Ecstatic Integration

03/07/2025

In 2009, during the Obama presidency, Thiel famously wrote: ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible’. He continued:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history in which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of a capitalist democracy an oxymoron.

It was a glimpse into quite how reactionary and far-right his politics can be – true capitalist freedom is threatened by the welfare state and women voters! He thought freedom might still be possible on the internet, in space, and on islands. In 2011, he bought citizenship to New Zealand and apparently constructed a bunker there to see out the apocalypse.

And yet Thiel is always one to hedge his bets. His 2008 letter to Clarium investors declared “a bull market in politics,” which would be characterized by a breakdown of the consensus of the “globalist elite.” He started to make bets on a new more right-wing populist anti-immigrant and nativist counter-elite, of the sort we now see in power. Long before Elon Musk supported Tommy Robinson or the AfD, Thiel was backing figures like Kris Kobach, who’d served as a lawyer for an anti-immigration group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or meeting with white supremacists like Kevin DeAnna.

In 2016, he donated to Donald Trump’s outsider campaign, and spoke at the Republican Convention – the first openly gay man to do so. At the time, Silicon Valley was very Democrat-leaning, both in its employees and CEOs and founders. He did not apparently expect Trump to win and watched in giddy amazement, Curtis Yarvin by his side, when he did. His court of Thielians took to calling him the ‘shadow president’. For a while, he enjoyed enviable access to President Trump’s inner circle. He organized the meeting of Trump with most of the leading figures from technology (Musk came away thinking Trump was a moron).

President-elect Donald Trump shakes the hand of Peter Thiel during a meeting with technology executives at Trump Tower, December 14, 2016 in New York City.
Thiel was given a role in Trump’s 2017 White House – Trump’s chief of staff, Steve Bannon, tasked him with taking on the bloated bureaucracy and especially the alphabet soup of agencies – FDA, CDC, and so on, similar to Musk’s efforts now with DOGE, albeit with less of a chainsaw. Thiel tried to appoint contrarians and libertarians to various positions, to counter-act the consensus thinking of ‘the blob’ and even perhaps dissolve whole agencies. He suggested Balaji Srinivasan as head of the FDA – Srinivasan suggested new drugs could be approved through a website of user reviews, like Erowid. Almost all of Thiel’s suggestions were blocked – they were too extreme even for Steve Bannon (he suggested a climate change denier should be Trump’s chief scientific advisor).

Thielians felt that Trump’s radical instincts were being curbed by the ‘swamp centrists’ around him. Thiel slowly distanced himself from Trump, recognizing perhaps that, according to the philosophy of Rene Girard, the king becomes a scapegoat whose sacrificial death purges society of its discontent. But he continued to make bets on political outsiders – he supported his friend Blake Masters’ run for Congress (it failed), and employee JD Vance’s run for the Senate (it succeeded).

Vance has long been an acolyte and admirer of Thiel’s. He credits a speech Thiel gave at Yale Law School in 2011 as a key moment in his slow conversion to right-wing Christianity. Vance later worked for Thiel’s Mithril Capital, then persuaded Thiel to invest in his own Narya Capital (always wise to name your start-up after something from Lord of the Rings). In 2021, Thiel introduced Vance to Trump at Mar-a-Lago. In 2022, Thiel put $15 million into Vance’s campaign for the Senate. Then, in 2024, Thiel’s friend David Sacks organized a $300,000-per-ticket fund-raiser for Trump at his mansion, and at the event Q&A he suggested to Trump that Vance should be his VP nomination. In the run-up to the Republican Convention, Thiel, Sacks and Elon Musk all phoned Trump to push for Vance. They got their way.

After a slow start in the campaign, Vance has emerged as a strong-albeit-polarising figure, far more visible in the first two months of Trump’s presidency than most vice-presidents. He’s become something like Trump’s mini-me, bullying visiting European leaders with aggressive questioning, and getting in Twitter fights with everyone from Niall Ferguson to Rory Stewart. Other Thiel-connected appointees or nominees in the new government include David Sacks, who as Trump’s AI and crypto czar pushed for a crypto federal reserve fund, and Jim O’Neill, who as deputy secretary of Health and Human Services under RFK may try to liberalize the FDA’s drug approval process. And of course, former PayPal colleague Elon Musk has an incredibly visible role in the new government. DOGE (whose staff includes various young Thielians) is trying to shake up the administration, slash spending and dissolve whole agencies. It’s now taking on Pentagon spending, in a shake-up which could create big opportunities for two of Thiel’s start-ups – Anduril and Palantir.