Peter Thiel and the Triumph of the Counter-Elites
The Silicon Valley billionaire made big—and early—bets on Trump and J.D. Vance. What did he see that so many didn’t?
On Tuesday
night, Donald Trump announced that the richest man in the world, Elon Musk,
along with the entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, will head a new initiative in the Trump administration: the
Department of Government Efficiency, or “DOGE.”
Internet
meme culture has now landed in the White House. Dogecoin is
a memecoin—and if you don’t understand that sentence, fear
not—I am sure Nellie will cover it in TGIF tomorrow.
But what the
announcement solidifies—if Trump’s win hadn’t already—is the triumph of the
counter-elite.
A bunch of
oddball outsiders ran against an insular band of out-of-touch elites supported
by every celebrity in Hollywood—and they won. They are about to reshape not
just the government, but also the culture in ways we can’t imagine.
How they did
that—and why—is a question that I’ve been thinking about nonstop since Tuesday.
And there
was one person, more than any other, who I wanted to discuss it with. He is the
vanguard of those antiestablishment counter-elites: Peter Thiel.
If you
listened to my last conversation with the billionaire venture capitalist a year and a half ago on Honestly, you’ll remember that Peter was the first
person in Silicon Valley to publicly embrace Trump in 2016. That year, he gave
a memorable speech at the Republican National Convention
that many in his orbit thought was simply a step too far.
He lost
business at Y Combinator, the start-up incubator where he was a partner. Many
prominent tech leaders criticized him publicly, like VC and Twitter investor
Chris Sacca, who called Thiel’s endorsement of Trump “one of the most dangerous
things” he had ever seen.
A lot has
changed since then.
For one,
Thiel has taken a step back from politics—at least publicly. He didn’t donate
to Trump’s campaign. There was no big RNC speech this time around.
But the
bigger change is a cultural one: He’s no longer the pariah of Silicon Valley
for supporting Trump. There’s Bill Ackman, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Shaun
Maguire, and Elon Musk, among many other tech titans who have joined the Trump
train.
On the
surface, Thiel seems full of contradictions. He is a libertarian who has found
common cause with nationalists and populists. He invests in companies that have
the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump’s White House wants to break up
Big Tech. He is a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and
the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college, but still seems to
venerate the Ivy League.
But perhaps
that’s the secret to his success. He’s beholden to no tribe but himself, no
ideology but his own.
And why
wouldn’t you be when you make so many winning bets? From co-founding PayPal and
the data analytics firm Palantir (which was used to find Osama bin Laden) to being the first outside investor in Facebook—Thiel’s investments in companies like LinkedIn,
Palantir, and SpaceX have paid off, to say the least.
His most
recent bet—helping his mentee J.D. Vance get elected senator and then on the
Trump ticket—seems also to have paid off. The next four years will determine
just how high Thiel’s profit margin will be.
On Honestly,
Thiel explains why so many of his peers have finally come around to Trump; why
he thinks Kamala—and liberalism more broadly—lost the election; why the Trump
2.0 team, with antiestablishment figures willing to rethink the system, will be
better than last time. We talk about the rise of historical revisionism, the
blurry line between skepticism and conspiracy, and his contrarian ideas about
what we might face in a dreaded World War III.
Click
below to listen to the podcast, watch the full-length video below, or scroll
down for an edited transcript of our conversation.
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