Why are so many smart people Peter Thiel-ing themselves?

As with almost anyone of significance in our nuance-allergic age, Peter Thiel is someone under-appreciated by his critics and over-applauded by his fans.

The standard speaker’s biography is something like this: he co-founded PayPal, Palantir and Founders Fund, and was the first outside check into Facebook. His more notorious accolades include bankrupting Gawker by funding Hulk Hogan’s suit and helping JD Vance first get elected to the Senate before introducing him to Donald Trump, thus greasing his ascension to VP nominee.

Thiel’s book Zero to One is considered canon in start-up world. He’s a conservative, a Christian and a contrarian. If you go searching for Peter Thiel interviews online, you’re as likely to hear him talking about crypto and national defense as you are the significance of Revelation and Christ as the archetypal victim. He has a claim to being the most influential conservative thinker of the last twenty years. He helped popularize Girardian thought and move the Republican party away from its previous neoconservative core. Tyler Cowen, who may be the best curator of talent of anyone in the world, has called Thiel the best spotter of talent of anyone he knows.

Thiel’s critiques of excess bureaucratization and specialization in Academia have been prescient for decades and remain underrated. His program for getting smart kids to skip college via a Thiel Fellowship helped produce Figma, Loom and Etheruem — the world’s second largest cryptocurrency. He has a knack for producing memorable phrases, even if they turn out to be more memorable than true (“Competition is for losers,” “Crypto is libertarian, AI is communist,” or his favorite interview question, “Tell me something that's true, that very few people agree with you on?”).

He’s not your typical billionaire, even if like your typical billionaire, he’d prefer not to pay much in taxes.

I would dare anyone to seriously engage with his thought and not walk away with some new nugget or idea, even if on the whole, you reject both his worldview and methods. Off the top of my head, I would point to an interview he did with his friend and one-time colleague Eric Weinstein, in which Thiel pointed out that the more specialized someone’s research is, the more insulated they are from outside criticism, as eventually they are operating in a domain in which only they have expertise. Anyone who has spent serious time in graduate humanities programs will recognize the cycle by which so many (potentially) brilliant professors work their way into private intellectual ghettoes. It’s how “innovation” in research leads to irrelevance.

Thiel’s admirers (I wouldn’t quite call them “fans”) can mistake his talents for a Midas touch. He may at times be prophetic, but that doesn’t make him immune to being short-sighted.

With PayPal, Thiel set out to create a digital monetary system that would free the populations of the developing world from the tyranny of hyper-inflation. It ended up mostly being a tool for eBay power users, eventually being sold to the e-commerce company in 2002.

Thiel’s famous investment in Facebook was lucrative, but he mis-timed his exit, selling the majority of his shares for around $1 billion in 2012. The stock is up nearly 20x since then.

And then of course, there’s Thiel support for former President and current candidate Donald J. Trump.

In 2016, Thiel was famously the only major figure in Silicon Valley to openly support Trump’s first run for office (though even this story is often told in a short-hand way that makes Thiel look more prophetic than he was — Thiel initially supported Carly Fiorina, only choosing to back Trump after being asked to speak at the RNC).

In the Bay Area, Thiel’s support of Trump was considered distasteful at best and evil at worst. His fellow Facebook board member Reed Hastings was especially critical, and Thiel himself eventually moved to LA, citing San Francisco’s political mono-culture.

Of course, Trump won, and Thiel landed a spot on the transition team, where he was invited to suggest candidates for the incoming administration. He was even given an office in Trump Tower.

For a bilingual Stanford grad, fluent in Christian theology, Western philosophy and libertarian thought, it’s hard to imagine a position that comes closer to the mythical Philosopher King, only in this case, it’d be the Philosopher King Maker.

Except, for Thiel, this was as good as it got. By all accounts, few of the candidates he suggested got jobs, and over time, he was frozen out of the inner circle. By 2020, he had stopped giving money to Trump.

Thiel did make a brief return in the 2022 midterms to support his friends JD Vance and Blake Masters as they ran for Senate. Vance underperformed Trump but still won in Ohio. Blake Masters lost in Arizona rather loudly, and just lost again this year, rather quietly.

Fast forward to this election cycle. As of last year, Thiel wasn’t only sitting the election out — he was finally opening up about his fallout with Trump. Never a great friend of the media, he agreed to a profile in The Atlantic. It remains, to this day, perhaps the most personally revealing profile that Thiel has ever agreed to. (I’ll only be discussing the political portion.)

The gist of the story was that Thiel was so disappointed in Trump, he was giving up on politics. (The title of the article says it all: “Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy: It’s one of his many, many disappointments.”)

One set of quotes was especially appealing:

Thiel even admitted to The Atlantic that he’d been dodging Trump’s calls for some time in order to rebuff his ask for $10 million in donations.

Just this past June, when pressed on the matter of his waning support, Peter had this to say at the Aspen Ideas Festival:

Saying the Trump administration was “crazier than I thought” and that he’d need a gun to his head to get enthused about a second term both seem damning on their own. But across these statements, the one that really stands out is the claim that Trump “couldn’t even get the most basic pieces of government to work.” That is about as scathing a critique as you can imagine from someone who cut their teeth creating companies from scratch and turning them into era-defining machines.

Peter Thiel, in a word, got duped. And as much as Trump’s critics like to points to January 6th and the Supreme Court nominees and his handling of Covid, I imagine it was headlines like this that hurt Thiel the most:

What’s strange is simply how obvious this outcome should have been. Trump is a media animal. He loves attention. He loves the spotlight. He loves being on TV and watching himself on TV. By many accounts, he wasn’t even trying to win in 2016, and was instead using his Presidential run to launch a media network.

Trump’s political career was, in other words, a publicity stunt, something many “average” Americans had no problem seeing — and yet somehow Peter Thiel, famed evaluator of talent, missed it entirely. Instead of a showman, he saw a savior, which in this case meant someone capable of tearing it all down — of clearing the board so a new era of politics could begin.

Thiel may himself offer a clue into how this could happen.

In his previously mentioned interview with Weinstein, Thiel and his former employee take turns discussing the flaws of 20th century ideology. Weinstein, a lifelong progressive who’s become a staunch critic of both parties, says that, without getting too ad hominem, it seems clear to him that Peter’s rights as a gay man would have been secured much earlier if America’s leftist intelligentsia had had more control.

Weinstein has no illusions about communism’s failings, but says the social utopian aspects were important. Thiel, in return, says that one of the main issues with communism was that it was never the intelligent, utopian-bent people who were actually in control:

I think this is a genuinely astute observation from Thiel. It’s also highly ironic, given that in the case of Trump, it’s Thiel who seems to have played the role of the “useful idiot,” giving Trump intellectual cover (and money), but never getting an actual say in the decisions being made.

Like the intellectuals whose vision of communism blinded them to its horrific reality, Thiel’s vision of what Trumpism could be blinded him to the banal, predictable reality of who President Trump actually was.

Thiel told The Atlantic in the aforementioned profile that the reason he agreed to be interviewed at all was to make public a promise he’d made to his husband: that he wouldn’t contribute any money this cycle.

Calling Trump’s first presidency a disappointment and saying that (as of late 2023) he was dodging Trump’s calls all seemed to be an effort to permanently distance himself from the former President.

But then enters JD Vance, who Thiel first introduced to Trump in 2021. Given Trump and Thiel’s frosty relationship, it would seem silly to credit the later with Vance getting the VP nod (it seems Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk had more of a say), and yet of course, without Thiel, Vance likely would have never been a Senator at all.

Whatever his role in the VP nomination, Peter still isn’t giving money this election — but now he’s fully changed his story as to why exactly that is.

Speaking at the All-In Summit in September, Thiel was asked point blank why he was sitting 2024 out, even though these are “his guys.”

Thiel’s answer? It’s no longer his disappointment in the first Trump presidency. Instead, it’s because of Democratic election fraud:

This is quite the claim, especially coming from someone who himself has said that he doesn’t think the 2020 election was stolen. (In The Atlantic interview, he even criticizes Trump for saying otherwise, while also saying that, if anything, it was the 2000 election that was stolen from Gore.)

Now, there’s no world in which Thiel was ever going to vote for Kamala. But it’s still surprising to see him repeating some of Trump’s most cherished (and deranged) lies. And it’s the loudest way Thiel can say, without giving money, that he’s fully back on Team Trump.

Silicon Valley, for the most part, remains a left-leaning place. But unlike in 2016, Thiel is no longer alone among tech’s major players in publicly supporting Trump’s campaign.

Elon Musk, after previously declining to endorse or finance either the Trump or Biden campaigns, is now flooding X daily with his support for Trump. He has also offered to lead an “efficiency commission” in a Trump administration and just appeared with Trump onstage at an event.

David Sacks, who supported Hilary Clinton in 2016 and helped launch Ron DeSantis’ failed Presidential campaign, is now hosting fundraisers for the man he wanted to defeat, alongside his All-In Podcast co-host Chamath Palihapitiya, another long-time Democratic donor who has since started to shift his allegiance.

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, two life-long Democrats, announced their support for Trump saying he’d be better for “small tech.” (Horowitz has since told his employees that he’s also giving to the Harris campaign, suggesting it was simply an issue with Biden that drove him into the arms of Trump. His firm, however, has not changed its position.)

Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t endorsed Trump, though Trump claims Zuckerberg told him he won’t be voting Democrat, and Zuck went out of his way to praise the former President for being a “bad ass” after he was shot in the ear in July.

For many of these figures, meeting Donald Trump seems to have been essential to their conversion. They’ve all said, in different interviews, that he’s funnier, more lively, and more personable than they would have thought. They claim to have had substantial conversations with him around topics like AI regulation and the federal debt. And many of them have emerged from meeting Trump with not only a fonder vision of him, but with a much darker vision of what a Harris Presidency could mean.

Andreessen and Horowitz, in endorsing Trump, said, “We literally [believe] the future of our business, the future of technology, and the future of America is at stake.”

Musk, at Trump’s rally, said that if Trump isn’t elected President, 2024 will be “the last election,” while David Sacks has consistently said we’re at risk of World War 3 if Democrats continue to fund the war in Ukraine.

Like with Thiel before them, these figures have turned Trump into a savior. Not just their preferred Presidential candidate, but the only man capable of averting a World War, saving free speech, and insuring American tech keeps its competitive edge.

That seems like a lot for a guy who couldn’t get the “basics” of government right.

Peter Thiel’s fascination with René Girard goes back to his undergrad days at Stanford, where Girard was a professor. The influence clearly remains: in his most recent appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, Thiel consistently returned to Girard’s theories as providing insight into the essential problem of inter-personal violence.

One of Girard’s most famous ideas is his concept of the scapegoat. I thought about summarizing it myself, then asked ChatGPT, and decided I couldn’t do it any better:

Girard takes this idea in a number of directions (for instance, by theorizing that Christianity was the first religion to spot the futility of scapegoating, with Christ serving as the ultimate scapegoat, thus paving the way for a religion focused on protecting rather than violating the innocent). Once you grasp the theory, you’ll see it everywhere in politics; in layman’s terms, it’s hard to solve complicated problems, but it’s easy to point at someone and say they’re the problem. 

The scapegoat and the savior, in Girard’s theory, can often be one and the same: Christ starts as the scapegoat, but becomes the savior; the former is to blame for society’s problems, while the later is a singular force capable of solving them all.

Perhaps Peter Thiel had this in mind when he first endorsed Trump: Thiel saw him as a scapegoat for our institutional failures, as the purest expression of the “anti-elite” ethos Thiel has always embraced: Trump was reviled by academia, media, the tech world and even the US’ intelligence community. And at some point along the way, Thiel became convinced Trump was the only one who could stand up to them all, if simply by muddying the field in which they played.

If Thiel’s support of Trump in 2016 now seems prophetic of a broader shift in the tech world, than his subsequent disillusionment should be a warning as well. What he wanted was a savior; what we got was a salesman.

Where’s the evidence that anything has changed?

It’s been well documented that despite his many character flaws (to put it mildly), Trump is revered as an almost messianic figure by the Christian Right. This mythos was only solidified after he dodged (or was given divine protection from) a would-be bullet.

We expect this from religious people, but a similar phenomenon seems to be happening among our most “rational” thinkers, too. Trump is being made into a savior by some of Silicon Valley’s elite as he, in turn, converts them to his cause.

You might think some of their language is merely hyperbole, but taking a second glance, the religious whiff is hard to miss. Rather than a self-interested politician, Trump has been re-imagined as a prophet, uniquely capable of curing our many national ills.

On a recent appearance on Joe Rogan, Palihapitiya — who might be the least vocal of Trump’s new supporters — repeated what’s become a common line of thinking among the converts: that Trump may be the wrong messenger, but he has the right message (in this case, by being anti-government waste and anti-interventionism). Palihapitiya speaks as if Trump had access to some greater truth, and the only question was whether he could get out of his own way.

Almost all of Trump’s new supporters speak in a similar way. Whether it’s regarding regulation or AI, the federal debt or Ukraine, what you hear over and over again is that they meet Trump, ask him questions, and he tells them exactly what he knows they want to hear.

Trump, meanwhile, is hawking $100,000 watches, special Trumps coins, and whatever this shady-looking crypto thing is — all with only weeks left in the election. His new and old tech backers might not literally think he’s a saint, but they seem to be so enamored with their own frustrations, and so desperate to find a simple solution to complex problems, that they’re willing to look past what might just be a simple con: Trump using the Presidency, once again, as a publicity stunt, with the end goal still being his own personal enrichment.

For some, the turn to Trump may just be a result of the cold shoulder they’ve received from the Biden administration. Andreessen and Horowitz say their companies have been harassed by the SEC, while Palihapitiya reportedly gave $250,000 to Biden’s re-election campaign, but could never get someone from the administration on the phone.

Kamala Harris isn’t Joe Biden, but neither has she separated herself enough to seem like an alternative to those disillusioned with the current administration. And because she’s seen as a party figure, as an ambassador for the wider Democratic elite, she isn’t singular enough to be made into a savior the way Trump and others (Obama, Clinton) have.

If scapegoat politics is about purging the body politic of evil by sacrificing its nearest representative, savior politics is about anointing the nearest hammer to set the world straight. Both belong to the politics of the grand gesture, the fixing of the world in a single, decisive step. The point isn’t that there aren’t people who can make an outsized difference in the world — it’s that our desire for super heroes blinds us to the “all too human” nature of the heroes we choose.

When it comes to Trump, I go back to Peter Thiel’s assessment: this man was unable to get the basics of government right. But somehow he’s now going to save free speech, end inflation, create peace in the Middle East, and lead us into a golden age of crypto, AI, biotech and more (all claims made by his supporters in tech)?

The ultimate irony in Peter Thiel breaking the seal for Silicon Valley is that Trump may be the Girardian candidate par excellence — he knows the key to politics is scapegoating enemies, and yet in being scapegoated himself, he’s made himself out to be a savior to all those who feel slighted as well. He flatters smart people by telling them their diagnoses are correct — and then assuring them he’ll do the dirty work himself when it comes to fixing the world. Their desire to see a savior blinds them to the human shaking their hand.

They’ll write him a check. He’ll take it and thank them. And then maybe four years from now, they’ll be quoting the oft-quoted Peter Thiel, muttering to themselves:

“It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought.”