Valley who support him. There are also few people in the mainstream business world who actually support Trump.
And by 2016, Thiel had a reputation in Silicon Valley as a very smart guy — and he wasn’t just putting money behind him, he was putting money behind him. after Access Hollywood tape. And not only did he spend money, but he came to the convention and supported it. He put himself out there.
What has changed now is that there is no longer any shame. There is no longer a perception in corporate America that supporting Trump is somehow damaging to one’s reputation.
And in Silicon Valley, the conservative movement is much stronger and more muscular than ever.
There’s a narrative that people like Thiel promote, that Silicon Valley is very liberal. And there are a handful of people who like to tell the truth, one of whom is Peter Thiel, who is fighting against this super-left industry in San Francisco — the most liberal city in the most liberal state.
But that’s bullshit. Because Silicon Valley has conservative roots in addition to its roots in counterculture. It started out as a defense industry. And many people in Silicon Valley have always been conservative. And even during the most left-leaning times in Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley still had libertarian politics.
I think what’s changed is that in addition to that libertarian stream, there’s now a right-wing populist stream. Some of those libertarians are no longer really libertarians: They’re right-wing populists, which is the journey that Thiel himself took, and that many others are now following.
They’re also more willing to stir things up — to really put themselves out there and be provocative.
Part of it has to do with social media and maybe Thiel’s influence. But it also has to do with the labor market, which was very tight during the pandemic, and it’s not as tight now. CEOs are not afraid of their employees anymore. They’re not afraid that if they say something controversial — it would be very disruptive to their business.
So this is a maelstrom of things that has produced a very vocal, right-wing, populist, Trumpist group that didn’t exist before.
Is this really a change in the mood in Silicon Valley? Or is it just a small group of rich people?
It’s somewhere in between.
As I said, Silicon Valley’s liberal nature has always been overstated. It’s not as liberal as people think and never has been.
Types like David Sacks, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel — those aren’t the norm. But there’s a growing group of those people. And they feel empowered by the rise of Donald Trump.
And also: Elon Musk is clearly a very influential person, and he has managed to break all sorts of norms. And if he doesn’t get rewarded for it, he won’t get punished for it — at least not yet.
And the way Silicon Valley CEOs and entrepreneurs think is that they often imitate the most successful people. Back then Steve Jobs, you know, they were obsessed with the question, “Are the cables in my computer good? Maybe I need a uniform!”
And now, it’s like: “Elon Musk posts bullshit every day. So maybe I should start posting bullshit.” Part of it is that, and part of it is politics that have always been there, and now it’s out in the open.
When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz endorse Trump this month, they took pains to say: “This is not about any other issue except economic issues. It’s about crypto regulation and startups and how capital is treated. And that’s the only reason we’re doing it.” Do you take that at face value? Do you think they believe it?
I think money is almost always the best explanation for why big companies or rich people do things politically. That’s the explanation you should look at first.
