Text/Abram Brown
A week ago, Peter Thiel announced that he would step down from a position he had held for 18 years: a member of the board of Directors of Facebook's parent company. Meanwhile, he's planning a party.
The party will take place in a few weeks at his island estate near Miami Beach, a beachfront townhouse he bought a year ago for $18 million. It was a campaign funding campaign for Blake Masters, a disciple of Thiel who is running for the Arizona Senate. Invitations to the event have been sent out to a group of wealthy Republican elites who support Trump, and attendance at the event is graded: VIP starts at 6 p.m. ($2,900 each donates) and other party attendees enter at 6:45 a.m. ($1,500 in donations). (VIP has more time and opportunities to network with Thiel and Masters.) And there's a third tier: donate $5,600 to become a co-sponsor.
This is at least the second time Thiel has held a fundraiser for masters in Miami. Last December, about 100 people gathered by Thiel's pool for drinks and photos. CNN commentator Ana Navarro and North Carolina Congressman Madison Cawthorn were both in attendance at the event. Hedge fund founder James Koutoulas also came, pinning a giant "LGB" logo to his blue jacket. ("LGB" is the anti-Biden slogan "Come on Brandon!") (Let's Go Brandon) abbreviation. Last year, Koutoulas also launched an LGB-branded virtual currency. ）
Koutoulas said: "I think Blake has a good combination of technical capabilities. Blake Masters is a graduate of Stanford University and is the manager of Thiel Capital, whose portfolio includes online lending firm SoFi and new electric seaplane maker Regent. In addition, Masters manages the Thiel Foundation, which awards bursaries to 225 young people each year in lieu of their university education. Koutoulas argues that the bureaucrats in Washington lack the experience of the Masters. He lamented: "There are so many people in the government who have no basic understanding of technology at all. ”
For those curious about Thiel's life after he left Facebook, the answer is likely to lie in these parties in South Florida. Thiel, 54, is still remarkably wealthy (Forbes estimates it to be worth $2.7 billion) that it's hard to imagine giving up entirely the venture capital empire he's built since 20 years ago. These investments formed the basis of his wealth; at the same time, he injected the money into Republican politics, portraying himself as a leading Figure in the Republican Party centered on Trump. But it's clear that he's at an inflection point: Not only did he announce last Monday that he was leaving Facebook, but he also spent a political surge. Counting the publicly traceable funds alone, Thiel has spent $22 million over the past two years on candidates running for U.S. senators and representatives — five times more than he spent politically in 2015 and 2016. Most of Thiel's political contributions were spent on two super-political action committees: one in support of Blake Masters and the other in support of J.D. Vance, the author of "Hillbilly Elegy," is vying for a seat in the Ohio Senate. Meanwhile, Democratic donors in Silicon Valley are said to be withdrawing donations, less than in the previous presidential campaign cycle, because they are satisfied that this campaign defeated Trump and are partly content with leaving the midterm congressional candidate to fend for themselves.
In recent years, Thiel has made himself look more and more like a mystery: less talkative, elusive, and mysterious. (He did not respond to a reporter's request for comment on this article, which is very much in line with his usual style.) However, if you know where to look for clues, it's still possible to crack the code. In the past, that meant looking at his business — all sorts of businesses. But today, to get to know Thiel, you need to look at the parties he hosts, the donors he co-opts, and the candidates he sponsors. Thiel has already reshaped venture capital, and he intends to do the same in the coming years to do the same for Republican politics, picking out candidates most likely to be described as "two-thirds like Trump and one-third like Thiel."
People like Koutoulas have identified with Thiel's reinvention of himself. Before donating to Masters, Koutoulas admitted that he did not conduct "super-in-depth research" on the former. Koutoulas' support for Masters is largely based on Thiel's endorsement. Koutoulas and Thiel are great friends and they live only 15 minutes drive away. "Since Peter moved to Miami, he has been very active in supporting an 'America First' foreign policy," Koutoulas said. "Koutoulas went on to complain about republican standards in the states — their correctness depends heavily on which party you belong to." Peter's basic credo is that America is really at an unstable tipping point. Look at the differentiation between all the coastal cities. Once-glorious New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles now have only high crime rates and high taxes. ”
Before talking about Thiel, the republican leader's pro-founder, perhaps we should start with a place that has been renamed and unknown.
That place is Foster City, California. It's close to San Francisco — 20 miles south, but when Thiel was a kid and he and his family had just moved there, it was nothing but the last leg of their journey from Frankfurt, Germany, via Ohio and Namibia. (His father was a chemical engineer.) Later, Thiel went on to undergraduate studies at Stanford University, went to law school, then briefly worked at Sullivan & Cromwell and then as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse in the early 90s. He then decided he would prefer to work for himself, so in 1996 he founded Thiel Capital and a few years later the hedge fund Clarium Capital. Before the financial crisis, Clarium Capital had an annual return of 30% (net of expenses). It adopts a novel business model that charges 25% of profits per year and no fees if it loses (as opposed to the traditional 20% and 2% methods, which allow hedge fund owners to make money in ups and downs). Thiel's letter to investors sounded like this: "We live in a time when conventional wisdom is no longer working... Investors who limit themselves to what used to seem normal and reasonable are unprepared for the miracle-filled times they now live in. ”
In between founding Thiel Capital and Clarium Capital, Thiel also founded a startup — he and co-founder Max Levchin originally named it "Confinity," which is today's PayPal. "The circulation rate of a $20 bill is 6, which means that in a year, there are 6 people who hold the money for an average of two months each. In the digital world, every time one of these people transfers money to us, we get new customers," Thiel told Forbes in 1999. He and Levchin went public with PayPal in February 2002 and sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion eight months later. Thiel made $55 million.
Three years later, Thiel founded another investment vehicle, the Founders Fund. Through the Founders Fund and his other companies, Thiel has amassed stakes in many significant companies over the past 15 years: Space X, Lyft, Airbnb, Spotify, Stripe, ZocDoc, and LinkedIn. (He also founded the time to co-found Palantir, a surveillance software company that is currently controversial.) ）
Soon after, investor Thiel established a fairly good track record for itself. This track record has helped him close numerous deals, and of course his willingness to abandon Silicon Valley rules is one of the reasons: Thiel has no grievances about startups where founders serve as CEOs and take power, maintaining economic and voting power for the company. While the old-fashioned on Sand Hill Road (Silicon Valley's VC Street) doesn't like that, if his competitors want to keep up with him, they must also evolve, abandoning their preference for checks and balances on CEOs to protect investments. Jim Breyer, founder of Breyer Capital, said: "Peter's approach has fundamentally changed the nature of the venture capital industry. (He's already invested more than a dozen times with Thiel or his company, including Facebook.) "In my opinion, this practice is very healthy, but others may not feel that this is a positive change." ”
Through LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, Thiel heard about two other young men: Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg. He liked their idea — Facebook — and immediately invested $500,000, or 3 percent of the shares, and joined Facebook's board of directors. Facebook was groping its way, working to add some features that we now consider its basic features: News Feed, notifications, and access to Facebook for users other than college students. At the time and in the years that followed, Thiel's impact on Facebook could not have been simplified or underestimated.
"You know, Warren Buffett said board members should have three things: They should have a savvy business mind, have a strong interest in the company, and be truly independent," recalls Don Graham, a former Publisher of The Washington Post who also invested in Facebook and served on the company's board with Thiel (and Breyer). "Peter invests heavily in the company, and he works very hard to make the company successful. I think Peter is both precious and clever, and Mark was very, very wise to leave him there. ”
For a long time, Thiel didn't mind being in the spotlight and enjoyed a few years of portraying him as an investment genius (though somewhat offbeat). Around 2015, things shifted, seemingly driven by two things: celebrity gossip site Gawker and Trump. The media derided him as the driving force behind the defamation case that led to the collapse of gawker.com. (The news blog site exposed Thiel as gay in 2007, much to the chagrin.) In early 2016, he announced his support for Trump's presidential campaign before conservative Republican supporters supported trump, making headlines about him darker. That year, Thiel donated $1 million to the super-political action committee that supported Trump and $200,000 to the Republican National Committee. This sparked widespread criticism of him in the media and among Thiel's peers. One of the latter includes Netflix founder Reed Hastings, who is also a director of Facebook. According to the New York Times, he told Thiel in an email: "I'm confused that you support Trump as our president, and for me that has gone from 'different judgments' to 'wrong judgments.'" ”
Trump won, but Thiel withdrew from public view, though his support for the 45th president didn't waver too much, and his activities in Trump's White House were frequent enough. But for Facebook, Trump's victory was costly. From Trump's election to today, you can trace back to the fairly straightforward route of a company being swallowed up by content moderation controversies and other issues, which was evident in last year's whistleblower breaches, and which were fraught with contradictions and complexities, most notably that Facebook (the company Thiel helped found) needed to ban Trump from its platform.
Without Thiel's direct statement, it's impossible to know exactly why he thinks he should leave Facebook now, not after 2016 or before the last presidential election. Perhaps Facebook's expulsion of Trump (his partner) was the last straw that crushed him. Or maybe it's just that after the Republican Party lost congress and the presidency, Thiel felt it was time to put the gas on it. (Facebook doesn't say much either.) In a statement announcing Thiel's departure, Zuckerberg said: "Peter has always been a valuable member of our board of directors and I am deeply grateful for all he has done for us. ”）
According to two Trump World sources, it is clear that in the years since Trump entered the White House, Thiel's popularity in conservative circles has risen sharply. Loyalty to Trump is a must in this circle, and the death of Republican super-billionaire Sheldon Adelson has left an influence vacuum in the circle.
"He's such a deep thinker and strategist that he's 20 years ahead of most people," said Darren Blanton, a startup investor and a former aide to Steve Bannon. "Peter Thiel is bent on making America a great nation again."
To achieve this, Thiel is funding grants like J.D. People like Vance, who are running for a Senate seat in Ohio. Vance's idea is very similar to Thiel's. Vance first met Thiel during a lecture at Yale, where Thiel argued that Ivy League schools (the same schools he and Vance attended) didn't help students reach their full potential. In 2017, Vance began working for Thiel's Mithril Capital Investment Fund. Three years later, Vance raised nearly $100 million from Thiel and others for its own fund, Narya Capital. The name "Narya," like many of Thiel's companies, is taken from the book Lord of the Rings. Both Vance and Thiel have also invested in right-leaning video platform Rube. Their political demands are as consistent as their funding: a U.S.-centric foreign policy, less government spending, and a tougher immigration policy.
Ahead of the next election, Vance is fiercely competing for the Republican primary. A competitor aired an ad on Ohio television that Vance had criticized some of Trump's old tweets. Vance later deleted the tweets in an attempt to side with Thiel and Trump. More recently, he also used Twitter to advertise a $10,800 dinner he and Thiel hosted.
And masters, as Trump might say, seem to have emerged directly from the Central Selection as a Thiel-backed candidate. Like Vance, Thiel, and Trump, masters favor stricter immigration rules and a less interventionist foreign policy. Like Thiel, he was 100 percent supportive of Trump running for president again, tweeting this in January:
Like Thiel, he quickly seized the prospects of emerging technologies. Thiel's PayPal has the earliest digital currency, and Masters is good at using NFTs. Last December, Masters sold a batch of limited-edition NFTs for $5,800 a piece; these NFTs are zero to one digital collector's edition. From Zero to One, a 2014 paper he co-authored with Thiel on startups, was wildly popular but rather abstract. In addition to the NFT, buyers will also receive exclusive invitations to parties hosted by Thiel and Masters and access to a private Discord panel. In total, he sold 99 NFTs and raised $574,000, the first instance in the nation to use NFTs for politics.
Combining Trumpism with cryptocurrencies was one of the reasons they won James Koutoulas, the hedge fund manager who attended a fundraiser hosted by Thiel in Miami. "We lack well-thought-out cryptocurrency regulation in this country... That's a real problem," Koutoulas said. "For the U.S. to continue to be a financial leader, we need to find a way to legalize crypto tokens and NFTs."
It's obviously too early to know if Vance and Masters will win, given that not every candidate Thiel has supported in the past few years. Last year, the man he spent the most money lost: Chris Kobach's unsuccessful Senate run, $1 million in vain. (As Secretary of State of Kansas, he enacted some of the nation's strictest voter registration laws.) In Washington State, Thiel's donation to gubernatorial candidate Loren Culp was much smaller ($2,900), whose campaign also spiraled. After the defeat, Culp responded in a Trump-like manner by prosecuting alleged election irregularities. The lawsuit didn't win, but his new efforts — a primary challenge to Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of the few Republicans to vote for Trump's impeachment after the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill incident.
The $20 million in political contributions to Vance and Masters could be enough to put the Senate in Republican hands, a very dire situation for the left. Thiel's spending has upset Democrats, so they're looking around for their own financiers. But Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is still watching from the sidelines, a vow he made after he bought Time magazine in 2018. LinkedIn's Red Hoffman also contributed only about a tenth of Thiel's political contributions, raising speculation about whether he's satisfied with the results of investing heavily in President Biden in 2020. (Neither Benioff nor Hoffman would comment.) )
"It's hard to have a more savvy donor in the Republican camp than Peter Thiel, so I do think that an unfettered Peter Thiel is something we need to be very, very worried about and very wary of," said Cooper Teboe, a senior D-Calif. and fundraiser. But he expects the party to eventually band together: "I don't think this fear will go unanswered." ”
But for now, if you sit by the pool with Peter Thiel, you can clearly hear the clear and well-funded objections from right-wingers.
Translated by Vivian School Li Yongqiang