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This is an adapted excerpt from the new book, Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.
“Christianity, the main religion of the Western world, always takes the side of the victim,” Peter Thiel said, adding, “you should think of wokeness as ultra-Christianity or hyper-Christianity.”
Thiel, the far-right billionaire investor, adheres to an overarching philosophy — power. It’s one of the reasons he rejects the “woke” ideology of equity, as he explained to comedians Konstantin Kisin and Francis Foster on their Triggernometry podcast in July 2024. Thiel said he sees Christianity as the ultimate “woke” religion for its focus on the poor, sick, and weak.
He may be extreme, but Thiel’s not unique in his views (other than being so public with them); others in his class and cohort hold similar beliefs. “The mansplaining billionaire is a new phenomenon of this decade,” The Code author Margaret O’Mara told me.
After Gawker outed him in 2007, Thiel became more public about his extremist politics. No longer even nominally a libertarian, he now adhered to more of an Objectivist philosophy. He loved The Sovereign Individual by William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, a book that was immensely popular in Silicon Valley in the 1990s and had influenced the future political trajectory of several tech leaders. (Later, Rees-Mogg’s son Jacob would join the Conservative U.K. government of Boris Johnson as a high-ranking official in charge of managing Brexit.)
One can see the book’s influence on Thiel’s view on electoralism: “In our view, voting was an effect rather than a cause of the megapolitical conditions that brought forth the modern nation-state. Mass democracy and the concept of citizenship flourished as the nation-state grew. They will falter as the nation-state falters, causing every bit as much dismay in Washington as the erosion of chivalry caused in the court of the duke of Burgundy five hundred years ago.”
In 2009, in his essay, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Electoral politics weren’t Thiel’s end goal; though he later offered a “clarification” to his comments on democracy and freedom, claiming that the real issue was he had “little hope that voting will make things better,” he also suggested (maybe jokingly) that conservatives should let liberals win, overreach, and then stage a military coup.
The billionaire, who claimed he was largely uninterested in voting, was fascinated by the possibility of an unregulated tech sector to change the world. In 2012, he returned to Stanford to teach a course on startups. Blake Masters, a Stanford Law student and Thiel acolyte, wrote up the lectures and posted them on social media.
Irrespective of his philosophical views on the value of democracy, Thiel was building a stable of future politicians who would further his message in Washington. In the 2012 GOP presidential primary, Thiel backed Ron Paul. He had met the paleoconservative Texan years earlier when lawmakers in Washington went after online gambling, one of PayPal’s moneymakers. Thiel wasn’t particularly interested in Paul’s 2012 run, rather in using the libertarian Republican’s campaign to further a different, far-right message. The Paul campaign was confused; there was basically no communication with the Thiel-backed super PAC Endorse Liberty. But for Thiel, the point was not to support Paul — it was to push his own political agenda.
That November, Thiel helped get Ted Cruz elected to the Senate, a long shot that paid off. And his support for Ron Paul gave him a welcome ally in the congressman’s son Rand, the new junior senator from Kentucky.
By 2014, Thiel was flying high. Even when asked about his association with figures like neofascist ally Curtis Yarvin, he was able to dodge the shots. Thiel was thinking about slashing federal bureaucracy and developing a stable of high-powered politicians to help him do so. Venture capital was ascendant, the economy was on the upswing, and Thiel — who saw Obama as a communist, despite the lucrative contracts the administration had showered his data processing and surveillance company Palantir with — was eager to use his power to retake the country for the conservative movement.
As the 2016 election ramped up, Thiel eagerly embraced his role as the public face of support for Donald Trump from the tech sector. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Thiel embraced the Silicon Valley self-mythos. His speech was a hodgepodge of relatively anodyne far-right comments until he announced, to riotous applause, that he was proud to be gay, Republican, and American.
When Trump won the election in a historic upset over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it was clear Thiel’s bet had paid off. Obama’s close ties with Silicon Valley had brought the industry and Washington together. Despite his love of private industry, after the 2016 election Trump didn’t offer the same level of buy-in for most tech leaders. Yet while the tech titans weren’t particularly enamored with Trump on a personal level, some saw the potential of a malleable entity. Trump was already surrounded by people who had dabbled in the tech world.
Steve Bannon, his 2016 campaign consiglieri, had served as CEO of a company selling gold in the massive multiplayer online role-playing game World of Warcraft. He was part of tech’s far-right underbelly. Once in the White House, Trump turned to the more elite Thiel to serve as liaison to Silicon Valley.
After Trump’s victory, tech leaders came to kiss the ring. Thiel was at his side for the December 14, 2016, meeting. The billionaire investor brought along allies Elon Musk and Alex Karp, even though at the time the respective companies they led, Tesla and Palantir, were not remotely on the same level as Google, Microsoft, Apple, and the others.
The tech CEOs flattered and praised Trump. No one objected to the new president’s plans to curtail immigration or temporarily ban Muslims from entering the United States. Business interests were simply more important than politics. Trump, for his part, was happy to let bygones be bygones after attacking tech companies on the campaign trail. If anything, the president was more excited about meeting the tech leaders than they were about meeting him.
“There’s nobody like you in the world,” the president-elect said. “In the world! There’s nobody like the people in this room.”
Thiel’s money is often found on the fringes of the right. He funds a number of ideological publications, including the Journal of American Greatness, American Affairs, Quillette, and Inference. He’s also a backer of the “intellectual dark web,” a collection of none-too-bright online influencers who have presented themselves as learned scholars to eager Dunning-Kruger types. The billionaire has spread his wealth so widely across the conservative discourse sphere that it’s almost impossible to track. “He isn’t like the general putting his chips on the table and drawing out a coherent plan,” a source close to Thiel told The Washington Post in 2022. “He is taking strong sniper shots for people and things he cares about. He is more like a professor. But intellectually, he is in battle mode.”
That April, a Vanity Fair story by James Pogue examined how the billionaire was funding a New Right revamp. He gave money to hard-right figures like Curtis Yarvin as well as a coterie of failed or striving young Hollywood types rebranding as conservatives and looking to make a splash.
Pogue attended a Thiel-aligned after-party in Orlando during the National Conservatism Conference in November 2021 and noted the attendees: Yarvin, soon-to-be-senator J.D. Vance, Newsweek editor Josh Hammer, Trump official Michael Anton, writers Chris Arnade and Sohrab Ahmari, and others. The New Right, Pogue wrote, “is heavily populated by people with graduate degrees, so there’s a lot of debate about who is in it and whether or not it even exists . . . but there’s also a highly online set of Substack writers, podcasters, and anonymous Twitter posters.” This new political alignment, funded by Thiel, is a combination of intelligentsia-style academics and online influencers.
The success of the populist, reactionary ideology promoted by Thiel is unsurprising, writes Naomi Klein in Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. Driven by “rising stars on the right” funded by Thiel and others, this politics reminds Klein of movements of the left that look to address systemic inequities in the global capitalist system. But while the left hasn’t turned that message into power, the right has been able to disguise a reactionary, brutal agenda in terms more familiar to the Occupy Wall Street crowd: “They promise a mix-and-match of bringing back factory jobs that pay family-supporting wages, building the border wall, fighting the toxic drug supply, liberating speech from Big Tech, and banning ‘woke’ curricula. Among those building careers around versions of this platform in the United States are J.D. Vance in Ohio, Josh Hawley in Missouri, and Kari Lake, who narrowly lost her bid to become governor of Arizona (and claimed, of course, that the election was stolen). Very similar versions of electoral diagonalism have taken root in countries around the world, from Sweden to Brazil.”
The New Right is slippery because it is difficult to root out the actual influence of the group, with exceptions like Yarvin, whom Vance is proudly close to. It’s found limited purchase with some on the traditional left who reject individualism and view so-called traditional values as somehow anti establishment.
Because the movement is so often relegated to the fringe, the extent of its impact can be difficult to quantify. But with the ascendance of Vance in the GOP and the other figures in the New Right orbit in media and discourse shaping, it’s hard to argue that it’s not having some effect.
The success of the conservative ideology he’s pushed hasn’t filled Thiel with much satisfaction. He wants more. It’s just not enough, as he explained to The Atlantic‘s Barton Gellman, the former Washington Post reporter who helped report the Snowden leak, in November 2023. The billionaire recounted to Gellman investment after investment that didn’t make the real, earth-shaking shift in humanity he’d hoped for. Crypto, seasteading, SpaceX: One after another, assets in Thiel’s portfolio were failing to make a difference. Regardless of whether they made him money, none resulted in the enlightened “escape from politics in all its forms” he had dreamed of in his 2009 “Education of a Libertarian” manifesto.
Thiel told Gellman he was disillusioned with politics and unhappy that his great wealth hadn’t been able to change the world to his satisfaction. The stated reason for the interview, a rarity for Thiel, was so he could hold himself accountable for a commitment not to spend money on the 2024 campaign cycle. “By talking to you,” Thiel told Gellman, “it makes it hard for me to change my mind.”
He wasn’t alone in his political discontent. By November 2023, tech leaders were frustrated with Trump but struggled to figure out where best to put their money. A political adviser from the tech industry told The Washington Post that donors were becoming increasingly disenchanted with the message: “There’s such a massive disconnect right now between caucus-goers and primary voters and the people who write the big Super PAC checks. We don’t care about [transgender] kids going to bathrooms. We care about dismantling the regulatory state.”
Keith Rabois — a lawyer whose homophobic comments at Stanford netted him the support of Thiel but widespread criticism from the student body — told the Post that Trump shared many of the goals of the Silicon Valley elite. But, he added, the former president’s follow-through on dismantling the regulatory state was hamstrung by his behavior: “Instead of just executing relentlessly, he would cause turmoil and chaos, and that would interfere with his agenda.”
By summer 2024, the tech leaders had largely dispensed with any illusions about their political preferences. In short order, Marc Andreessen, Musk, David Sacks, and others in their orbit came out publicly for Trump, pledging the Republican their endorsements and support. For Andreessen, the “final straw” was a proposal from the Biden administration to tax unrealized capital gains, something the billionaire said in mid-July “makes startups completely implausible.”
That influence hasn’t been overlooked. “It’s Peter Thiel’s party now,” journalist Dave Weigel tweeted during the 2024 RNC, and it’s hard to argue the point — Thiel’s close associate J.D. Vance was chosen as Trump’s running mate and Hulk Hogan, the wrestler who with Thiel’s backing successfully sued Gawker out of existence, spoke on the last night of the convention before Donald Trump.
Excerpted from Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left by Eoin Higgins. Copyright © 2025 by Eoin Higgins. Available from Bold Type Books, an imprint of Basic Books Group, a publishing group of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc., New York, NY, USA. All rights reserved.
