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Some very prominent tech leaders are excited about Donald Trump, and also about JD Vance, a tech VC.
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In an interesting twist, VC Peter Thiel supported both Trump and Vance, but became disillusioned with Trump after the 2016 election.
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So how should we think about Vance’s connection to tech and Thiel’s connection to Trump today? I asked Thiel biographer Max Chafkin to explain.
The appointment of J.D. Vance to the Republican presidential ticket is interesting for many reasons. But I am particularly interested in Vance’s connections to Silicon Valley, where a group of very wealthy men lobbied Donald Trump to select Vance as his vice presidential candidate.
And I’m very 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 later became publicly disillusioned with Trump.
So how deep are Vance’s connections to Silicon Valley? And what does his rise say about some tech moguls’ new affinity for Trump?
I put all these questions to Max Chafkin, a journalist at Bloomberg Businessweek. He’s been writing about Thiel for years and wrote The Contrarian, an excellent biography of Thiel that he published in 2021. Below is an edited excerpt of our conversation.
We know about Peter Thiel’s connection to Trump: he supported him in 2016 and spoke at that year’s Republican National Convention, where he was the first openly gay man to address that groupWhat is his connection to JD Vance?
He hired Vance out of Mithril, another venture capital firm of his, in 2016. At the time, Vance was a rising intellectual, and Thiel hired him when Vance’s book came out. And that gave Vance a start in venture capital and introduced Thiel to a really important intellectual. Vance is now this kind of bombshell politician, but at the time, “Hillbilly Elegy” was seen as an important memoir, and Vance had a really great story.
Thiel has done this throughout his career. He has basically looked for very ambitious young men — sometimes a handful of women, but often men — who are either technologists interested in disrupting the corporate order of things or politically disruptive. And sometimes they are one and the same.
So he hires Vance, and Vance only lasted a couple of years at Mithril. But then Thiel was a major investor in Narya, Vance’s venture capital fund.
I would say Vance’s career as a venture capitalist is pretty unremarkable. The most notable investment he made was in Rumble [a conservative YouTube competitor]and Thiel, in addition to backing Narya, also co-invested with him in Rumble itself. It was a pretty successful investment, and they managed to go public.
But you see, that’s also a pseudo-political investment. It’s not just, “Oh, this is a great business opportunity” — Rumble became part of Vance’s political package. Because Vance, like Thiel in a sense, has gone after — as he sees it — left-wing social media companies, and Rumble is a response to that.
Are there other ideological connections between Thiel and Vance? And did Thiel help shape Vance, or were his ideas already baked in before they met?
Thiel has had a tremendous influence on a generation of people on the right. He was a pioneer in criticizing universities — he wrote a book in the mid-1990s with David Sacks, another prominent venture capitalist and right-wing donor, in which he exposed all the horrors of the left and “political correctness.” That book is quite sharp and has a handful of passages that have been heavily criticized. But it was ahead of its time in many ways, because that criticism is still very much alive. Instead of “political correctness,” people talk about “wokeism,” but it’s essentially the same thing.
I will say that Vance has his own political history that predates Thiel. Thiel certainly helped establish him as a viable candidate in that race for the Ohio Senate. Without Peter Thiel, Vance is not going anywhere near the U.S. Senate. But Vance has a political education, and an intellectual life, that exists outside of Peter Thiel.
So, these are like-minded people who came together. No Svengali/doll thing.
Yes. There are other cases where Thiel finds people and mentors them when they are teenagers, and really helps to shape them, gives them networks, and has a clear and enormous ideological influence.
But the way I see it, JD Vance was on a comeback trail, and Thiel saw him and, like a good venture capitalist, he got in on the ground floor. He got in at Series A.
After endorsing Trump in 2016, Thiel was publicly disappointed with Trump when he took office. This summer he said he would vote for him “if you held a gun to my head” but that he would no longer support him financially. What was their connection and why was there a break?
Thiel has this kind of backwards-looking idea about The America Of The Past, which is very similar to Make America Great Again. It was similar to what Founders Fund [a venture fund Thiel cofounded] talked about — where are our flying cars? Where is the greatness we were promised? Those two things were similar, even though Trump is a crude Luddite New Yorker, a million miles away from Thiel, who is a deeply intellectual West Coast man.
Trump and Thiel both enjoy dropping bombs, challenging conventional wisdom in ways that even seem offensive. Thiel is a contrarian — the guy who says the unspeakable, the provocateur. Thiel thinks that’s very important.
And that, of course, is a major part of Trump’s appeal.
But if you look back at Thiel’s endorsement of Trump back then, it wasn’t a full endorsement. It was: This guy is important. And he says important things. And yes, there are things about him that I and a lot of other people find personally off-putting. But when you look at the whole package, he’s the hero that we need right now.
Thiel’s problem with Trump was about effectiveness. It’s about the sense that Trump is telling a big story but not executing it: we came up with these big ideas about disruption. And we ended up not going 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 this early investor in the Trump presidency. And he was able to exit early and essentially cash out before the Trump presidency collapsed in scandal.
What do you think about the fact that in 2016 Thiel was really the only prominent person in Silicon Valley supporting Trump, and now in 2024 you also have very big names supporting him, such as Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen?
It wasn’t just that Trump had few people in Silicon Valley who supported him. There were few people in the mainstream business world who actually liked Trump.
And by 2016, Thiel had a reputation in Silicon Valley as a very smart guy — and he wasn’t just spending money on himself, he was spending money on himself after the Access Hollywood tape. And he not only spent money, but he went to the convention and supported it. He put himself on the map even more.
What has changed now is that there is no sense of shame anymore. There is no sense in corporate America that supporting Trump is a reputational thing to do.
And in Silicon Valley, the conservative movement is much stronger and more powerful than before.
There’s this narrative, promoted by people like Thiel, that Silicon Valley is super liberal. And there are only a handful of truth tellers, including Peter Thiel, who are fighting the good fight against this super left-wing industry in San Francisco — the most liberal city in the most liberal state.
But that’s kind of nonsense. Because Silicon Valley has conservative roots as well as counterculture roots. It started as a defense industry. And a lot of people in the Valley have always been conservative. And even during the Valley’s most left-leaning moments, it still had libertarian politics.
I think what has changed is that alongside that libertarian current, there is now a right-wing populist current. Some of those libertarians are not really libertarians anymore: they are right-wing populists, a journey that Thiel himself has made, and now many other people have joined him.
They are also more willing to stir things up, to really come out and provoke.
Part of that 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 is not so tight now. CEOs are less afraid of their employees. They’re not afraid that if they say something controversial, it’s going to disrupt their business.
So it’s a confluence of circumstances that has led to this noisy, far-right, populist, Trumpist movement that wasn’t there before.
Is this really a Silicon Valley vibe shift? Or is this a fairly small group of very wealthy men?
It’s somewhere in between.
Like I said, the liberal nature of Silicon Valley has always been a bit overblown. It’s not as liberal as people think it is and never has been.
The David Sacks, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel types — that’s not the norm. But there’s a growing contingent of those guys. And they’re feeling emboldened again by the rise of Donald Trump.
Also: Elon Musk is clearly a very influential man, and he’s managed to break all sorts of norms. And if he’s not rewarded for it, he’s not punished — not yet, anyway.
And the way CEOs and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley think is they often just copy the most successful person. When it was Steve Jobs, you know, they were obsessed with, “Are the wires in my computer pretty? Maybe I need a uniform!”
And now it’s like, “Elon Musk is shitposting every day. So maybe I should start shitposting too.” It’s part of that, and part of it is that the politics has always been there, and now it’s out in the open.
When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz endorsed Trump This month they’ve gone to great lengths to say, “This is not about issues other than economic issues. It’s about crypto and startup regulation and how capital is treated. And that’s the only reason we’re doing it.” Do you take that for granted? Do you think they believe that?
I think money is almost always the best explanation for why big corporations or rich people act politically. It’s the explanation you have to look at first.
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