JD Vance’s Silicon Valley connections run deep. So do Trump’s
Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are key figures in a rising network of pro-Trump techies who are channelling tens of millions of dollars towards Republican campaigns. And Thiel is the one who reportedly introduced Vance to Trump in the first place. Io Dodds reports on the GOP’s increasingly cosy relationship with Big Tech
As Donald Trump hesitated about who to pick as his 2024 running mate, Elon Musk – the world's richest person – reached out privately to reassure the former president that JD Vance was his man.
That is according to the The New York Times, which reported on Tuesday how Musk, alongside Silicon Valley investors such as David Sacks and Peter Thiel, had pressed Trump to choose their old ally as his potential vice president.
Their influence illustrates the extent of Vance's links to a very specific clique of conservative tech leaders – and raises interesting questions about how, and for whom, he would govern.
"Blessed be our Holy Saint Peter, who exorcises the demons that haunt our lands," said pro-Trump space entrepreneur Delian Asparouhov on Twitter/X following the decision – alongside a picture of his investing partner Thiel depicted as an Orthodox saint.
Musk, Sacks, and Thiel are all prominent members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia”, who worked together at the pioneering online payments company back in the late Nineties and early Noughties. More importantly, they’re all key figures in a rising network of pro-Trump techies who are channelling tens of millions of dollars towards Republican campaigns.
While Musk's rightward turn is relatively recent, Sacks and Thiel have been at this a while. In the Nineties, they wrote a book called The Diversity Myth that criticised multiculturalism and downplayed rape (though both men have since apologised for the latter comments).
In 2009, Thiel famously declared that he "no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible", because government benefits and the enfranchising of women had created a massive constituency who would always vote against capitalism and economic liberty.
Since then, both men have funded multiple Republican candidates. Thiel in particular has not only become close to Trump but is a prolific funder and network-builder for the Silicon Valley conservative movement, mentoring a generation of right-leaning young techies while ploughing money into a wide range of campaign groups, causes, and long-shot new technologies.
Vance first encountered Thiel as a speaker at Yale Law School, where he disparaged students' job prospects in the traditional legal trade and urged them to consider jobs in Silicon Valley instead. It was, Vance later wrote, "the most significant moment" of his time at Yale: one that forced him to consider why he was "obsessed with achievement", and to what purpose he was seeking to enter America's elite.
Vance went on to work for Thiel at his San Francisco investment house, Mithril Capital, and then at two venture capital firms focused on start-ups outside the traditional coastal tech industries (one of which he co-founded). He appears to have impressed many people that he worked with, but didn't stay in the industry long enough to prove or disprove his skill at spotting breakout companies.
"I had a fantastic experience with JD," said his former Mithril colleague Crystal McKellar on Bloomberg TV on Tuesday, calling him "a polymath... eager, utterly without ego, smart, hardworking, a really fun guy, whose values were very centered."
Steve Case, who worked with Vance at Revolution LLC for about a year and a half, said in 2022 that Vance was "helpful" when setting up his firm’s ‘Rise of the Rest’ initiative, but "wasn't really working that much" for the firm after moving back to Ohio during the last few months of his tenure. Case added that he was "surprised and disappointed" by Vance's embrace of Trump.
Looking at the nine investment deals for which Pitchbook lists Vance as the lead partner, most of the companies he funded have modestly increased in estimated value or been bought up by other firms, while two have gone out of business. That's not unusual in venture capital, which typically backs a wide range of slim prospects in the hope that one of them will pay off massively enough to outweigh all the failures.
It's no exaggeration to say that Thiel was instrumental to Vance's rise. As well as backing Vance's campaign for the US Senate in 2021-22, he was reportedly the one who introduced Vance to Donald Trump, giving him the opportunity to smooth over past barbs such as calling the real estate mogul "cultural heroin" and "noxious".
Evidently, Thiel's bet paid off. If Trump wins in 2024, he and other Valley conservatives will have a personal friend in the White House. On top of Republicans' general affinity with big business, the Trump campaign has also committed to abandoning Joe Biden's limited attempts at regulating AI, in which Thiel has substantial investments. It is a victory for "effective accelerationists" who believe machine intelligence should be unleashed to transform the world.
This romance may seem surprising to anyone who has been watching the GOP's increasingly strident criticism of Silicon Valley over the past few years. Bashing Facebook, Google, and so forth as all-powerful enforcers of wokeness has become a ubiquitous campaign trope.
Vance himself has frequently joined that chorus, praising Biden's top antitrust enforcer Lina Khan and her campaign to break up Big Tech. But key to this is that Silicon Valley doesn't speak with one voice, and executives such as Musk are increasingly framing themselves in opposition to the rest of the industry.
Republicans' main criticism of tech giants is not so much that they are big or powerful as that they are left-wing. Whether these companies and their owners are actually are left-wing is a complicated question, because while many tech workers are liberals, the systems they build have frequently benefited the right more than the left.
But tech giants did take a hard line on misinformation during the run-up to the 2020 election, and decisively broke with Trump after the Capitol riot. If that bloody episode had smashed Trump's hold over the GOP, they might have forged ties with his replacements; as it is, Trump and his supporters are now out for revenge.
Certainly the Republican Party has proven willing to embrace tech platforms that pitch themselves as explicitly conservative. Elon Musk has shifted X (formerly Twitter) decisively to the right, with predictable results, and you don't hear Trumpists complaining about that.
Meanwhile, Trump is no stranger to cutting highly personal deals with companies he likes. In 2020, he hand-picked the software company Oracle, whose co-founder Larry Ellison is a major Trump supporter and donor, to run an American version of TikTok –mandated by the full force of his office. In 2024, he reversed his stance after tightening links with a different rich person who has a large stake in TikTok's Chinese parent company.
That's not to say this alliance is all about cosy graft and corporate self-interest. Many of these players have sympathetic financial interests, but Silicon Valley billionaires are nothing if not individual. There is no question that Thiel and Sacks' conservative convictions are deeply held. So are Musk's, judging by the commercial hits he has taken to maintain them.
Rather, Vance's ascent signals the formation of a new, tech-focused power bloc that spans politics and business, bound together by both financial and ideological advantage.
This bloc has its roots in the breakdown of Silicon Valley's traditional bipartisan balancing act. It is against not only Democratic politicians but blue factions and coalitions within the tech industry itself. And come November, it could prove just as consequential as they were in 2020.
This article was updated at 16:05 Pacific Time on Wednesday July 18, 2024, to clarify Steve Case’s comments about Vance.
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