Trump’s tech bros: The enigma of Peter Thiel

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0:32Murad 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. So Gawker was this kind of digital-first online media company. It was all about gossip, celebrity news, commentary on media and culture. That's Tabby Kinder, the FT's West Coast financial editor, reminding me what a big deal Gawker was back then. It was really early for the time, dot-com era style media outlets. And Hulk Hogan had a row with them over a story about a sex tape and he sued them. Not only did Hogan sue Gawker, but the lawsuit eventually bankrupted the website, all thanks to the deep pockets of one man.

1:23It emerged that Peter Thiel had been the financier funding all of the lawsuits. He put$10 million plus in to help Hulk Hogan shut Gawker down.

1:35Murad 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. Thiel's talked about it as being one of his greatest achievements. It was a huge power play and it taught the world not to mess with Peter Thiel. He's certainly not shied away from the fact that he did this. 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. Like tech. He was the first outside investor to spot the potential in Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook.

2:18Murad Ahmed: 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. 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. Thank you very much. Thanks.

3:07Murad Ahmed: This is Tectonic 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.

3:58Murad Ahmed: And he's become influential in politics, with Vice President J.D. 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?

4:20Murad Ahmed: 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? 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 multimillionaire, big break.

5:09It 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.

5:21Murad 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? Yeah, he's made incredibly good early bets on big tech companies that are still considered startups now. SpaceX, Airbnb, Stripe. Tons of the biggest companies that have come out of Silicon Valley had very early investments from Peter Thiel. One of the first big investments he made, or at least the first kind of truly big successful investment he made, was into Facebook around 2004, so really soon after the eBay sale. He put about half a million dollars into thefacebook.com, which very quickly became well over a billion dollars.

6:13Murad 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? 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 where 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.

7:00And 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.

7:15Murad 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? Okay, 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. And he's unconventional. He doesn't like being part of a system as such or being put into box ever. He lives in LA, not in San Francisco or Menlo Park.

7:56And that sort of underscores the fact that he is a bit of an insider outsider always. And he tends to see problems and systems 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 well-functioning 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.

8:48J.D. 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 and 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 um you know there are aspects I would imagine the whole Trumpian agenda right now that aren't necessarily in line with what he and his his group would regard as being the top priorities.

9:22Murad Ahmed: What parts of the Trump agenda do you think he does like? Or is there anything about Trump's character that he's on board with? 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-trading. 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 very strong emphasis on looking after poor people.

10:07And 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, you know, they would be upset by, you know, 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.

10:43and within that often migration of highly skilled people.

10:47Murad Ahmed: You mentioned that Thiel likes putting bets on people who shake things up. So did he see Trump as a bit of a disruptor? 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. We judge the leadership of our country to have failed. The sheer size of the U.S. trade deficit shows that something has gone badly wrong.

11:26Murad Ahmed: The United States is importing more than$500 billion every year. That money flows into financial assets, and it gives the well-connected people who benefit a reason to defend the status quo. And one of the key hallmarks of Silicon Valley is that you don't believe that anyone should be an incumbent that goes unchallenged. If you're in 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.

12:08Murad Ahmed: Our movement is about replacing a failed and corrupt political establishment with a new government controlled by you, the American people. And as I say, Thiel has never been easy to define at all in any way, and again, that's a good thing because, you know, 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.

12:51Murad Ahmed: 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. And that's very much what's driving a lot of what he is doing and thinking. 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? There's no doubt that what was an incredibly unpopular alignment and uncomfortable alignment between Peter Thiel and Trump in 2016 by 2024 looks like an incredibly forward thinking and smart move.

13:36Because by last summer, we saw a load of Silicon Valley, big personalities come out for Trump.

13:44Murad Ahmed: Just because I would say that we have a leader of the coalition and his name is Donald Trump. President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America. Let's just go around the horn. Who voted for Trump? Let's all raise their hands for those who voted for Trump. Ready? I voted twice. I voted twice. Me too. But he was so easy. People that had been vocal Democrats in the past, like Mark 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.

14:25I 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 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 prioritized have become the most important things that people in Silicon Valley care about. So it's, yeah, while it's not necessarily increased his influence, he already was a very influential person. It certainly brought a lot of the Valley in line with his way of thinking.

15:07I 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.

15:32Murad Ahmed: okay let's take a short break and when we come back let's talk about how teal's influence is actually being felt in washington

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16:55Murad Ahmed: 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 J.D. Vance Tabby how close is that relationship Peter Thiel gave J.D. Vance his first real job in Silicon Valley, actually. So J.D. 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 slash 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 PCTL very much supported.

17:58and also his faith has actually been incredibly important in terms of his influence as well.

18:06Murad Ahmed: 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. Lots of people seem to think that his Christian beliefs have also influenced his perspectives on technology, on politics. J.D. Vance actually kind of credits Peter Thiel with his own conversion to Christianity or his own kind of accepting of a God of faith. J.D. Vance, he wrote that he first started to come to religion when he saw Peter Thiel give a speech, I think, at Yale University.

18:53So 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.

19:04Murad 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 Teal started that's become really big in the defense tech world. 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.

19:48And 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 and 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 its conflicts in the Middle East, suddenly there is this assembling of tech industry expertise behind the US national security efforts.

20:30And Palantir, as one of the earliest companies that were sort of doing that has been a huge beneficiary and its market cap is huge. I mean, I think it's over$300 billion 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 guess anywhere near to now.

21:26Murad Ahmed: Gillian, what do you make of this idea that Thiel is somehow kind of a bridge between the Valley and DC? 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, right, 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.

22:10And so yes, Peter Thiel absolutely played a very important role in backing J.D. 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's 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.

22:55Murad 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. 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 do we need voting? Or the latest kind of idea is why do we need a separate Fed and a treasury?

23:36They 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 right wing or left wing 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, I'm going to stop there.

24:07Murad 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 in 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's sense 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?

24:48There'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 information has been prone to censorship in the past.

25:48One 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's 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 companies or in the media simply because you disagree with it.

26:13Murad Ahmed: And do you get any sense at all about how Trump feels about Thiel? 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'm 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.

26:56And it's notable that for the most part, Peter Thiel has kept himself in recent months and being 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, you know, at the end of the day, it really is a different intellectual style as much as anything else.

27:14Murad 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? There's a lot of people around Teal 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 Teal 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's kind of, he seems to be savvily and steadily upping his profile and has made, like Teal, some very sensible and smart bets on various technology companies and has really become one of the defense tech investors that was doing it before it was popular, has now backed some of the biggest and the most important companies in that space.

28:17Another person who might fit into that is someone like Trey Stevens, who was one of the co-founders at Andrill. And he works currently a founder's fund, which is one of Peter Thiel's larger venture capital funds. And Trey 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.

28:49Murad Ahmed: And finally, Gillian, even post-Trump, how lasting do you think Thiel's philosophy is going to be in American politics? 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 longstanding 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 Yavin and his ideas, which are utterly offensive to many people.

29:37But 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 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 organizing 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.

30:18Murad Ahmed: That was EFT's Gillian Tetz 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 breakup.

31:03Murad Ahmed: 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.

31:45Murad Ahmed: 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 of this episode for some free-to-read articles from the FT. In the meantime, thanks for listening and Tectonic will be back in a few weeks with a brand new series on AI and music.

32:07Murad Ahmed: This season of Tectonic is presented by me, Murad Ahmed and produced by Josh Gabbard 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 Zaragoza and Topher Forges.

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