He Hates Democracy and Wants To Cheat Death – Meet the Billionaire Investor Who Created J.D. Vance
Donald Trump’s running mate is a dangerous “extension” of right-wing broligarch Peter Thiel.
In 2009, the arch-libertarian Cato Institute published an essay from Peter Thiel, an infamously right-wing venture capitalist, in which he confessed to some of his biggest political disappointments. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote, making clear his distaste for elections. Thiel complained that “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women” had been difficult for the libertarian cause. He was also frustrated that an “unthinking demos” – that is, ordinary voters – guided electoral politics. When Thiel was later accused of opposing women’s suffrage, Cato published a response from the author in which he seemed to double down on his desire to somehow escape democracy: “While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.”
It would be one thing if Thiel, with his reactionary, anti-democratic beliefs, were an obscure tech investor with a blogger’s interest in politics. But Thiel is far more than that – he’s a billionaire financier for whom political struggle is the main event. A longtime Republican donor, Thiel praised Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention. He is singularly responsible for the rise of J.D. Vance, pouring a record $15 million into his Senate campaign. And while some tech elites have lately emerged as vocal Trump backers, Thiel was there first.
Thiel has long expressed irritation that we haven’t achieved a Jetsons-like future of infinite abundance, but he seems even more dissatisfied – bitterly so – with a political system he’s determined to upend. A billionaire who made his initial fortune as the CEO of PayPal, Thiel is now the eminence grise of a powerful network of investors and executives known informally as the ‘PayPal Mafia,’ many of whom support Trump’s bid for a second term. Having soured on democracy, Thiel has spoken of politics – and death, for that matter – as something that can be “escaped,” leading to a utopian place of true freedom. His investments and donations have flowed accordingly, making him one of Silicon Valley’s most influential political operators while blazing a trail for a new crop of tech executives who have embraced the MAGA movement. Thiel invested in explicitly right-wing companies, dined with white nationalists, sponsored far-right writers, and founded startups dedicated to supporting the surveillance state.
He didn’t just speak at the Republican National Convention in 2016, announcing himself as a proud gay Republican. After the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, Thiel also offered a public show of support with a $1.25 million donation. According to Trump, it was Thiel who chose which tech companies were invited to the confab of CEOs at Trump Tower after the 2016 election.
By the time of the 2024 presidential cycle, however, as a liberal activist group began investigating Thiel’s activities, the billionaire decided he wanted out. He expressed disappointment less in Trump’s policies than in the chaos of his shambolic administration. When Trump asked for a multi-million-dollar campaign donation, Thiel said no, reportedly leading to a rift between the two.
In June, Thiel finally said he would vote for Trump… if someone put a gun to his head.
Then everything changed, on July 15, when Trump announced Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate.
“The Most Significant Moment”
Put simply, there is no J.D. Vance without Peter Thiel. In “The Contrarian,” his biography of Thiel, journalist Max Chafkin described both Vance and Blake Masters as “extensions” of Thiel, men who owed their careers and much of their political thinking to the billionaire’s ideological influence – and financial sponsorship. (Masters lost his 2022 Senate election and, more recently, his 2024 House primary race.) Some politicians may be friendly to right-wing Silicon Valley “broligarchs,” but Vance has fashioned himself in Thiel’s image. And now, the billionaire hardliner seems on the verge of getting what he’s long wanted: one of his own in the White House.
Although he made his bones as a tech executive and financier, Thiel has written and lectured about his bugaboos – identity politics, women, democracy, higher education – since he was an undergraduate at Stanford University in the late 1980s, when he founded a conservative student paper, The Stanford Review. Despite denouncing American campus culture and funding a fellowship to pay entrepreneurs to skip college, Thiel remains involved with Stanford as a guest lecturer and as one of its most famous alumni and critics. Over the years, Thiel has hired several alumni of The Stanford Review. And he is still, in the year 2024, giving talks at elite colleges about “the diversity myth” – the title of a book he published in 1995 with his friend David Sacks, who emerged this year as Trump’s top Silicon Valley supporter.
“We’re still in this groundhog day,” Thiel said earlier this year to a conservative student group at Harvard. His book felt “incredibly prophetic,” he said. “We were basically right. Very little I would change on the particulars.” In 2016, when Forbes drew attention to passages from “The Diversity Myth” that minimized rape (“a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret”), Thiel and Sacks apologized.
If we’re in a groundhog day situation, it may be in part because powerful white men like Thiel can’t let go of certain political obsessions. Thiel has been lamenting the influence of leftist identity politics for more than 30 years. He still complains about being forced to read – in college, 35 years ago – certain academically en vogue books, like Aimé Césaire’s post-colonial retelling of “The Tempest,” and the autobiography of Rigoberta Menchú, a Guatemalan Indigenous rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize. But over time, Thiel has found a receptive audience for his grievances. And he’s had no student more loyal than J.D. Vance.
In 2011, Vance was attending Yale Law School when Thiel came to give a talk. At the time, Vance was a Marine veteran and Ohio State graduate who had emerged from meager economic and social circumstances in southern Ohio to attend a top law program that served as a finishing school for future members of the power elite. Vance grew up steeped in evangelical Christianity but in college he drifted into Sam Harris-style atheism – a common enough path for a young man in the place and time. His colleagues saw him as politically conservative but not radically so. That would change.
Thiel’s subject matter was his typical fare. He spoke about the illusory satisfactions of chasing prestige and competing with one’s peers over a limited pot of rewards while the larger society faced technological stagnation and decay. For Vance, whose beliefs were proving to be malleable, it became a formative experience. In attempting to escape his traumatic upbringing, Vance had allowed himself to be driven by the mindless pursuit of academic achievements and professional credentials. Rather than aspiring for a career as a federal judge or a partner at a white-shoe law firm, as so many of his classmates did, he realized that he dreaded his future as a lawyer. Despite being a product of the same milieu that Vance now inhabited, Thiel offered another way. “Peter’s talk remains the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School,” Vance wrote in a widely cited essay in a Catholic magazine.
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