- Billionaire Peter Thiel has gained a name as one of Silicon Valley’s most controversial figures.
- The PayPal cofounder went on to have a successful career in venture capital.
- Known as a connector, he has mentored the likes of JD Vance and Sam Altman.
Like many billionaires, Peter Thiel is already benefiting from Donald Trump’s second presidential win.
His net worth jumped following the election, reaching a record high of $14 billion on Friday, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The election results were also a win for the venture capitalist on a more personal level.
The vocal conservative and early Trump supporter was instrumental in the rise of vice president-elect JD Vance — and a big reason the Ohio politician was second on the ticket.
Thiel and other Silicon Valley elite called Trump numerous times to implore him to choose Vance as his vice president, hoping that he’d institute startup-friendly policies and cut regulation, The Washington Post reported. He was pivotal in turning Vance, once a never-Trumper, into a MAGA Republican.
The relationship between Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir, and Vance goes back to at least 2011, when Thiel visited Yale Law School, where Vance was a student. Vance, who praised Thiel’s Christianity, called the talk in which he discussed the achievement rat race “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School.”
Thiel went on to champion the future politician, writing a blurb for Vance’s 2016 book “Hillbilly Elegy,” hiring Vance to work at his VC firm Mithril Capital, and investing in Vance’s own venture fund, Narya Capital.
He helped bankroll Vance’s campaign, pouring at least $15 million into his 2022 senatorial bid, according to data from OpenSecrets, and aiding him in securing an endorsement from Trump following a 2021 Mar-a-Lago meeting where he introduced the two, The New York Times reported.
While he did not contribute financially to the 2024 presidential race — “an extra $1 million or $10 million does not make any difference,” he said of Trump, who reportedly called him a “scumbag” — he was among Trump’s first supporters in Silicon Valley, backing him in 2016, speaking at the Republican National Convention that year, donating $1.25 million to pro-Trump groups, and serving as a member of his transition team.
With Vance’s placement on the ticket and the Trump-Vance win, Thiel has secured his standing as a conservative kingmaker and one of tech’s most powerful political players.
The don of the PayPal Mafia
Long before he linked Trump and Vance, Thiel became known as a connector and mentor in Silicon Valley.
Like many of tech’s early founders, he attended Stanford, where he would also earn a law degree. While an undergrad, his reputation for contrarian opinions was beginning to form. In 1987, he cofounded The Stanford Review, a student publication dedicated to “presenting alternative viewpoints,” which mainly manifested in a conservative bent. Early editions took aim at political correctness on campus.
After brief stints as a lawyer and in trading, Thiel broke onto the tech scene in 1998 when he cofounded PayPal. There, he earned the nickname of the “don” of the PayPal Mafia, one of tech’s most influential groups, which includes Elon Musk, Keith Rabois, David Sacks, and Reid Hoffman.
It’s also what first made him rich. He earned about $100 million when it went public, Bloomberg estimates. His fortune grew thanks to early investments in Facebook (he was its first outside investor), LinkedIn, and Yelp, and from his role as cofounder of Palantir, the big data firm and frequent federal government partner.
In 2005, he cofounded the VC fund Founders Fund, which has invested in SpaceX and Airbnb and where he remains a partner. He also cofounded the VC firms Valar Ventures and Mithril Capital.
Thiel’s sphere of influence in Silicon Valley expanded as he got richer. He became known as a mentor, starting the Thiel Fellowship, which gave $100,000 and two years of support to founders under 20. His most well known mentees — though not Thiel Fellows — include Mark Zuckerberg, who he connected to Trump, and Sam Altman. He shares an interest in longevity with the latter, reportedly signing up to be cryogenically frozen and adapting an antiaging routine.
Conservative kingmaker
His personal politics and contrarian streak also came to define Thiel, setting him apart from the largely Democratic Bay Area.
A self-described “libertarian,” Thiel has written extensively about his political beliefs, including a piece in the 1990s that railed against affirmative action.
“I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual,” he wrote in 2009.
Over the past two decades, he’s spoken several times at events for the conservative and libertarian Federalist Society. He contributed to the Seasteading Institute, an attempt at an independent, libertarian floating nation.
There was also his feud with Gawker, which some considered an attack on free speech. In 2007, the online outlet wrote a story about the sexuality of Thiel, who is gay. Nearly a decade later, it was revealed that he had poured about $10 million into cases against Gawker, including Hulk Hogan’s 2012 case, which eventually led to the website’s demise. (At the time, Thiel characterized his fight as against violations of privacy, not journalism.)
He had donated to conservative or libertarian politicians for years — including more than $2 million for Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential campaign and millions to groups backing Ted Cruz that same year, per OpenSecrets.
It was Thiel’s 2016 endorsement of Trump that cemented his status as tech’s most vocal conservative — and caused rifts with others in the tech world. Reed Hastings, who was at the time on Facebook’s board with Thiel, reportedly called Thiel’s Trump support “catastrophically bad judgment,” and there were calls for Y Combinator, where Thiel worked as an advisor, to fire him.
By 2018, Thiel’s friction with the San Francisco tech bubble had boiled over. He called Silicon Valley a “one-party state” at a 2018 talk at Stanford. Soon after, he decamped to Los Angeles.
While he did not donate to Trump in 2020, he solidified his reputation as a major GOP donor in 2022, supporting not only Vance but also Arizona senatorial candidate Blake Masters, who lost, Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, and more than a dozen other Conservative candidates.
Now, with Vance in the White House, it remains to be seen what Thiel’s relationship with Trump will be. He has proven, though, that his contrarian point of view was right, at least this time.
Additional reporting by Sam Tabahriti and Jyoti Mann.
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