“We were talking, and he said, ‘I think I’m going to-I’m considering going and giving a speech at the Republican National Convention,’” Hoffman recalled. He sounded out his old friend Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, who has since become his political nemesis. The convention was 10 days away, and Trump was short on high-profile endorsements. Thiel had never met father or son, and had yet to give money to Trump’s campaign, but the younger Trump had noticed his name on the delegate list. Though his candidate had lost, he planned to attend the RNC as a delegate. In the Republican primary, he had backed Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett-Packard CEO and a fellow Stanford alum, with a $2 million contribution. Thiel himself had not yet publicly embraced Trump. In his mind, Gawker was a stand-in for the media writ large, hostile to the presumptive Republican nominee Hogan was a Trumplike figure and the jury-the voters-had taken his side. When the jury came back, “my instant reaction at that point was ‘Wow, maybe Trump wins the election,’” he told me. The verdict drove the company out of business.įor Thiel, the outcome was more than vindication. Thiel had secretly funded the litigation against Gawker, which had mocked him for years and outed him as gay. On March 18, 2016, a jury delivered an extraordinary $115 million verdict to Hulk Hogan in his invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media, whose website had published portions of a sex tape featuring Hogan. Trump quite obviously did not share these interests, or Thiel’s libertarian principles.īut four months earlier, Thiel had seen an omen. Thiel has cultivated an image as a man of ideas, an intellectual who studied philosophy with René Girard and owns first editions of Leo Strauss in English and German. T hiel’s decision to endorse Trump at the Republican National Convention in 2016 surprised some of his closest friends. Not for the first time, Peter Thiel has lost interest in democracy. Their failure to make the world conform to his vision has soured him on the entire enterprise-to the point where he no longer thinks it matters very much who wins the next election. His disappointment runs deeper than that. As such, he has become the embodiment of a strain of thinking that is pronounced-and growing-among tech founders.Īnd why does he want to cut off politicians? It’s not that they are mediocre as individuals, and therefore incapable of bringing about the kinds of civilization-defining changes a man like him would expect to see. He is the techiest of tech evangelists, the purest distillation of Silicon Valley’s reigning ethos. This matters because of Thiel’s unique role in the American political ecosystem. And by talking to you, it’s going to lock me out of the cycle for 2024.” I know they’re going to be pestering me like crazy. My husband doesn’t want me to give them any more money, and he’s right. But by talking to you, it makes it hard for me to change my mind. “There’s always a chance I might change my mind. Thiel’s hope was that this article would “lock me into not giving any money to Republican politicians in 2024,” he said. Months later, word got back to Thiel that Trump had called Masters to discourage him from running for Senate again, and had called Thiel a “fucking scumbag.” When Thiel declined, Trump “told me that he was very sad, very sad to hear that,” Thiel recounted. Thiel had given each of them more than $10 million now Trump wanted Thiel to give the same to him. Trump reminded Thiel that he had backed two of Thiel’s protégés, Blake Masters and J. Thiel tried to duck Trump’s calls for a while, but in late April the former president managed to get him on the phone. And what was that thing he needed to say, loudly? That he wouldn’t be giving money to any politician, including Donald Trump, in the next presidential campaign.Īlready, he has endured the wrath of Trump. He was more open than I expected him to be, and he had a lot to say.īut the impetus for these conversations? He wanted me to publish a promise he was going to make, so that he would not be tempted to go back on his word. But Thiel-co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, avatar of techno-libertarianism, bogeyman of the left-consented to a series of long interviews at his home and office in Los Angeles. I t wasn’t clear at first why Peter Thiel agreed to talk to me. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Produced by ElevenLabs and NOA, News Over Audio, using AI narration.
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