Silicon Valley Billionaires Know Exactly How They Want the Election to Go
Reading Time: 6 minutesFrom Elon Musk to David Sacks to far-right VC bloggers, J.D. Vance got the influence of the entire tech world. Now he might be headed to the White House., J.D. Vance: He isn’t just Trump’s VP pick. He’s the pick of Silicon Valley tech bros.
Who was happiest about Donald Trump’s Monday decision to pick Ohio Sen. and former ivory-tower Appalachia whisperer J.D. Vance as his vice presidential hopeful? It wasn’t rural America, swing-state independents, or women voters. It wasn’t the conservative intelligentsia or the Catholic hard-liners, despite Vance’s self-pronounced conversion. It certainly wasn’t the traditional Republican donors currently opening up their checkbooks for Trump, or even Vance’s own Senate colleagues.
In actuality, it was the Big Tech and venture capital ambassadors who were the happiest of all. Trump had been the target of a heated effort from Silicon Valley types of all strata (well, mostly billionaires) to get Vance to the VP slot. Or, as Axios reported Monday, ‘a secret lobbying campaign continued into yesterday morning, with Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and tech investor David Sacks all calling Trump to try to lock in Vance.’
Musk, of course, has struck up a close relationship with Trump in recent months, regularly chatting on the phone with the former president and helping to organize executives who desire to oust President Joe Biden over his pro-worker, pro-tax, and pro-regulation agenda. ‘Excellent decision by @realDonaldTrump,’ Musk tweeted to the ex-president, who still hasn’t returned to posting on the social network formerly known as Twitter.
Longtime VC, podcast host, and political influencer Sacks gave a Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention that, like many of his other screeds, mostly made the case against Biden instead of one for Trump. He did, however, tweet his satisfaction with Vance, praising his military service and subsequent critiques of forever wars, calling him ‘an American patriot, with the courage to fight America’s wars but the wisdom to know when to avoid them.’ (Sacks’ tweet also erroneously implied that Vance had enlisted ‘when the Twin Towers came down,’ even though he couldn’t join and serve until a few years after 9/11.)
It’s not just them. The burgeoning (and amply funded) corpus of anti-regulation, anti-‘woke,’ pro-crypto, and A.I.–enchanted ‘effective accelerationists‘ are fully taken in with Vance. On X, Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey celebrated the coming matchup of ‘Tech Bro vs Kamala Harris,’ while Chamath Palihapitiya—a now-right-leaning VC who co-hosts the megapopular All-In podcast with Sacks—reveled in the potential for ‘a Bestie adjacent as the VP.’ (Besties refers to the four All-In hosts, who recently interviewed Trump on their show.)
Why the obsession with Vance? By the time his star began to rise with the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he had pivoted from a career in law to a Silicon Valley gig at Mithril Capital, one of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firms. At that time, Thiel—who’d co-authored an anti-‘multiculturalism’ book with Sacks in the 1990s—was one of Trump’s few outspoken tech-world surrogates, a position that had earned him a speaking slot at the RNC that first nominated Trump for president.
The conservative Vance wasn’t fully aligned with his boss, though: He frequently criticized Trump even while attempting to explain the candidate’s appeal to rural Americans. He also disparaged Silicon Valley in an interview with MediaDownloader as ‘more of a bubble than D.C.’ and New York, full of Richie Riches with ‘no real sense of how frustrated and how destitute a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley are.’ In an early-2017 New York Times op-ed, he expressed some admiration for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while also ‘hop[ing] for better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy.’ Just two months later, he wrote another Times piece about why the ‘optimism [that] blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country’ had spurred him to move back to Ohio from California.
Although Vance may have left the Bay Area, he hadn’t left his position with Thiel’s company and remained a ‘friend and big fan‘ of him. He got more involved in the VC arena, joining Steve Case’s Revolution firm as a partner in managing a fund that aimed to support more startups based outside the coasts. As reporting from Business Insider has indicated, it is unclear how successful he really was at that mission.
It was clear that Vance’s return home was less about uplifting the ‘hillbillies’ he had whitesplained to the liberal bubble with his memoir and more about seeking higher power. He teased a run for office as far back as late 2016, in a Washington Post interview about his moving plans, and floated the possibility again two years later, while joining a conservative influence group chaired by Federalist Society maven Leonard Leo. When that run for office flamed out, he dug deeper into the VC realm, starting a Cincinnati-based fund backed by Thiel and Marc Andreessen in 2020.
The following year, Vance joined Thiel in funding the right-leaning video platform Rumble—and took money from a PAC started by Thiel to get a race going for the seat held by retiring Sen. Rob Portman. He also met Trump at Mar-a-Lago after an introduction brokered by—who else?—Thiel. While shoring up his ultimately successful run, he also offered monetary support to pro-Trump organizations like American Moment that dedicated themselves to training the next generation of GOP leaders.
The focus on Vance’s biography is often tied to the Hillbilly Elegy moment, which culminated in a popular 2020 Netflix movie that earned poor reviews from critics—a reception that reportedly pissed Vance off and helped curdle his resentment of the elites into a close embrace of Trump. But it’s also likely that Vance’s deeply entrenched VC career, which kept him close to Peter Thiel and away from anything resembling the rural poverty of his youth, did as much as anything to drive him into Trumpism.
Throughout Trump’s term, Thiel found an opportunity to push his brand of fever-swamp politics into the GOP’s fore via the influence of Curtis Yarvin—fka the authoritarian, racist, misogynyistic, techno-supremacist blogger Mencius Moldbug—who reached the Trump White House through a line with Thiel, Steve Bannon, and hyperconservative writer Michael Anton, all of whom took to Yarvin’s recommendations of the manosphere pundit Bronze Age Pervert (real name: Costin Alamariu).
Who else has cited both Yarvin and Alamariu as influences? That’s right: J.D. Vance, who has also taken to national conservatism, a newer form of right-wing ideology that blossomed in the Trump era. The movement’s adherents desire a clear break from the GOP of the pre-Trump years (and something closer to the paleo-conservatism of Pat Buchanan).
No more unnecessary foreign entanglements, like the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan; expanded state involvement in everyday life, primarily to incentivize ‘good Christian values’ like the family unit and the sanctity of birth; a much harder line on immigration; and a willingness to treat snooty liberals like the real un-American enemies they are.
Thiel’s money, influence, and network did a lot to shape Vance, allow for his eventual political entry, and throw him down the rabbit hole. Allegations have long swirled on X of Vance’s involvement in ‘far-right group chats‘ with young Republicans, a tendency that has endeared him to the super-online alt-right bases of New Right activists. On X, Vance follows the far-right food-focused conspirator Raw Egg Nationalist.
It also didn’t hurt that more of Silicon Valley and the financial world lurched to the right after 2020, radicalized against social justice protests, COVID lockdowns, and the antitrust scrutiny and legal probes that came under the Biden administration. A sense of grievance afflicted onetime Biden voters like Musk and Palihapitiya—and always-radical folks, including Sacks (who arranged his pro-Trump Silicon Valley events with Vance’s help), were ready to capitalize on that. Meanwhile, wealthy investors like Andreessen were eager to direct their money to any sort of political influence they could muster because they knew they wouldn’t get anywhere with Biden.
What’s more, Vance’s keen attention to both shifting sentiments among rural Republicans and the complaints from Extremely Online conservative factions allowed him to issue dog whistles that suited the increasingly deranged techies just fine. Vance’s longtime appreciation of Trump’s anti–Iraq war denunciations fit with Sacks’ obsessions over the forever wars; his crackpot theorizing over ‘America’s low fertility [rate]‘ is in line with Musk’s pronatalism; his rants against ‘childless cat ladies‘ are a clear call to the manosphere devotees beholden to Yarvin, Alamariu, and Raw Egg Nationalist. (Thiel himself, for what it’s worth, has been sitting this election out. But at this point, he has made his impact.)
To be clear, J.D. Vance is not a perfect fit with these weird techno-feudalist alliances. He has often praised FTC Chair Lina Khan, an avowed Silicon Valley enemy, and his backing from the anti-union Musk somewhat belies his superficial-at-best support for the labor movement. And, to the shock of his most Moldbug-like stans, he has an Indian American wife.
But what probably counts most is what Andrew Torba, CEO of the far-right social network Gab, tweeted on Tuesday: that ‘Vance is influenceable’ and that ‘plenty of our guys can be put into positions of power because he’s there.’ Peter Thiel understood that a long time ago. Members of the oligarch class that boosted Vance’s fellow Ohioan elite Vivek Ramaswamy—whom they’d also like to take part in a potential future Trump administration—came to understand that. And a horrifyingly possible Vice President J.D. Vance is the result.
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