Why is Peter Thiel in the tank for Donald Trump?
The maverick libertarian tech billionaire raised eyebrows when it was revealed last week that he has pledged to be a California delegate for the presumptive GOP nominee at the Republican convention in July.
Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and the first outside investor in Facebook, has reversed his longstanding hostility to Trump, and a close friend says it is primarily because he has been won over by The Donald’s vocal opposition to political correctness.
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“Peter has become an increasing admirer of Trump’s public attacks on political correctness, especially what he has been saying about women,” says a close friend of Thiel, speaking on condition of anonymity.
“He is growing more concerned about political correctness and the way it is crippling our ability to have rational conversations. Trump has been speaking to his fears over that issue recently.
“Peter particularly enjoyed it when Trump said Hillary [Clinton] was playing the women’s card and that if she was a man, he would have no chance of winning.”
The source adds that Thiel, 48, doesn’t have too much time for Trump himself on a personal level: “He doesn’t think highly of Trump. But he agrees with him about economic inequality and mass immigration, which he thinks will undermine social cohesion.
“People always talk about him as a libertarian, but he’s a social realist who is open to deviations from free trade if they are designed to support the social order.”
The car bit is the funny bit. Oh Silicon Valley oh Dear! RT @danprimack: Maybe Donald Trump promised Peter Thiel a flying car.
— julia hobsbawm (@juliahobsbawm) May 11, 2016
Yet the support is a total turnaround from Thiel’s previously expressed criticism of Trump. He told The Daily Caller in 2014 that Trump was “sort of symptomatic of everything that is wrong with New York City.”
In an interview with French website Express Live last March, Thiel went further, saying Trump’s global outlook is depressing: “The posture of Trump…is for me a zero sum game. It’s a world where there are no technical progress, or there is no productivity gain, where the younger generations feel they did not fare better than their parents. This is a static world.”
The openly gay Thiel is a member of the Libertarian Party yet has donated extensively to Republicans over the years. Thiel contributed the most cash to Ron Paul’s Super PAC in 2012. When Paul dropped out, he subsequently donated to the Mitt Romney/ Paul Ryan Presidential ticket.
Thiel has also given money, or fundraised, for former Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, and Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, none of whom are libertarian politicians. Prior to his delegacy for Trump, Thiel backed Carly Fiorina’s Presidential campaign.
The political disruption that Trump would cause was hinted at by Thiel in a New Yorker interview in 2011, when he said: “The failure of the establishment points, maybe, to Marxism. Maybe it points to libertarianism. It sort of suggests that we’ll get something outside the establishment, but it’s going to be this increasingly volatile trajectory of figuring out what that’s going to be.”
Thiel can perhaps claim to be the most successful technology investor in the world. In 2002 when PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion, Thiel’s cut was $55 million. His seven percent ownership of Facebook and place on the board is now worth an estimated $1.5 billion.
Yet his investment management and hedge fund company Clarium Capital saw its revenues decline from $8 billion in 2008 to $400 million in 2011 as a result of unprofitable investments.
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Thiel did not get back to Heat Street for a comment. But Trump supporters are keen to highlight the importance of Thiel’s endorsement. Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos told Heat Street: “Peter Thiel’s endorsement of Trump is hugely significant. Thiel is a rich, successful gay man, whom Trump-haters—whether on the right or the left — cannot dismiss as a redneck or Internet troll.
“His endorsement demonstrates that smart, sophisticated people will be holding their nose and voting for the Chaos Candidate in November because the alternative is so much worse.
“Republicans failed to see Trump coming, and continue to act befuddled by how libertarian his base can be, because they miss what he really represents: a massive f**k-you to entrenched elites and a glorious middle finger to language-policing snobs and nannies on both sides of the political divide. What could be more libertarian than that?”
Hypothesis: Peter Thiel is the Donald Trump of Silicon Valley.
Discuss.
— Rob Day (@cleantechinv) September 18, 2014
