From
Peter Thiel to Exit Meta’s Board to Support Trump-Aligned Candidates by Ryan Mac and Mike Isaac at NYT:
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Mr. Thiel first met Mr. Zuckerberg 18 years ago when he provided the entrepreneur with $500,000 in capital for Facebook, valuing the company at $4.9 million. That gave Mr. Thiel, who with his venture firm Founders Fund controlled a 10 percent stake in the social network, a seat on its board of directors.
Since then, Mr. Thiel has become a confidant of Mr. Zuckerberg. He counseled the company through its early years of rapid user growth, and through its difficulties shifting its business to mobile phones around the time of its 2012 initial public offering.
He has also been seen as the contrarian who has Mr. Zuckerberg’s ear, championing unfettered speech across digital platforms when it suited him. His conservative views also gave Facebook’s board what Mr. Zuckerberg saw as ideological diversity.
In 2019 and 2020, as Facebook grappled with how to deal with political speech and claims made in political advertising, Mr. Thiel urged Mr. Zuckerberg to withstand the public pressure to take down those ads, even as other executives and board members thought the company should change its position. Mr. Zuckerberg sided with Mr. Thiel.
But Mr. Thiel’s views on speech were at times contradictory. He funded a secret war against the media website Gawker, eventually resulting in the site’s bankruptcy.
Mr. Thiel’s political influence and ties to key Republicans and conservatives have also offered a crucial gateway into Washington for Mr. Zuckerberg, especially during the Trump administration. In October 2019, Mr. Zuckerberg and Mr. Thiel had a private dinner with President Trump.
Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg have long taken heat for Mr. Thiel’s presence on the board. In 2016, Mr. Thiel was one of the few tech titans in largely liberal Silicon Valley to publicly support Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.
In 2020, when Mr. Trump’s incendiary Facebook posts were put under the microscope, critics cited Mr. Thiel’s board seat as a reason for Mr. Zuckerberg’s continued insistence that Mr. Trump’s posts be left standing.
Facebook banned Mr. Trump’s account last year after the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, saying his messages incited violence. The episode became a key rallying point for conservatives who say mainstream social platforms have censored them.
Mr. Vance, who used to work at one of Mr. Thiel’s venture funds, and Mr. Masters, the chief operating officer of Mr. Thiel’s family office, have railed against Facebook. In October, the two Senate candidates argued in an opinion piece in The New York Post that Mr. Zuckerberg’s $400 million in donations to local election offices in 2020 amounted to “election meddling” that should be investigated.
Recently, Mr. Thiel has publicly voiced his disagreement with content moderation decisions at Facebook and other major social media platforms. In October at a Miami event organized by a conservative technology association, he said he would “take QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories any day over a Ministry of Truth.”
Mr. Thiel’s investing has also clashed with his membership on Meta’s board. He invested in the company that became Clearview AI, a facial recognition start-up that scraped billions of photos from Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms in violation of their terms of service. Founders Fund also invested in Boldend, a cyberweapons company that claimed it had found a way to hack WhatsApp, the Meta-owned messaging platform.
Meta declined to comment on Mr. Thiel’s investments.
In the past year, Mr. Thiel, who also is chairman of the software company Palantir, has increased his political giving to Republican candidates. Ahead of the midterms, he is backing four Senate candidates and 12 House candidates. Among those House candidates are three people running primary challenges to Republicans who voted in favor of impeaching Mr. Trump for the events of Jan. 6.
From
The Making of Peter Thiel’s Networks by Moira Weigel at The New Republic:
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In the late 1960s, Republicans began to mainstream what had formerly been a far-right talking point about “liberal bias.” And donors working through think tanks and nonprofits funded a network of college clubs, newspapers, and conferences, inspired by their New Left counterparts, to counteract the liberal influence on campus and to break the monopoly of colleges on knowledge production and credentialing.
These structures helped Thiel build the first part of his network. In 1987, Thiel co-founded The Stanford Review, a conservative campus paper, with grants from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which supported papers like it across the country—Dinesh D’Souza’s Dartmouth Review, for instance, and Ann Coulter’s Cornell Review. (Coulter and Thiel would become close friends.) Complaining about liberalism on elite college campuses was emerging as a recognizable career path: After Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind became a blockbuster success in 1987, various foundation-funded books like Roger Kimball’s 1990 Tenured Radicals and D’Souza’s 1991 Illiberal Education would follow. In this moment, minor adjustments to the “Western Civ” curriculum at Stanford, specifically, attracted national media attention. In addition to running on ISI grants, The Stanford Review would scare up donations by sending letters to wealthy alumni about the scandal of new classes being offered on subjects like Black hair.
If Thiel hated Stanford, he loved hating it. He stayed for law school, and well into his third year was still hanging out with undergraduates and writing for The Stanford Review. After a few years away—during which time he worked at the prestigious corporate law firm Sullivan & Cromwell in New York and interviewed for, but failed to secure, clerkships with Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia—he returned to Palo Alto. By the time he got back, he was already at work on a culture war screed, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, which he co-wrote with fellow Stanford Review alum David O. Sacks.
A conservative Bay Area think tank called the Independent Institute published the book in 1995. The John M. Olin Foundation, the conservative nonprofit dedicated to nurturing a “counter-intelligentsia,” which had also supported D’Souza, gave the Independent Institute a $40,000 grant to publicize it. The Young America’s Foundation, the conservative youth movement that groomed Jeff Sessions and Stephen Miller, among others, promoted the book, as did Thiel himself—he handed out copies from a giant stack to anyone who wanted one as they walked by the Stanford student union. The Independent Institute helped Thiel and Sacks find a national platform: They placed op-eds in National Review, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal, as well as appearing on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club and on right-wing radio networks that were rapidly growing in the wake of Reagan-era deregulation.
As Thiel moved up in the world, he never outgrew the campus culture wars; he kept many allies from that era close. And throughout his career, Thiel would be drawn to figures who deployed culture war tactics like those he’d learned at Stanford. In 2007 and 2011, he donated to Ron Paul’s candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination—supporting a fringe libertarian figure known, before the Tea Party movement, for his newsletters, which used Stanford or Dartmouth Review–esque strategies to whip up controversy. Among other things, the newsletters referred to MLK Day as “annual Hate Whitey day” and called the end of South African apartheid the “destruction of civilization.” At a conference at the conservative Claremont Institute in 2010, Thiel ran into Chuck Johnson—then a student at Claremont McKenna College, who was already making a name for himself in conservative circles.
Johnson, who would go on to write for Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller and Breitbart, connected Thiel to key figures in the emerging alt-right. In 2016, Johnson introduced Thiel to Milo Yiannopoulos, then the tech editor of Breitbart, and to the Clearview AI founder Hoan Ton-That. After Google employee James Damore wrote a memo decrying the “ideological echo chamber” among his colleagues in July 2017, Johnson hosted him and other disaffected Google employees at Thiel’s house. And, when Thiel decided to attend the RNC in 2016, he asked Johnson to secure him a place as a Trump delegate.
Thiel was cultivating connections with a rising faction in the Republican Party. He was impressed by an ambitious young lawyer, who would later be a fellow enemy of Google: Josh Hawley, who happened to be a former contributor to The Stanford Review. He gave $300,000 to Hawley’s 2016 campaign for attorney general of Missouri and donated to his 2018 campaign for U.S. Senate. And in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Thiel moved in the orbit of Breitbart executive chairman Steve Bannon, who, according to Chafkin, would become Thiel’s main link to the Trump White House.
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The tech backlash has created an appetite for new kinds of questioning and critical narratives about the industry—and that is a good thing. But replacing heroes with anti-heroes does little to alter the narrative about how a handful of geniuses have changed the world through their insuperable intelligence; the genre continues to trade on a deep desire to make myths about the men behind the machines. And in the case of Thiel, specifically, to focus too much on him as an individual precludes understanding, much less contesting, the nature of his power.
Thiel is not Jobs or Musk, a charismatic CEO associated with a particular invention. He is not an inventor but an investor, and, for the most part, he prefers to stay behind the scenes. He leverages his network—or, more precisely, his status as a node between several networks that were not previously densely connected. To understand his influence, we have to track how his ideas and his practices have traveled and, where they have become a kind of social glue, the people they join together. To do that, we will need to look at the PayPal Mafia and the machines their money has built from outside, below, within.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
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