Trump’s tech bros — The enigma of Peter Thiel

This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: ‘Trump’s tech bros — The enigma of Peter Thiel’

Murad Ahmed
This story about tech, power and revenge begins more than a decade ago with Hulk Hogan, a sex tape and a gossip website called Gawker.

Tabby Kinder
So Gawker was this kind of digital-first online media company. It was all about gossip, celebrity news, commentary on media and culture.

Murad Ahmed
That’s Tabby Kinder, the FT’s West Coast financial editor, reminding me what a big deal Gawker was back then.

Tabby Kinder
It was really early for the time, dotcom era-style media outlets. And Hulk Hogan had a row with them over a story about a sex tape and he sued them.

Murad Ahmed
Not only did Hogan sue Gawker, but the lawsuit eventually bankrupted the website, all thanks to the deep pockets of one man.

Tabby Kinder
It emerged that Peter Thiel had been the financier funding all of the lawsuits. He put $10mn plus in to help Hulk Hogan shut Gawker down.

Murad Ahmed
Peter Thiel is a renowned tech investor, and he apparently held a grudge against Gawker for having outed him as gay years before. This was his way of making Gawker pay.

Tabby Kinder
Thiel talks about it as being one of his greatest achievements.

Murad Ahmed
It was a huge power play, and it taught the world not to mess with Peter Thiel.

Tabby Kinder
He’s certainly not shied away from the fact that he did this and he doesn’t shy away from having a kind of shadowy influence. And he is willing to put financial power behind something that he believes in.

Murad Ahmed
Like tech. He was the first outside investor to spot the potential in Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook. He was an early backer of companies like Airbnb and Spotify, and his fund was the first to put money into Elon Musk’s SpaceX. And then, in 2016, he spotted another rising star to get behind. At the Republican National Convention that year, Thiel broke ranks with the tech establishment and backed Donald Trump.

Peter Thiel voice clip
Good evening. I’m Peter Thiel. I build companies and I support people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships. Tonight, I urge all of my fellow Americans to stand up and vote for Donald Trump. Thank you very much.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Murad Ahmed
This is Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m Murad Ahmed, the FT’s technology news editor, and in this season of the podcast, we’ve seen how many of America’s tech titans have sought to get closer to Donald Trump to protect and further their business interests. But Peter Thiel is different. As well as a successful investor, he’s seen as a thinker, a philosopher king at the very top of Silicon Valley. In a largely godless tech world, Thiel is a committed Christian and amongst a left-leaning community, he’s been labelled with words like libertarian, nationalist, techno-authoritarian. He’s backed wild ideas like building offshore island communities free of national laws and an Olympic-style games where taking performance-enhancing drugs is encouraged. And he’s become influential in politics, with vice-president JD Vance just one of the many protégés and acolytes gaining power in Washington. So the question is: how did Thiel get this influence, and what, if anything, does he want with Donald Trump?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

To try and better understand Thiel and his motivations, I sat down with Tabby Kinder and FT columnist Gillian Tett to talk about what exactly Peter Thiel wants now and what his legacy might be in a world well beyond Donald Trump. I started by asking Tabby where Peter Thiel came from. How did he make his name and his money?

Tabby Kinder
Really, his start came with PayPal in the ’90s. Before that, I think he’d had a few roles, not tech-related, banking, he was a lawyer, that sort of thing. But he co-founded PayPal as a kind of early payment system. And it sold to eBay in 2002, which was when Thiel kind of walked away as a multi-millionaire, big break. It launched the careers of a whole load of other people, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and it was from that point really that he became a sort of legendary tech investor.

Murad Ahmed
So he makes his fortune from PayPal and he becomes this legendary investor, as you say. What did he choose to put his money towards? Has there been an investment strategy?

Tabby Kinder
Yeah, he’s made incredibly good early bets on big tech companies that are still considered start-ups now, SpaceX, Airbnb, Stripe. Tonnes of the biggest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley have very early investments from Peter Thiel. One of the first big investments he made, or at least the first truly big, successful investment he made was into Facebook around 2004, so really soon after the eBay sale. He put about $500,000 into thefacebook.com, which very quickly became well over $1bn.

Murad Ahmed
So Thiel made some pretty shrewd investments and with that some serious money, but how did that turn into political influence in the Valley?

Tabby Kinder
The question of Peter Thiel’s influence in Silicon Valley is an interesting one because he’s obviously incredibly powerful, influential, wealthy, but influence is a kind of a strange thing because he sort of very quickly became on the outside of Silicon Valley. He was never in with the CEOs of Google and Amazon and these people. And whereas Silicon Valley from the ’90s onwards really cemented this reputation for this kind of Californian hub of innovation and liberalism and it’s like very distinct from DC, Thiel was always kind of on the outside of that. He’s politically and philosophically quite distinct from some of the other big personalities we’ve seen grow to lead Silicon Valley in the last couple of decades.

Murad Ahmed
So at this point, politically, he’s still a bit of an outsider. Gillian, coming to you, you’ve met Peter Thiel many times, he seems to almost reinforce that outsider status by endorsing Donald Trump back in 2016. Why does he do that?

Gillian Tett
I’ll say a couple of things. First of all, Peter Thiel is astonishingly bright. I always learn a lot whenever I interact with him. And I’m always very intellectually challenged. And he’s very wide-ranging in his reading and his ideas and views. He’s unconventional and he doesn’t like being part of a system as such or being put into a box ever. He lives in LA, not in San Francisco or Menlo Park, and that sort of underscores that, that he is a sort of bit of an insider-outsider always. And he tends to see problems and systems, you know, as big patterns and looks for dislocations and things like that when deciding how to invest and treats in some ways the political economy as another version of the financial system and economic system in terms of looking at ways that it’s malfunctioning and how things could do better and putting big bets on people or initiatives he thinks might actually shake things up or change things.

So he moved into politics really as an extension of many of his ideas about what’s wrong with the world and his belief that, you know, you bet big on things that you really care about or have conviction about, and has placed some big bets in people. JD Vance is obviously one of them. His relationship with Trump, though, is a bit more complex. And in the last six months, he’s quite deliberately, it seems, distanced himself a bit from the political machinery, political fray, because at the end of the day, he really is very libertarian in many of his ideas. And like many people who’ve come from a libertarian bent, there are aspects, I would imagine, the whole Trumpian agenda right now, that aren’t necessarily in line with what he and his group would regard as being the top priorities.

Murad Ahmed
What parts of the Trump agenda do you think he does like? Or is there anything about Trump’s character that he is on board with?

Gillian Tett
Well, you know, he comes from the type of old-school populism that is driving part of the Trump agenda. And the way that I see it right now around Trump is there’s really three factions.

There’s the congressional Republicans who, you know, one might see epitomised by people like Mike Johnson, who used to be quite free trade-y — they’re certainly not now — but often driven by family values.

There’s the populist nationalists, people like Steve Bannon, that is very much driven by “America first”, hostility to China, but also a very strong emphasis on looking after poor people and they would want to see tax rises on the rich and that kind of thing.

And then there’s the more libertarian approach, which is people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. And they would be upset by smashing up science, smashing up anything to do with intellectual activity. For the most part, I mean, people like Peter Thiel and others have made it clear they think a lot of the universities are akin to cathedrals. So they’re basically part of the elite establishment and things they don’t like and they’re fighting against. But at the same time, they do support science and entrepreneurship and innovation and within that often migration of highly skilled people.

Murad Ahmed
You mentioned that Thiel likes putting bets on people who shake things up. So did he see Trump as a bit of a disrupter?

Gillian Tett
It’s really about a howl of outrage and horror and frustration with the system, the status quo that there was around before. And that’s really the primary aspect of it, as far as I can see, which many people in Silicon Valley have long felt, that the Washington system is too stodgy and too captured by incumbent elite interests to be dynamic.

Peter Thiel voice clip
We judge the leadership of our country to have failed. The sheer size of the US trade deficit shows that something has gone badly wrong. The United States is importing more than $500bn every year. That money flows into financial assets, and it gives the well-connected people who benefit a reason to defend the status quo.

Gillian Tett
And one of the key hallmarks of the Silicon Valley is that you don’t believe that anyone should be an incumbent that goes unchallenged. You see an incumbency, you want to challenge it always. And the political system in the last few decades has become dominated by incumbent elite insiders. And so insofar as Donald Trump came in threatening to shake things up and promising to shake things up, that was the message that appealed to people like Peter Thiel.

Donald Trump voice clip
Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people.

Gillian Tett
And as I say, Thiel has never been easy to define at all in any way, shape or form. And again, that’s a good thing because we need free thinkers. You may disagree with some of the solutions he’s backed or the ideas, but you can’t deny that they come from quite a thoughtful place and a lot of internal dialogue and discussion. And that, you know, he is trying to tackle real problems he sees and real problems around how to keep America innovative and productive, and focus on growth in the future.

Peter Thiel voice clip
There are deep reasons the stagnation happens. If we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think the society, I don’t know, it unravels, it doesn’t work.

Gillian Tett
And that’s very much what’s driving a lot of what he is doing and thinking.

Murad Ahmed
And Tabby, just to go back to his influence in the Valley, do you think his influence has grown given his connection to the political sphere and his connections to Trump?

Tabby Kinder
There’s no doubt that what was an incredibly unpopular alignment, an uncomfortable alignment between Peter Thiel and Trump in 2016, by 2024 looked like an incredibly forward-thinking and smart move because by last summer, we saw a load of Silicon Valley big personalities come out for Trump.

Marc Andreessen voice clip
Because I would say that we have a leader of the coalition and his name is Donald Trump.

Elon Musk voice clip
President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America.

Chamath Palihapitiya voice clip
Let’s just go around the horn. Who voted for Trump? Let’s all raise their hands for those who voted for Trump, ready?

David Sacks voice clip
I voted twice, I voted twice.

Tabby Kinder
People that had been vocal Democrats in the past, like Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk, suddenly were rallying behind Donald Trump, which of course brought them kind of closer in line with what had been seen as a sort of fringe opinion in the Valley by Thiel to back a candidate like Trump. I don’t think it necessarily grew his influence. He was already, you know, very influential. But it did kind of cement this feeling that Peter Thiel has played an incredibly smart game and that he does make very good early bets and that generally he’s kind of not been wrong on his views of the progression of things and what’s happening in politics and regulation. The things he’s prioritised have become the most important things that people in Silicon Valley care about. So yeah, well, it’s not necessarily increased his influence. He already was a very influential person. It certainly brought a lot of the value in line with his way of thinking.

Gillian Tett
I mean, can I just jump in there and say that, you know, you can’t deny the fact that he is a genius at smelling where the zeitgeist is going and where the opportunities are in the future. And you can see that in relation to his investing career, but also the political mood and wind. And again, plenty of people might hate what he has stood for, but they can’t ignore it insofar as it shows where the wider trends are heading.

Murad Ahmed
OK, let’s take a short break and when we come back let’s talk about how Thiel’s influence is actually being felt in Washington.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So Peter Thiel is part of the libertarian influence on Trump’s administration, but unlike Elon Musk, he’s not really been anywhere near the man himself, at least not this time around. One clear connection between Thiel and Trump is JD Vance. Tabby, how close is that relationship?

Tabby Kinder
Peter Thiel gave JD Vance his first real job in Silicon Valley, actually. So JD Vance moved to San Francisco, became a venture capitalist very briefly. And his first role was at Mithril Capital, which is one of the Peter Thiel hedge funds/venture capital funds. He didn’t work there for very long. He left to go and start his own fund after, I think, just a couple of years, in Ohio that was more focused on investing in technology, entrepreneurs in other parts of the US outside of Silicon Valley, which also was an ambition that Peter Thiel very much supported. And also his faith has actually been incredibly important in terms of his influence as well.

Peter Thiel voice clip
I think that there’s an anthropology in Christianity. There’s an understanding of human nature where we’re in the image of God. We’re mimetic. We try to, you know, we need good role models. The only good role model for us is Christ.

Tabby Kinder
Lots of people seem to think that his Christian beliefs have also influenced his perspectives on technology, on politics. JD Vance actually kind of credits Peter Thiel with his own conversion to Christianity or his own kind of accepting of a god and faith. JD Vance, he wrote that he first started to come to a religion when he saw Peter Thiel give a speech, I think at Yale University. So that’s not only financially and professionally is how the two are linked, but, you know, there’s clearly this kind of spiritual, philosophical link between the two men as well.

Murad Ahmed
And as well as those personal links with the administration, he has also gained some influence through his companies too. The one that really springs to mind is Palantir, the secretive data intelligence company that Thiel started that’s become really big in the defence tech world.

Tabby Kinder
So Palantir started in 2003 and it was a tech company that set out very early on to work with the US government. Its first funding came from In-Q-Tel, which is the venture arm of the CIA. And it started with a really clear message post-September 11th, that the best and brightest tech experts in the US should be working on national security. And at the time, that was a really kind of unusual and sort of unpopular opinion. And there was a big divide between most kind of tech entrepreneurs in DC. They wouldn’t have, tech guys wouldn’t have dreamed really of starting a business that intended to have the government as one of its biggest customers. And over the last 20 years, that has obviously changed. And now in the last few years, as we’ve seen tensions between the US and China grow, as Russia invaded Ukraine and there’s conflicts in the Middle East, suddenly there is this assembling of tech industry expertise behind the US national security efforts. And Palantir, you know, as one of the earliest companies that was sort of doing that, has been a huge beneficiary and its market cap is huge. I think it’s over $300bn now.

And yeah, we’ve seen lots of very similar companies crop up in its wake. More recently, Anduril, which is another Peter Thiel kind of seeded company, which started off very much like Palantir to provide hardware, weapons for the US war effort, which basically brought Silicon Valley tech expertise to the battlefield, basically, which just hadn’t been happening before. I mean, it really shows how Thiel kind of bridged this influence between Silicon Valley and DC, which set him on a very early path to have the sort of political influence that lots of other big tech CEOs and entrepreneurs are grappling to get anywhere near to now.

Murad Ahmed
Gillian, what do you make of this idea that Thiel is somehow kind of a bridge between the Valley and DC?

Gillian Tett
I would actually challenge the idea that he’s a bridge. I don’t think he’s ever trying to represent a group of any sort or act as a bridge between groups per se. He and Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, and others come from a tradition of Socratic debate, of intellectual discourse. And they don’t regard themselves as being part of a tribe or even necessarily a party. And they don’t assume that they are representing a particular ism or group of people per se at all. You know, it’s more a question of people trying to sit down and figure out the world with their ideas of what they think is happening. And so yes, Peter Thiel absolutely played a very important role in backing JD Vance and helping him, along with other candidates in the past. But that doesn’t mean that he’s suddenly totally aligned like a political operative in Washington in endorsing everything he does or regards him as his man or vice versa.

And it’s important to stress that Washington operates on this basis of almost tribal political loyalties, which are often very damaging, whereby if you back somebody, they’re yours, if you like, and vice versa. And it is very different from the mentality which comes from this much more Socratic, intellectual questioning approach that starts with each problem and tries to look at it in the round and then tries to imagine what they think is their solution.

Murad Ahmed
Sometimes that solution has led Thiel to some pretty radical ideas. He’s flirted with things like the Dark Enlightenment movement, which is sort of more extreme and anti-democratic.

Gillian Tett
I’ll simply say that on the occasions I’ve spoken with him, I’ve always been stunned by the range of ideas that he absorbs. So if you read the works of someone like Curtis Yarvin, which has been influential in the whole Dark Enlightenment movement, that’s challenging everything, talking about having the president as a king and why do we need democracy and why are we voting or . . . the latest kind of idea is why do we need a separate Fed and a Treasury? They should be smashed together and the entire balance sheet of the American government should be restructured like a company immediately. You know, these are wacky, wild alien ideas. It’s quite hard to decide whether that’s rightwing or leftwing because it’s not really part of any particular political party right now. But that’s much more the mentality of taking each problem in its own right and trying to look for solutions to it, starting with a whole wide range of thinkers rather than just saying, I’m Republican or Democrat and I’m going to stop there.

Murad Ahmed
While it’s endlessly fascinating to try and understand Peter Thiel’s thinking, like you say, Gillian, it’s quite hard to work out any particular threads. And some of it came up on his recent op-ed for the FT. It was titled “A time for truth and reconciliation”. It seemed to be about various, I think a lot of people would call them conspiracy theories, and Peter Thiel sensed that in a kind of post-internet era, these ideas were going to be uncovered by the Trump regime and come into full view. Where does that all come from? How does that fit into Thiel’s sense of the world, but also potentially his influence over what Trump does next?

Gillian Tett
There’s a line of thinking amongst many of the Silicon Valley leaders, or more free-spirited Silicon Valley leaders, that says, insofar as they hate incumbent elites and old-fashioned structures, they’d see that what happened in the last decade or two, particularly in relation to the Democrats but not exclusively, was swaddled in their views, an attack on free speech, and that the woke banner was used to crush dissent and to kick people who wanted to challenge the system off social media platforms and to suppress information. And so when someone like Peter Thiel says that he is wanting a sort of reconciliation commission to look at all the information that he believes have been covered up in the past or suppressed, he means it because there is this belief that a lot of the information has been prone to censorship in the past. One can argue whether that’s mad or correct or whether that’s just conspiracy theories. You know, lots of people have very different views about that. But the fact he is saying that is indicative of a line of thinking which is actually quite widely spread. And it shouldn’t be dismissed by anybody who is involved in policymaking or at companies or in the media simply because you disagree with it.

Murad Ahmed
And do you get any sense at all about how Trump feels about Thiel?

Gillian Tett
Well, Trump is very transactional. And Trump has zero interest in philosophers or anything like that. So he’d be very baffled by a lot of this libertarian, Socratic debate, quite frankly. Trump cares about power, first and foremost, and about ways of leveraging his platform to achieve his ends. I imagine that Trump, and I’ve not asked Trump ever about what he thinks about Peter Thiel but I imagine he would regard him as useful, helpful on occasion, but probably be irritated that somebody like Thiel is probably not kissing the ring every five minutes. And it’s notable that for the most part, Peter Thiel has kept to himself in recent months and been quiet. It’s a very big contrast to someone like Elon Musk. Plenty of people in Silicon Valley have discussed which of the two approaches is savvier, but at the end of the day, it really is a difference in intellectual style as much as anything else.

Murad Ahmed
Tabby, looking ahead a bit, there’s this idea that Peter Thiel and his acolytes will still be there after this Trump administration ends. Who are the people around Thiel that you think we should be keeping an eye out for?

Tabby Kinder
There’s a lot of people around Thiel that have shown themselves to have some sort of political ambition. One person is potentially Joe Lonsdale. He is a co-founder of Palantir. He’s known Thiel forever. And Lonsdale now runs a venture capital firm called 8VC that is based down in Austin, Texas. I’ve met Joe a few times. He’s doing that thing where he seems to be savvily and steadily upping his profile and has made, like Thiel, some very sensible and smart bets on various technology companies and has really become one of the defence tech investors that was doing it before it was popular. It has now backed some of the biggest and most important companies in that space.

Another person who might fit into that is someone like Trae Stephens, who was one of the co-founders at Anduril. And he works currently at Founders Fund, which is one of Peter Thiel’s larger venture capital funds. And Trae is, like Peter, is a really committed Christian. I think given his career in defence tech, his closeness to Peter Thiel, I mean, that at the moment is a recipe for being a very compelling candidate in politics.

Murad Ahmed
And finally, Gillian, even post-Trump, how lasting do you think Thiel’s philosophy is going to be in American politics?

Gillian Tett
Honest answer, I don’t know. I mean, right now it’s very hard to predict a week ahead right now. And again, I think he wouldn’t describe himself as having this dark, hidden web of influence per se. It’s more about questioning ideas and things. Right now, America’s political economy and political system is in great flux. Many long-standing ideas, which have often been very lazily embraced by the establishment, are being challenged. The extreme manifestation of that is the world popularity of someone like Curtis Yarvin and his ideas, which are utterly offensive to many people. But as I say, they’re influential. The less extreme version of that is the fact that Donald Trump won the election. And right now, there’s a lot in flux. There’s one thing that unites, you know, the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial mindset is that they welcome flux. Because flux is when the most interesting and explosively exciting new concepts and ways of organising yourself and being emerge. So if you believe that, disruption is seen as a good thing, not a bad thing, because it challenges the incumbent elite.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Murad Ahmed
That was the FT’s Gillian Tett and Tabby Kinder talking to me about Peter Thiel, the enigmatic tech investor, and his influence over the Trump administration. Over the course of the five episodes in this series, I found myself wondering if Trump is changing the tech world more than the tech world is changing Trump. The likes of Elon Musk helped get the president into power, but what have they really got out of it? Musk has returned to Tesla embittered, with sales of his electric cars in decline and the company’s government subsidies slashed. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg watered down content moderation, and yet Trump’s antitrust regulators continue to pursue a case that could lead to its break-up.

Maybe the best that Big Tech can hope for is to avoid coming under fire. The tech bros are providing little opposition to the president, just as Trump wants. But Trump’s next three years in office will be consequential for tech. The president’s team are reshaping the world, with policies on artificial intelligence, trade and free expression that will determine which of the bros, if any, emerge winners from the Trump presidency. And those winners have the potential to remain at the forefront of this new intersection between politics and tech, well beyond the man who is in power today.

This is the last episode in this series on Trump’s tech bros. If you haven’t already, you can listen back to our episodes on Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Also take a look at the show notes for this episode for some free-to-read articles from the FT. In the meantime, thanks for listening, and Tech Tonic will be back in a few weeks with a brand new series on AI and music.

This season of Tech Tonic is presented by me, Murad Ahmed, and produced by Josh Gabert-Doyon. The senior producer is Edwin Lane, and the executive producer is Flo Phillips. Sound design by Sam Giovinco and Breen Turner. Original music by Metaphor Music. The FT’s acting heads of audio are Manuela Saragosa and Topher Forhecz.