Peter Thiel: Paypal mafioso

23:32It's not normal. He's a contrarian from an investing standpoint and thinks a lot about the singularity. We'll discuss that in a moment. I'm much less excited about that. I'm pro-human. Singularity, go. Okay, so tell me if I'm wrong, but the singularity is when artificial intelligence, robots, whatever you want to call it, will merge with human existence, correct? And will kind of leap forward in technology. Well, it means different things to different people. The dictionary definition is that the singularity is the point in time when advances in artificial intelligence can create machines that are smarter than humans.

24:05But for some people, it means the moment when they sort of merge and you can upload your human experiences to a machine and essentially become immortal. So like I say, it means different things to different people. But I did ask him about this when I met him. I said, do you actually think that? And he said, yeah, I think it'll happen within my lifetime, if my lifetime is 120 years, which is why he takes protein pills, doesn't have any sugar, keeps his gut biome, whatever. He takes all these extraordinary health things because he wants to be alive at the point when this happens. So he'll be 120 in which year?

24:40If he's 57 now, so that's 63 years from now. So that makes it 2087. Would I be alive then to see the singularity? Actually, you know what, cart me off to the retirement home. I don't think I want to see this happen. Okay. Well, some people listening may well be. So you'll have to tell us from beyond our grave whether it happened or not. Yeah, maybe they'll be able to upload our consciousness from all the recordings we've done of a good, bad billionaire. Exactly. There we go. We're practically immortal already. There we go. Let's get back to Peter Teal. Over the next couple of years, PayPal would sign up more than 20 million users.

25:13But it was burning through cash, as a lot of startups do. In fact, it burnt through$180 million in funding before breaking even. And remember, during this period, we had the dot-com crash where a lot of other tech companies bit the dust. But PayPal managed to bounce back. And it really did change the way people use the internet. People became more confident about sending money on the scary thing known as the internet. Yeah. And having a PayPal account wasn't some kind of niche thing for nerds. A lot of people had it. Millions of people had it. So in 2002, Peter took PayPal public. That's when you sell shares to the public in an IPO.

25:47Shortly after it, he sold PayPal to eBay for$1.5 billion. And Peter took$55 million personally. And he resigned on the day of the acquisition, which seems like quite a bold move. Doesn't usually happen. Usually when a company acquires another one, the person who's being acquired will stay on for a year or two to sort of smooth the transition. They can earn their way out. Often they won't be able to use the proceeds of the sale immediately. They'll have to wait for a lockup period. So him quitting with his money on day one is kind of unusual. Always a contrarian. So after selling PayPal, Peter focused on investing.

26:24So he set up a hedge fund called Clarion Capital with$10 million, mostly his own money. And with that, he was able to place bets that fitted his own views of the world, his contrarianism, like buying Japanese government bonds when others were selling. And the hedge fund soon became a giant and he gets a reputation of being a bit of a genius investor. And that could have been where the story ended. He could have become just another Warren Buffett. But a recent seismic world event had deeply impacted Peter's thinking at that time. The September 11 terrorist attacks had completely challenged his libertarian beliefs.

26:55He published an essay called The Straussian Moment, based on Leo Strauss's philosophy known primarily for reviving sort of classical political philosophy through analysis of works by ancient thinkers. And Peter wrote, A religious war has been brought to a land that no longer cares for religious wars. Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment. So it's in this context that he makes his next big move in 2004.

27:32He founds a company called Palantir, named after a seeing stone in Peter's beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy, and he invests$30 million in it. and Palantir becomes a very controversial company. In fact, it's a global surveillance company. It's designed to find terrorists and other criminals by detecting small, minute patterns in vast amounts of digital data. So, Libertarian Peter becomes a contractor with the government. Palantir was used by the CIA, the New York Police Department. It was also controversially awarded a contract with the British National Health Service in 2023, which provoked protests over patient data security.

28:07And more immediately, technology has been used by the Israeli military in Gaza. Palantir's chief exec, Alex Karp, says our work in the region has never been more vital and it will continue. And according to Vanity Fair, Palantir has been labelled by some journalists as one of the most terrifying companies in Silicon Valley. So Libertarian Peter, wanting to throw off the yoke of big government, is actually enabling them to surveil its own citizens, both at home and abroad. So as in the same year as founding Palantir, Peter makes another investment that will prove incredibly profitable. That friend from Stanford, Reid Hoffman, introduces him to a 20-year-old Harvard dropout, a guy called Mark Zuckerberg.

28:46Yeah, remember him? Peter gives Mark$500 ,000 in exchange for 10 % of the company. This was the first outside investment in Facebook. And you could say the rest is history. In fact, you can recap the whole saga in our episode about Mark Zuckerberg. Peter then goes full throttle with his investment. He launches a venture capital firm Founders Fund in 2005. Founders Fund sought riskier, more out-of-the-box companies, as they put it, that really have the potential to change the world. Its online manifesto began with, we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. That's quite a funny manifesto, to be fair.

29:19A little bit of a pop there at Twitter, now known X, of course now owned by his old friend Elon Musk. And the sort of stuff that Peter invests in or backs is definitely out there. Some examples, he becomes the largest contributor to a think tank formerly called the Singularity Institute, which is interested in identifying and managing potential risks to humanity from artificial general intelligence. And the general means that it can roam free and do whatever it likes rather than being set specific tasks. He also gives$3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation. Its goal is to reverse human aging and the person running it thinks humans will one day live to be a thousand.

29:56There's also the Alcor Life Extension Foundation that had been freezing corpses in liquid nitrogen since 1976. I wonder what kind of storeroom they've got. They've been in the game for very early on and I really hope they don't have any kind of energy failure anytime soon. Yeah, he also invests one and a quarter million dollars in something called the Seasteading Institute, founded by Milton Freeman's grandson. Milton Freeman, a great libertarian, free market prophet, if you like. And Seasteading refers to the founding of new independent city stakes that are on floating platforms in international waters so you can get away from the exertion of control by nation states.

30:31And Palantir, presumably. Yeah, but as well as these wackier businesses, he also invested in some companies you've probably heard of. Lyft, TaskRabbit, LinkedIn, Stripe, Airbnb, Spotify, some household names there. He even invested in Elon Musk's SpaceX, although he apparently passed on investing in Tesla. According to Musk, Peter told him he didn't fully buy into the climate change thing. But these are some of the biggest tech companies in the world. So whilst he's investing big money, he's also making huge returns. And by the summer of 2008, for example, Facebook was valued at$15 billion. And his hedge fund, Clarion Capital, had assets of more than$7 billion.

31:06And that meant that in 2008, Forbes lists Peter Thiel as worth$1.2 billion. Well done, Peter Thiel. Age 40, you are a billionaire.

31:27So let's take a story beyond a billion. Due to Facebook's seemingly inexorable growth, Peter's personal fortune keeps growing and growing. We didn't get everything right. The 2008 financial crisis nearly decimated his hedge fund, Clarium Capital. Some thought his hedge fund was poised to do well because it was a crisis that Peter himself had long been predicting. But instead, Clarium went from$7 billion in assets to a few hundred million. To paraphrase a colleague. He's an exceptionally competitive person. He was on the cusp of entering the greats of the investing gods, but he just missed it. And by 2010, he closed the New York office and moved Clarion back to San Francisco.

32:05But he is still a billionaire and not above getting involved in personal vendettas. So throughout the 2000s, there was a US news site called Gawker, which was posting gossip about celebrities in the media. And Gawker also owned Valleywag, which was a Silicon Valley gossip blog, of which Peter was a regular subject. Including a 2007 blog entitled, Peter Thiel is totally gay, people. And while friends and colleagues knew he was gay at this point, he saw it as a public outing. Okay, he's going to nurse that grievance because jump forward a decade, Peter secretly gives$10 million to the wrestler Hulk Hogan to help him sue Gawker after Gawker made public a sex tape involving Hulk Hogan.

32:44So Gawker lost the legal battle and the whole thing drove Gawker and its owner to bankruptcy in 2016. But Peter called funding that lawsuit one of the greater philanthropic things that I have done. I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest. I thought it was worth fighting back. And not long after Peter got married to his longtime partner in Vienna, it's reported that guests came expecting to celebrate Peter's 50th but were instead surprised to be attending his wedding. But he's about to get involved in something more high stakes and more divisive than just bringing down a gossip column or gossip site, and that is politics.

33:21Now, from many of his statements about his suspicion of the state and big government, you might be surprised that he would even get involved in politics at all. Yes, in a Fox Nation interview, he said, I would like us to be honest about how terrible politics is. As someone who is generally libertarian, I would like to live in a world that is less conflict, less politics. And in a widely read 2009 essay on the libertarian think tank Cato Institute's website, he argued that freedom and democracy were no longer compatible. Instead, only technology can make a real difference in the world. We are in a deadly race between politics and technology, he wrote.

33:55The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. God, there's quite a lot to unpack in that. There is. It's quite a passage there. I think it would take us a whole podcast episode to break that down. In 2016, he was one of the very few people from Silicon Valley to support Donald Trump. Yeah, speaking at the Republican National Convention, he also served on Trump's executive transition team. And now journalists have noted concerns that his counter-terrorism company, Palantir, benefited from this support when it was awarded lucrative government contracts.

34:29An anonymous former dinner guest of Peter Thiel's told Vanity Fair, Trump is a means to an end for Thiel. As human beings, they couldn't possibly be more different. And somewhat ironically, given that Trump had urged total allegiance to the United States just a month after he won the election, Peter was revealed to have become a citizen of New Zealand, a popular second home to the super rich who are very keen to avoid living out the apocalypse. Yeah, it was the thing to have at a certain time, having a bunker beneath the ground in New Zealand in case there was a zombie or atomic bomb. Collapsed of civilisation.

35:02Exactly. There's a lot of preppers who make their way to New Zealand. Now, that support of Donald Trump has meant that Peter has become a divisive figure in the world of tech. In 2018, he publicly renounces Silicon Valley itself, calling it a one-party state and comparing its woke worldview with Saudi Arabia's domestic strain of fundamentalist Islam called Wahhabism. And he moved to Los Angeles. And in 2022, he leaves the board of Facebook's parent company, Meta, after being one of its longest serving members. I remember when I chatted to him in 2010, it was around the time of the Facebook IPO.

35:36He had sold 90 % of his shares in Facebook. And I asked him why he'd done that. He said, we still have substantial shareholdings, but you sold 90 % of it. I said, why did you do that? Is it because you don't believe in this? He said, I saw how much Facebook paid for Instagram. They paid a billion dollars for a company with 12 employees. And I thought, if you're so vulnerable, you have to pay a billion dollars to a company that has only just started. That means there's something vulnerable about your business model. But turns out Peter Thiel isn't so smart. Turned out to be one of the best acquisitions in the history of technology.

36:10And if he'd held on to his shares, he would be a lot richer than he is today. It's so funny because what I think is emerging from this portrait of Peter Thiel is he's got these ruthless investor instincts, right? He's very savvy. But at the same time, he has these quite out there worldviews. And the two don't really seem to connect. Yeah, I think that also he's almost kind of pathologically contrarian. So if everyone's saying that Facebook is going to be the next big thing, and he's already profited from it, he almost feels kind of compelled to disagree, even when it's actually to his own detriment.

36:41Interesting. I mean, he really is one of the more complicated people we've covered on this podcast. So he's just left the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook. And one of the other rumours about his reason for leaving was to focus on influencing the US midterm elections. This is according to the New York Times, who spoke to an anonymous source with knowledge of Peter's thinking. And in those midterms, he supported J.D. Vance's run for Ohio senator and was reportedly the one who introduced Vance to Trump, Vance now being his vice presidential nominee. Yeah, he also funded 15 other hard right Trump-supporting Senate and House candidates, many of whom back the lie that Trump won the 2020 election.

37:18And alongside funding candidates, Teo has also funded a dating app to help Republicans meet a like-minded partner. It was designed by former Trump staffers and it's called The Right Staff. I like the name. It prides itself on only having two gender options, ladies and gentlemen, no pronouns necessary. And it includes profile prompts like, a random fact I love about America is dot dot dot. And favourite liberal lie is dot dot dot. It seems that people's political motivation may have dried up pretty recently, though, as of the 15th of October. So really recently, it's emerged that Peter Thiel has not funded Trump's 2024 bid.

37:53In fact, in an interview with The Atlantic late last year in November, Peter said voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help. The national reckoning he had hoped for with Trump's presidency, in other words, did not materialise. Yeah, he said there are a lot of things I got wrong, saying it was crazier and more dangerous than I thought. Now, J.D. Vance views differently. He told the Financial Times recently I'm going to keep on talking to Peter and persuading him that, you know, he's obviously been exhausted by politics a little bit, but he's going to be really exhausted by politics if we lose in Kamala Harris as president.

38:24Yeah. And Peter has said, I'm still very strongly pro-Trump, pro-JD, J.D. Vance. I've decided not to donate any money politically, but I'm supporting them in every other way possible. I'm sure they're a bit less grateful for those other ways than they would be for some cold, hard cash. On the business side, Peter has also been cashing out of Palantir, selling$600 million of stock in the global surveillance company just this September. And he's made a cool$1 billion selling shares this year alone. So that brings us right up to date. His current worth, we think, is$9 billion. So now we judge him.

38:55Is he good, bad or just another billionaire on our various categories? Yes, we rank our billionaires from zero to 10. The first category is wealth. How rich is he and how does he spend it? Nine billion dollars is a lot of money. But for someone who has been involved in all of these companies, PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, Lyft, Airbnb, LinkedIn, etc. In a way, I would have expected him to have been richer than this, I've got to say. He could do better. Yeah. He sold out of Facebook too early, as I was saying. I mean, his wealth has more than doubled in just a year. So that's not nothing. Yeah. And some people, fair to say that some people think actually that number could be a little off, that 9 billion number, because he is thought to be very skilled at avoiding tax exposure, as many of our billionaires are.

39:43And you know, he does enjoy spending it. He's got a half million dollar McLaren supercar. He's got his own butler. Butler. Okay. Well, let's judge him right now. So 9 billion doesn't get him above five in the absolute wealth stakes. But the McLaren supercar and the butler, the wanting to live forever, he's wearing it pretty well. His oddness, I think, also amplifies his absolute wealth. Right. I mean, supercars, butlers, hired staff, quite par for course with billionaires. But I think you're right. The wanting to live forever, that really edges it for me. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to give him a seven for wealth, because even though he's not top of the tree, he acts like he is and he hangs out with all the people who are.

40:25That's very true. I agree. Seven out of 10 for me. Villainy. What have they done to get to the top? Profiles of Peter are pretty damning of him sometimes. They often describe his image as explicitly villainous. He actually likes being seen as a bit of a villain. I mean, the laundry list is long. Vanity Fair says that he's seen as a right-wing supervillain. The New Yorker says that he's a villain out of central casting. Even the Financial Times has described him as a libertarian, kook and bond supervillain. Right. And that's what we're trying to get at in this. So I think he ticks a lot of boxes in the villainy category, almost deliberately and by his own choosing.

40:58So I think that he will be pleased to know that I'm going to give him an eight out of 10 for villainy. I mean, he really does seem to revel in the fact that so many people seem to think of him as this kind of right wing villain. Yeah. And he said some pretty unpleasant things when he was back at university as well. So I might even nudge him up to a nine. As I say, he won't mind that. But actually, you know, his own actions have justified a high score in these things. He says this big talk about, you know, freedom and independence and libertarianism and being allowed to go your own way while at the same time founding and investing in companies that explicitly designed to not let people go their own way and to actually keep tabs on them.

41:40And this is one of the things about him. To me, he has a slight contempt for his fellow human beings. He thinks that most of us are lemmings or sheep or whatever disparaging analogy you want to make. And that free thinkers go the other way and everyone else should get out of the way. And the oppression of government and rules and democracy and blah, blah, blah is all there to frustrate the potential of the individual. In a way, that's kind of his hallmark throughout this, which is weird because he's been very influential in producing websites like Facebook, which thrive on herd mentality. And surveillance.

42:21And surveillance. Yeah, so exactly. A truly complex individual. Okay, I'm going to go nine for villainy. I think I'd agree with you, nine. And it pains me to say he'll probably enjoy that. Yeah. So let's move on to the sort of diametric opposite of that. Philanthropy. What's he done on that score? Well, in 2010, he set up the controversial Teal Fellowship, which was originally named 20 Under 20. You can kind of see why they changed that name. Yeah. Every year he awards$100 ,000 to young tech entrepreneurs under the age of 20 if they drop out of university to launch a startup. Critics have said it's an attack on education.

42:53It's an attempt to steal away the best and the brightest. Peter, on his part, has argued they could return to school at the end of the two-year fellowship. Okay. So that's an interesting one. Whether that's philanthropy or whether that's a kind of tech incubation kind of laboratory, you could argue about. But he's also got a more traditional philanthropic arm called the Thiel Foundation set up in 2006. It focuses on science, technology, long-term thinking about the future. But as Fortune magazine points out, it's no ordinary charity. It supports for-profit companies and the new frontiers of science we've mentioned in this episode, like seasteading and prolonging the human life.

43:27And philanthropy, as we've said often, is not an absolute number. It's about the proportion of their wealth they give away. And Forbes estimates he's given away between one and five percent. So that is not a huge effort on the philanthropy front compared to some others. Now, I'd give him a one out of 10 for this. One out of 10 for philanthropy. He's really not doing well. And also, I mean... They're all quite self-serving, these things, aren't they? Exactly. You know, you can imagine that he's not thinking about the millions of starving children around the world when it comes to creating a new city-state on floating water.

43:57We'll give him a one for philanthropy, if that. Let's leave it at one. power. Interesting one, this. Well, I would say that he is an incredibly powerful person. I mean, he's kind of become this almost boogeyman, right? Well, the boogeyman to some profits to others. And I mean, New York Magazine, for example, said Thiel's increasing prominence as both an intellectual in and benefactor of the conservative movement, and his status as a legend in Silicon Valley, makes him at least as important as more public tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, he still holds sway over Zuckerberg. So, you know, he's clearly a powerful person.

44:32He is a person that even people richer than him, people seemingly more influential, turn to as a kind of father figure or kind of wise old owl. So in that way, he wields a lot more influence than his own private wealth would suggest. That is a really interesting thing to know. Actually, in Vanity Fair in 2019, they wrote that in the Los Angeles Game of Thrones, he's Littlefinger, aka he's the person pulling all the strings. The hottest ticket, they said, is an invite to a dinner hosted by one of the people who helped get Donald J. Trump elected in 2016. And that person is Peter Thiel. I would score him quite highly on this.

45:06Yeah, for sure. I would say like maybe eight out of ten. Yeah, eight or even nine. I'm going to give him, because one of our tests when we did Rupert Murdoch was could he influence elections? Could he pick up the phone to a head of state and influence elections? I think he gets a yes in both those categories, I would say. And of course, you've got to remember Facebook's involvement with the Cambridge Analytica stuff. I'm going to give him a nine for power. Okay, eight from me, nine from you. Now we come to our last category, legacy. What do we think will be his legacy? Well, the thing is, if he's right about some things, this category doesn't exist because he'll still be with us for the rest of time.

45:40I mean, I'm shook by that statement. You know, maybe this category is irrelevant when it comes to him. If you're immortal, the legacy category is irrelevant. It's TBD. TBD. So let's assume that he's not going to live forever. I mean, his legacy, I think the legacy he leaves will be in the footprints of the companies he's founded. And also his Ayn Rand inspired, extreme libertarian kind of view of the world is one shared by quite a lot of tech superpowers that we have and influence their thinking about how the world should be ordered. And collectively, they have an enormous amount of power over the world.

46:18So I think Peter Thiel will go down as actually punching way above his weight in terms of absolute wealth. I think he will be seen as an architect of a mindset that has become incredibly powerful. So I'm going to give him an eight. Wow. I'm sure Rand would be very pleased with him being called an architect. Well, Ayn Rand, right, still very influential. A lot of these people treat her books as Bibles. And I think the people who think Ayn Rand was influential, they will certainly think that of Peter Thiel. So as I say, 8 out of 10 for legacy for me. I think 8 out of 10 is a good notch for him to land.

46:53I mean, he may very well edge up to a 9 or a 10. You know, he's still got quite a long way to go, especially if he lives far longer than the rest of us. Yes, it's going to be interesting. Maybe there'll be a whole new generation of good, bad billionaire listeners who haven't even been born yet who will have a Peter Thiel episode. Yes, our AI-generated voices that live on long after the BBC has crumbled. I don't mind as long as we get paid. Just kidding. So is he good, bad or just another billionaire? Well, is he good, bad or just another billionaire? Well, interestingly, one anonymous entrepreneur who spent time with Peter told Vanity Fair, does he believe that chaos is a ladder he can climb?

47:28He's playing chess while we're playing checkers. Yeah, another anonymous longtime investor in Peter's firms told biographer Max Chafkin, he wanted to watch Rome burn, which is interesting. A lot of people talk about the right, Steve Bannons of this world as basically kind of enjoying some sort of rapture as the democracy disintegrates. Right. They're chaos agents, basically. Yeah. Although it's been noted that Thiel's ideological shifts have matched his financial self-interest at every turn. That's another interesting perspective. I mean, when you put that all into context, he is an incredibly fascinating, complicated guy.

48:03But I also cannot avoid that in my heart of hearts, I think he is a bad billionaire. Yeah, I think you've got to be right. I mean, I get to interview a lot of chief execs and founders, investors and whatever. And people say, who's the smartest person you ever interviewed? And I would say for many years, I would say Peter Thiel. He's also one of the most unusual. I think the contradictions in what he's done do it for me. You know, I'm all libertarian, but I'm going to make sure that the government has got detailed surveillance on you at all times. and also if you believe this then it's fine but I personally don't believe that the highest moral purpose is the pursuit of self-interest and I do believe in a society and as a from a personal point of view if you don't believe in that I can't I can't say that you're a good person so for me he's a bad billionaire so Peter Thiel you are unfortunately although I think you will enjoy this a bad billionaire you'll love it

48:59and that believe it or not brings us to the end of season two say it ain't so i mean we've covered some truly exceptional billionaire stories we love hearing from you so please do rate and review us in your review let us know whose story scandalized you the most what business tips you've learned which were favorite rags to riches tales and who is this season's biggest villain and we'd like to thank everyone who's listened, which has also helped us win a small award. Gold at the British Podcast Awards for Best Business Podcast. So thank you to the listeners for that. Thank you to the listeners.

49:31Thank you, judges. Thank you to our excellent producers. So when you look back on this series, what sticks in your mind? I mean, I think there'll be plenty of people whose stories will still be developing in the many years to come. I mean, Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT springs to mind. Yeah, sure. That's going to have an increasing influence on all of our lives. You need an AI to predict how it's going to work out. I also think, you know, in terms of sheer extravagance, I loved learning about Mukesh Ambani funding his son's super luxury wedding. Yeah, with$600 million. Although one of the killer stats in that is that as a percentage of his wealth, he actually spent less of a percentage of his wealth than many normal Indian families do.

50:08Unfortunately, most families can't afford to fly out Rihanna and Beyonce. And also, if you remember on that episode, I predicted that in five years time, Mukesh Ambani will be the richest person in the world. That's my bet. So I am not confident enough to make any bets on any of our billionaires because who knows where the land of wealth will take them in the years to come. Good Bad Billionaire will be back for a third season in 2025. Hooray, which billionaires could we measure up? And judge, there's 2 ,781 billionaires in the world with a combined$14.2 trillion. So plenty to choose from. Could it be John DeMo, the big brother reality TV billionaire?

50:43Disney star Selena Gomez? Even Elon Musk? Well, we want to hear from you. Whose billions would you like us to delve into in Season 3? Or head to the BBC World Service's Facebook page and join the conversation under the Good Bad Billionaire post. Your pick could make it onto Season 3 of Good Bad Billionaire, so look out for new episodes dropping into your feed in the new year to find out if your billionaire made the cut. See you very soon. Bye for now.

51:09Good Bad Billionaire was produced by Louise Morris. James Cook is the editor, and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World Service. For the BBC World Service and the podcast commissioning editor is John Manel.

51:46and leads from interested homeowners. That's the sound of fuel for your business, and it costs nothing to join. Get more from the work you're already doing. Learn more at jameshardy.com slash alliance.