Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel looks over the podium before the start of the second-day session of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, July 19, 2016.
The 2022 midterm elections remain over a year away, but already Peter Thiel, the famed billionaire tech investor, early supporter of Facebook and PayPal, and high-profile endorser of Donald Trump, is making his political preferences known.
In the first few months of 2021, Thiel has already given $10 million apiece to super PACs sponsoring Republican Senate candidates Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio. That’s a gargantuan amount of money for a Senate primary, especially over a year before Election Day. And though Thiel’s conservative politics have been infamous since he endorsed Donald Trump in 2016, the financial commitment thus far exceeds his largest single commitment to Trump’s cause by a factor of eight. Each.
The nature of the candidates Thiel is sponsoring, what they’re running on, and where those races are located paint a confounding portrait of the newest conservative power broker, one as vexing for Republicans as for Democrats. In Arizona, Thiel has waded into a critical race for Republicans’ chances to claw back a Senate majority in the upcoming midterms, as they attempt to flip Mark Kelly’s seat. In Ohio, Thiel’s candidate will compete in a Wild West open seat to replace longtime incumbent Republican Rob Portman.
But both states have strong Republican Parties, with institutional capacity and machine candidates. In Ohio, state treasurer Josh Mandel holds a clear lead in all available polling; in Arizona, attorney general Mark Brnovich is widely expected to lead the field when he announces. Thiel chose not to donate to those parties, or endorse their preferred, front-running nominees, but instead is trying to overwhelm them with his own political vision.
What that vision is, exactly, remains unclear. Both Masters and Vance have self-styled as that most dubious of political forms: “right-wing populists” inveighing against the excesses of corporate control over American life and the ravages of trade policy on working-class families. Masters, who is both the chief operating officer of Thiel Capital and the president of the Thiel Foundation, dropped a campaign announcement decrying the fact that “young people in America expect to be worse off than their parents” and pledging to “build an economy where you can afford to raise a family on one single income.” Vance’s phony populism, and his contempt for liberal meritocracy, are already well known, thanks to his best-selling book and its high-dollar adaptation by Netflix.
As Silicon Valley falls ever so slightly out of love with the Democratic Party, the possibility of a tech-aligned vision for Republican politics becomes slightly more likely.
Is it possible that Thiel is trying to commandeer the Republican Party with his own version of a nationalist, anti-monopoly politics for working families, an evolution of the Trumpian vision? Some libertarian commentators would say yes. But that explanation is wholly unsatisfying as motivation for a man who famously wrote a Wall Street Journal column in 2014 titled “Competition Is for Losers.”
“Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites,” Thiel opines in a spirited defense of Google. It’s not exactly the marching standard of an anti-monopoly crusader. That line of thinking comes straight from the pages of his 2014 book Zero to One, an expanded version of lectures Thiel gave at Stanford Business School and aided by notes from his Stanford postgraduate co-author, you guessed it, Blake Masters.
It’s not the first time Thiel has supported a supposedly anti-monopoly, tech-skeptical Republican. He donated to Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who has perfected this stripe of politics that involves a lot of big talk about big corporations and not a lot of legislating in their disinterest. But the bulk of Thiel’s donations happened while Hawley was running for attorney general of Missouri, in 2015 and 2016. When Hawley eventually ran for Senate in 2018, Thiel only gave him the maximum individual donation of $5,400, not setting up a multimillion-dollar super PAC investment. (As Politico noted, that money hit “just days before Hawley launched an antitrust investigation into Google,” which Thiel seemed to have turned on.) None of those contributions were of the kingmaking quantity, given Hawley’s established position and the amount of money put up.
Meanwhile, both the Ohio and Arizona Senate primaries are crowded with candidates, and Thiel’s wards both remain long shots, despite their financial support and media coverage. Both face a considerable uphill climb, and as far as investments go, are less likely to bear fruit than Thiel’s famous tech firms.
What else might Thiel be after? As Eli Clifton points out for the Quincy Institute, while the domestic politics of these campaigns may look confounding, the foreign policy does not. Masters, writes Clifton, goes to great lengths to talk about finishing the border wall with Mexico, and “promoting a foreign policy that is [according to Masters] ‘tough on actual threats like China.’”
That may be best explained by a different famous Thiel investment project: Palantir Technologies. In fact, Thiel is invested in numerous border security technology firms and defense contractors, something that Masters, as something of a right hand to Thiel, knows well. Vance has been verbose on this subject as well, authoring a Newsweek article promising “secure borders” and going on Fox promising to ratchet up the pressure on China, a pledge to pursue the sort of Cold War–style rivalry that could be extremely lucrative for those sorts of firms. Surveillance technologies of all sorts, from E-Verify to an expanded Border Patrol and a beefed-up Department of Defense, all feature on Masters’s campaign site.
Of course, more funding to the Pentagon, incomprehensible though it may seem given the already bloated $700 billion-plus the department takes home annually, would redound right to Thiel’s benefit. As The Verge reported, Thiel’s Founders Fund is invested in military surveillance firm Anduril, which has extensive contracts with Customs and Border Protection doing “autonomous surveillance towers” at the border, and further work with the Department of Defense. Palantir has infamously done extensive work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The list goes on.
If Thiel’s gambit pays off, and he manages to install two loyalists in a Senate that’s otherwise unchanged from its current form, that would result in two crucial swing votes pushing Thiel’s particular politics. And while any Republican mega-donor would be happy to see the party return to a majority position in the chamber, Thiel’s entry into the ranks of possible GOP kingmakers may well be a worry for more traditional Republican bankrollers. As with Trump, Thiel has a different vision for the party than the Koch network, which did not support the future president. And as the Koch network has shown, $20 million does not a mega-donor make; much more money will be needed before Thiel can be credibly seen as part of that peer group.
But as Silicon Valley falls ever so slightly out of love with the Democratic Party, the possibility of a tech-aligned vision for Republican politics becomes slightly more likely. President Biden’s willingness to take on corporate monopolies of all sorts (including tech) with his recent executive order and appointments to the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission makes the politics of anti-monopoly much more plausibly a Democratic one. But fearing higher taxes, other Silicon Valley magnates could throw in with Thiel’s vision, to try to preempt or appropriate what seems to be a popular political posture.
