Who is Peter Thiel?
The man who wants to put Trump back in power
By Diana Dittmer
2/12/2022, 7:21 am
Ironically, a billionaire tech investor could turn out to be one of the most powerful political string pullers in the US election campaign. Peter Thiel supports the Republicans with gigantic sums of money, he is extreme and he does everything to help Donald Trump to get re-elected.
Ever since Democrat Joe Biden became US President, Peter Thiel has been quiet. Under the Trump administration, the exceptional billionaire businessman, as a political advisor to the Republicans, regularly made a name for himself with his extreme political views. However, the investor and founder, who was born in Germany and grew up in the USA, now seems to want to report back in good time before the US midterm elections in autumn: after almost 20 years on the board of directors of the Facebook group Meta, he will be leaving after the annual general meeting in May, it said company this week. It was not revealed what plans Thiel was pursuing. US media speculate that he will probably turn more to politics again in the future.
The party will welcome him with open arms. Thiel has already invested a lot of money and influence in the interests of the Republicans. Donald Trump is warming up for a possible re-election, and the gap between Thiel and Facebook had recently widened anyway. He doesn’t want his political activities to be a “distraction” for Facebook, writes the US finance portal Bloomberg, citing a person close to him. “He believes the Republican Party can advance the Trump agenda and wants to do what he can to support that.”
Paypal, Facebook, Palantir
Thiel is well wired in business. The 54-year-old has more than once shown a good instinct and recognized lucrative trends. His career is paved with the names of US tech giants and their makers. It is widely known that Thiel was one of the first investors in the online network Facebook, where he has been a member of the board of directors since 2005. He was friends with Mark Zuckerberg for many years.
Thiel earned the money for his Facebook investment alongside Elon Musk with Paypal – alongside Zuckerberg, another big name who has continuously accompanied his career. A few hundred thousand dollars, they say he invested in 1999 into the company, four years later he brings the payment service to the stock exchange. It was sold to Ebay, which brought him a whopping 55 million US dollars in 2002. Enough to found the hedge fund companies Clarium Capital Management and Global Macro Funds alongside his sizeable investment in Facebook. Even after that, the entrepreneur’s lucky streak didn’t end. Since 2003 he has been involved with another large tech company: Palantir. He also successfully listed the “data octopus” founded by the US secret service CIA, as critics complain.
Thiel manages to continuously increase power and account balance through his investments. The business magazine “Forbes” estimates his fortune at around 2.6 billion dollars (2.3 billion euros). His trademark not only includes high bets on new trends, but also on unusual or even controversial ones: since 2015, for example, Thiel has invested heavily in cannabis businesses. He is also a big fan and willing financier of Elon Musk’s project to colonize Mars. Thiel is also taken with neo-brokers: he works as a consultant at Trade Republic.
He reveals himself to be an eccentric by promoting research into the human aging process. Cryonics, as the technology is called, aims to freeze people in order to thaw them again at a later point in time. If Thiel is convinced of something, he is not afraid to risk high stakes. He’s never demonstrated that more convincingly than in his costly vendetta against gossip blog Gawker, who unwillingly outed him as gay in 2017.
The oddball in Silicon Valley
It was Thiel who organized the superlative tech meeting in the Trump Tower shortly after Trump won the US presidential election. At that time, all Silicon Valley bosses of repute and reputation traveled to their future president in New York. The guest list included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook manager Sheryl Sandberg, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla boss Elon Musk. It was the concentrated US economic power with a combined market value of the companies of three trillion dollars. And they all came because Thiel called them.
Despite his good connections and numerous successes, Thiel never really belonged to the tech “gang”, in Silicon Valley he is and remains an outsider. The liberal industry does not share his radical political views. Thiel has never made a secret of his convictions. He offends: he encourages monopolies and not only attracts attention and negative headlines with pithy slogans about how competition is for losers. “I’m an America First conservative,” he says of himself. His commitment to so-called libertarianism, a movement that prioritizes personal liberty over government influence, shows how far to the right he is on the political spectrum .
Many of his political demands are based on Trump’s nationalism. He joined the campaign team of the now ex-president early on. Trump and Thiel discover what they have in common: both favor not only a super-lean state and the idea of a technocratic government that bypasses the established institutions. Political correctness is also repugnant to both; they are to be equated with prohibitions on thinking.
After Steve Bannon was demoted in 2017, Thiel became a Trump confidant. He quickly enjoys the reputation of the “shadow president” among his employees. He supports the Republicans with huge sums of money: According to “Politico”, he supports two Republican representatives of the new right with around ten million dollars each. These include best-selling author JD Vance, who is running for the US Senate in Ohio in 2022, and Blake Masters, who wants to retake the Senate seat in the southwest United States, which was won by the Democrats, in the fall. Masters, like Thiel a self-declared “America First conservative”, is COO at his eponymous investment firm Thiel Capital.
Thiel pulls together the right troops
Thiel is the one tilling the field so Trump can position himself as the Republican nominee for the 2024 US election. In doing so, he moves on very thin political ice. He spoke openly against diversity and multiculturalism, says Sandra Navidi from Beyond Global ntv, and “in a language that is understood as racist in America”. Descriptive sentences such as “freedom and democracy are not compatible with one another” also go to his account. When Thiel moves into politics and into Trump’s camp, that doesn’t come as a surprise, says the financial expert, who has worked on Wall Street for almost 20 years and is familiar with the powerful network of the financial world: Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was “leading” by Peter Thiel back.
The entrepreneur has proven to be a safe bet: “He understood how to monetize algorithms, how to disseminate information and how to influence people’s thinking and behavior,” says Navidi. How systematically Thiel pursues his political goals can also be seen from the fact that he has invested in the competing Canadian video portal Rumble. Here “particularly right-wing opinion leaders should have their say”. That fits into the overall picture, as does the fact that he hired former Austrian Chancellor Kurz, who had to resign due to ongoing corruption allegations. The former Chancellor is now working as a “Global Strategist” at Thiel Capital. Thiel had previously hired a government spokeswoman for the conservative ÖVP. Both have “good contacts with autocrats, especially in Eastern Europe,” explains the expert. Thiel is “extremely active behind the political scenes”.
It had become quiet around Thiel, he was obviously not gone. It’s halftime in Washington. The US election campaign is going to be tough. The mood test for Democrat Joe Biden is scheduled for the midterm elections in the fall. The time was ripe for a political decision. Meta and Facebook have long since been phased out, and the company has repeatedly been criticized in public for Thiel remaining on the board of directors. The house peace was disturbed in other ways as well: Thiel was one of the first investors in Facebook, but he was also the one who sold a large part of his shares during and after the company’s IPO in 2012. Nor did he shy away from investing in Facebook’s competitors.
At the latest since Thiel has supported the Republican candidates Vance and Masters, the relationship with Zuckerberg is said to have cooled off significantly. Vance and Masters are openly hostile to Big Tech, in particular the role of Facebook in Biden’s victory is being questioned without evidence. For Zuckerberg, Vance and Masters are a red rag. Bloomberg headlines: “All-in on far-right politics”. Thiel’s resignation will “probably save Facebook from additional political headaches.” He will not disappear from the scene.