Not only was he the first from the tech elite to openly support Trump in 2016, but Peter Thiel has also quietly and methodically built a network of people and ideas that now permeate the heart of American politics. One of the names tied to this network is J.D. Vance
Six months before the entire world would fix its gaze on Donald Trump’s swollen features, eyes turned upward—but to the left—toward the distinguished row at the inauguration of the 47th President of the United States.
Among the phenomenologically interesting figures were the famous podcaster Joe Rogan and MMA boss Dana White, but the focus was on the “tech bros” billionaires. Elon Musk, naturally, was front and center, flanked by Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), and Sundar Pichai (Google).
Some thought they were there to “kiss the ring.” Others saw it as the final unmasking of Silicon Valley’s right-wing faction (Zuckerberg’s pivot was particularly telling). Still others argued that the techno-oligarchs were now the real power behind the White House.
One notable absence was Sam Altman (OpenAI). His presence in the audience—but not on stage—was chalked up to a falling-out with Trump’s favorite “tech bro,” Elon Musk.
Still, one big name, perhaps equally if not more important, was missing for a different reason. Billionaire investor and founder of PayPal and the controversial company Palantir, Peter Thiel prefers to remain out of the spotlight.
Stories about shadowy figures often veer into dull speculation or conspiracy theory. When it comes to who’s “really behind Trump,” names have ranged from Putin, to media magician Steve Bannon, to the now-forgotten crew from Cambridge Analytica.
Peter Thiel is different. He’s more tangible. While his name can also be associated with familiar buzzwords—cryptocurrency, venture capital, innovation, growth, the new right—there are also more eccentric themes: companies named after items from The Lord of the Rings, scholarships for college dropouts, a distinct brand of conservative ideology rooted in Christianity. Then there are the extreme elements: Olympics for the doped-up, immortality, the Antichrist, and, of course, Epstein.
There are no direct ties—no flights or dinners—but Epstein’s money did flow into Thiel’s Valar fund.
BUILDING THE MODERN AMERICAN RIGHT
If Thiel’s fellow tech giants were at the Capitol that January to buy their ticket into the new administration, Thiel had already been working behind the scenes for years.
He was the first in tech to openly back Trump in 2016 and systematically built a network of people and ideas now central to American politics. One of those people is J.D. Vance.
“I didn’t expect much from Trump’s first term, but I thought that for the first time in 100 years, we had a Republican who wasn’t serving up sugary Bush-era nonsense. That’s not exactly progress, but at least we could talk about it. Today, that seems like a baseless fantasy,” Thiel recently said on The New York Times podcast Interesting Times.
A world that doesn’t create new things, doesn’t conquer new frontiers, doesn’t take risks in energy or medicine, is a world heading toward frustration, nihilism, and ultimately widespread violence. The cure, he believes, is growth and acceleration.
He also added that his under-$2 million investment in Trump in 2016 wasn’t a big risk.
“I had two thoughts at the time. First, no one would be mad at me if Trump lost. The whole thing would seem too weird, and no one would care. Second, I thought he had a 50-50 chance, because the problems were deep and the stagnation was frustrating. In reality, people weren’t ready. Maybe now, a decade later, we’re finally at the point where we can talk about it,” said Thiel.
Thiel saw Trump as a potential disruptive force and an asset against what he sees as the key problem of the modern West—massive stagnation that’s persisted for 50 years, a retreat from relentless growth, and a slide into civilizational apathy.
For Thiel, stagnation isn’t just economic—it’s a societal illness. A world that doesn’t innovate, explore, or take risks slides into despair and violence. The cure, in his view, is growth and acceleration.
Technological and economic growth, he believes, would “reset the order” and open a path toward a new civilization. But that growth requires risk and a willingness to discard many of today’s systems—including democracy.
CHIPS ON THE TABLE
Thiel’s “hedge” on Trump was just one of many strategic plays, and his ability to predict early and correctly is well documented. He was the first investor in Facebook and a co-founder of PayPal, which, besides millions of dollars, spawned a new generation of Silicon Valley players—chief among them, Elon Musk.
Thiel’s “Founders Fund” has backed key startups like Airbnb, DeepMind, SpaceX, Spotify, Stripe, Neuralink…
Many leaders of these companies, connected through Thiel’s money, shared interests, Stanford backgrounds, informal membership in the “PayPal Mafia,” and alignment with his views, are now directly or indirectly involved in U.S. governance.
During the turbulent first six months of Trump 2.0, they may have gotten less attention than the elusive Musk, but they secured critical roles—in finance, emerging tech, science, health, and defense.
For example, David Sacks, a former PayPal exec and Stanford friend of Thiel, was dubbed the “AI and crypto czar”—two of Trump’s favorite areas. Trump has long emphasized these as key to American dominance—Pax Americana 2.0.
Michael Kratsios, who worked for two of Thiel’s funds—Thiel Capital and Clarium Capital—became head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the first millennial in the role. In the previous administration, he oversaw DARPA projects.
Jim O’Neill, a former director of the Thiel Foundation who worked across several Thiel firms, is now Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s deputy at the Department of Health. Like Kennedy, he’s long opposed the FDA and promotes ideas central to Thiel’s philosophy—deregulation, longevity, biotechnology.
O’Neill advocates for a freer market in healthcare and shifting risk for experimental drugs onto patients. Thiel goes further:
“If you know you’re terminally ill, there are probably more risks you can take. Researchers, too, can take more risks,” Thiel argues.
There are more people and deeper links between Thiel’s empire and the U.S. government, most notably with Palantir.
Named after the “seeing stones” in The Lord of the Rings, Palantir is the clearest embodiment of Thiel’s power—and often his mouthpiece. Founded with CIA backing, it provides the military and intelligence agencies with powerful big data software that connects seemingly unrelated data points, identifies patterns, and locates enemies—real or potential.
Although Thiel is nominally a libertarian, Palantir represents a pillar of modern centralized digital surveillance and a weapon in information and hybrid warfare—drawing harsh criticism, especially from the San Francisco crowd.
“The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more about software, but they don’t know more about how society should be organized or what justice is,” said Palantir CEO Alex Karp. “Our company was founded there, but we seem to share fewer and fewer values.”
THE VANCE PROJECT
Yet there’s one key chip in Thiel’s game, smaller than Palantir but perhaps more important—his most successful political project: J.D. Vance, now Vice President of the United States.
A former senator from Ohio, Marine, and author of Hillbilly Elegy, Vance is seen by many as a pure Thiel creation.
His autobiographical novel tells the story of a darker version of the American Dream. Less memoir, more social critique, it maps out the rise of Trump—especially to those who didn’t see it coming.
A child of the forgotten white working class, Vance made it to Yale Law, entered a world that knew nothing of his background, and wrote a book that first gained traction in obscure podcast circles before hitting Amazon and NYTbestseller lists.
The book explores the pain of America’s forgotten class, but also Thiel’s core concern: a loss of purpose, direction, and meaning—societal apathy.
It’s easy to see Thiel’s influence. Vance attended a 2011 Thiel lecture at Yale, calling it the most important moment of his studies. Thiel spoke of his core theory—great stagnation—arguing Western civilization isn’t advancing, despite rapid internet progress, because nothing much is happening in other domains.
“We once moved forward uncompromisingly—faster ships, railroads, cars. It peaked with Concorde and the Apollo missions. Then we slowed down,” Thiel recently said.
Thiel also touched on religion during that talk, and Vance later said it led him to embrace Christianity. “That’s when I saw someone could be both smart and Christian,” he wrote.
HARDER THAN STEEL, LIGHTER THAN COTTON
Thiel’s influence goes far beyond that one lecture. In 2015, Vance joined Thiel’s “Mithril Capital”—named after Tolkien’s mythical metal, stronger than steel but light as cloth.
Then he launched “Narya Capital,” again borrowing from Tolkien—named after one of the Elven rings. The funding came from Peter Thiel.
At the time, Vance was a staunch anti-Trumper. His path through the crowded GOP landscape in the Rust Belt was cleared by Thiel, who invested $15 million in a Super PAC backing him—one of the largest individual donations of its kind. Thiel also took Vance to Mar-a-Lago to smooth things over with Trump and secure his endorsement—and, ultimately, win the Ohio Senate race.
Vance’s campaign echoed Thiel’s politics: a mix of Christian conservatism, tech ambition, and direct critique of the liberal establishment.
DARK ENLIGHTENMENT & THE CATHEDRAL
Though some view Thiel as a conservative “philosopher king,” many of his ideas are derived from the more obscure but influential thinker Curtis Yarvin, founder of the neoreactionary movement NRx, also known as Dark Enlightenment.
Despite being a product of elite education himself (Stanford), and funding similar paths for others, Thiel’s ideology runs counter to the very institutions that shaped him. His administration’s open war on universities is not accidental but a formalization of his long-held beliefs—seen also in the Thiel Fellowship, which offers $100,000 to young talents to drop out of college and build something instead.
Many more of Thiel’s beliefs now echo in Trump 2.0: shrinking government, dismantling bureaucracy, resetting institutions—and always, the mantra of growth.
According to Thiel, it’s not about saving democracy, but leaving it behind. As he’s said plainly:
“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
Behind his philosophy, with influences from French and Austrian thinkers, lies an anti-democratic thesis and advocacy for a fight against the “Cathedral” (academia, media, and bureaucracy), as well as the dismantling of what we know as the state in favor of a new system that would function like a technological corporation with a CEO-monarch at its head.
In such a system—which, for some, represents a fusion of technological utopia, Christian mysticism, and radical politics, and for others, a call for something resembling fascism—there exists one clearly defined threat. The threat is not social unrest, opposition, or economic collapse, but a theological-philosophical concept of Judgment Day, drawing inspiration from the works of René Girard.
It is a sterile, technological dystopia and global apathy toward which the world is heading in the event of authoritarian control, the erasure of all differences and conflicts, and, inevitably, the halting of growth. Thiel calls the force leading toward such a system—not supernatural, but social—the Antichrist.
HOW TO FIGHT THE ANTICHRIST
“The way the Antichrist would take over the world today is by constantly talking about Armageddon. Constantly talking about threats to life and saying that it’s something that must be regulated. That’s the opposite of the idea of the Antichrist from the 17th or 18th century, where it was some evil genius, an evil scientist who invents a machine and takes over the world… In our world, the thing that could politically resonate is the opposite. The narrative that could take hold is that we must stop science. So, in the 17th century, it would be someone like from the film Dr. Strangelove, and today the closest thing to that would be Greta Thunberg,” says Thiel.
Trump certainly doesn’t like Greta, but he also doesn’t seem like someone who likes being told what to do. He quickly distances himself from close allies, is tactically skilled, and ultimately—he’s never even mentioned Thiel. But what if, due to age or scandals, his second term becomes merely a loud prelude to something else?
In that scenario, if not now in the style of Joe Biden, then likely in the next cycle, instead of a placeholder like Kamala Harris, J.D. Vance enters the Oval Office. He’s not just Trump’s vice president—he is Thiel’s most successful political project. The boy from Hillbilly Elegy carries a much firmer and more precise ideological matrix, one that combines Christian conservatism with a ruthless technological ambition for growth at any cost.
That’s why the real question might not be what Trump wants. The question is: what kind of America does Peter Thiel dream of?
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