New York, San Francisco venture capital and politics. Actually, this combination is rarely found in the USA. But that could soon change with the midterm elections in the United States. The German-born investor and billionaire Peter Thiel wants to give up his position on the Facebook supervisory board and focus more on politics. There, the 54-year-old supports two candidates from the Trump camp, JD Vance and Blake Masters, who made their money as venture capitalists.
“Politics took up more and more space with him. Peter is super political and has been for five, six years,” said a person close to him. “He sees the Biden administration as a gift because he finds it so bad.”
Accordingly, the election of President Joe Biden was a Pyrrhic victory for the Democrats. Biden’s lack of popularity is allowing Republicans to regroup for the congressional and presidential elections.
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Thiel’s favorites Masters and Vance represent a new generation of Trumpians. The 35-year-old Masters likes to denounce the “brainwashing of the corrupt public education system” and berates the “criminal government” and the “globalist elite” who have betrayed American interests. He chose a photo of Trump’s wall to Mexico as the background for his Twitter profile, with the caption: “Take back Arizona.” The state for which he wants to enter the Senate.
Masters and Thiel have known each other for a long time: when Thiel was teaching a class at the elite university and investor forge Stanford, Masters was one of his students. Thiel is Masters’ mentor and business partner.
Masters runs the businesses of tech investor firm Thiel Capital and the Thiel Foundation, which promotes science and innovation. In 2014, they co-wrote a book that became a hit, selling three million copies, Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future.
Masters radically rejects free trade and multilateralism
Some of Master’s political positions could also be assigned to the left of the spectrum, such as strict environmental protection, higher wages and the goal of breaking up big tech companies like Facebook and Amazon. But many of his demands lean heavily on Trump’s nationalism. ‘I’m an America-first conservative,’ he says of himself.
Masters is still an unknown on the Republican map. He still has to assert himself against the competition within the party.
(Photo: ddp/USA TODAY Network)
Masters advocates strict immigration restrictions and radically rejects free trade or multilateralism. He also does not distance himself from Trump’s conspiracy theory of a stolen victory in the 2020 presidential election. “Trump won 2020,” says one of his commercials.
Still, Masters is still an unknown on the Republican map, and he has yet to assert himself against intra-party competition. In the most recent polls from February, he has only averaged seven percent so far.
But that’s exactly where his mentor comes into play: Thiel pumped ten million dollars into a so-called Political Action Committee (PAC), which is supposed to secure Masters’ Republican nomination in Arizona. $10 million is “a hell of a lot of money” for career changers, Kirk Adams, a Republican from Arizona, told Politico magazine.
Another PAC for the bestselling author Vance, who also became known in Germany in 2016 with his memoirs “Hillbilly Elegy”, which was recently filmed by Netflix, received the same amount.
In it, the 37-year-old describes his childhood and youth in Ohio and Kentucky. He grew up poor with drugs and violence before graduating from Yale with a law degree and becoming a venture capitalist. He also explains in part how Trump was able to conquer these structurally weak regions of the left behind.
The author JD Vance called Donald Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue, today he supports the ex-president in the election campaign.
(Photo: ddp)
When the book was published, Vance accused people with a similar fate of “blaming everyone but themselves”. He called Trump “cultural heroin” and a demagogue “leading the white working class into a very dark place.”
Vance is a regular on American right-wing podcasts
But later he too turned to Trumpism. Today he denounces the “elites and the ruling class”. He describes the storm of fanatical Trump supporters on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 as a “big lie”. He is a regular on podcasts by American right-wingers, such as former Trump strategist Steve Bannon.
The ties between Vance and Thiel also go back a long time: Vance is a former employee of the venture capital fund Mithril Capital, which Thiel co-founded. Thiel took a stake in a Vance venture capital fund a few years ago. Most recently, both men invested in the video platform Rumble, which is used in right-wing conservative circles as an alternative to YouTube.
Because the moderate Republican Rob Portman is retiring in Ohio, Vance now wants to run for the Senate there himself. He, too, has yet to assert himself in politics – and his earlier criticism of Trump is already causing problems.
Thiel’s environment does not believe that Mark Zuckerberg pushed him to leave because of his political commitment. The Facebook founder always appreciated his mentor’s political connections.
More: Sebastian Kurz is hired by tech investor Thiel