Peter Thiel and JD Vance: How PayPal founder boosted VP candidate's political career
When JD Vance first met Peter Thiel in 2011, Vance was a student at Yale Law School and Thiel, a venture capitalist, gave a speech at the university criticizing modern society.
Vance later wrote that he was trying to find his place in a highly competitive atmosphere, and Thiel’s speech awoke something in him that made him realize he didn’t want to practice law.
Vance would go on to work for Thiel at his venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. More than a decade after they met, Thiel would help Vance win a seat in the U.S. Senate with $15 million to support his campaign, which launched Vance to his selection Monday as former President Donald Trump's running mate.
Vance’s first claim to fame may have been his rise from rags to riches, but Thiel was key to his political success.
“I had no idea what to expect at the time,” Vance wrote of when they first met.
Who is Peter Thiel and what does he believe?
Thiel made his fortune as an early investor in PayPal in the 1990s and Facebook in the 2000s. He's also known as the financier of a lawsuit against Gawker that bankrupted the website and a longtime Republican donor who has spent more than $49 million on campaigns since 2000.
A self-described libertarian, Thiel has expressed opinions and associated with figures on the far-right fringe. In a 2009 essay, he wrote, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible," and that women gaining voting rights "rendered the notion of 'capitalist democracy' into an oxymoron." In 2016, he hosted a "Right Wing Dinner Squad" that included white nationalist Kevin DeAnna.
Vance moved San Francisco, where he worked for Thiel’s firm, in 2013, according to TechCrunch.
Thiel has heavily supported an eclectic mix of right-wing Republicans, including former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who has said the U.S. should return to the gold standard, and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, an immigration hardliner who gained national notoriety for toughening the state’s voting laws while serving as secretary of state.
During the 2022 midterms, Thiel backed Rep. Harriet Hageman, who unseated Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, and unsuccessful House candidate Joe Kent in Washington, who spread the racist and antisemitic Great Replacement theory on the campaign trail.
Thiel did not respond immediately to a request for comment. Nor did the Trump campaign or Vance's Senate office.
Peter Thiel invested in Rumble with JD Vance
One of Vance and Thiel's earliest joint forays into politics may have been in 2021, when they invested in Rumble as a conservative alternative to YouTube. In the aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, social media companies cut the far-right’s access to their platforms.
The investment went through Vance’s Cincinnati-based private equity fund, according to the Wall Street Journal. Vance’s financial disclosure from 2022 valued his firm’s stake in Rumble between $15,001 and $50,000.
“This will be a major play against Big Tech,” Chris Pavlovski, the CEO of the company, told the Wall Street Journal in 2021.
By 2022, Rumble became one of the leading social media news platforms on the right, according to the Pew Research Center. More than three-quarters of people who got news from the site leaned Republican.
Peter Thiel backed JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign
When Vance expressed interest in running for a Senate seat opening up in 2022, he went up against a crowded primary field that included included several wealthy individuals who gave tens of millions of dollars to their own campaigns. Vance, who by now was rich from his venture capital career and sales of his book "Hillbilly Elegy," gave his campaign $1.4 million.
But Thiel, whom Vance once described as a “good friend,” became Vance’s biggest backer by far. Thiel gave $15 million Protect Ohio Values, a super PAC that ran ads supporting Vance's candidacy. The PAC spent more on ads to elect Vance than all of the money Vance's campaign raised on its own. And it's one of the largest amounts Thiel has ever spent on a single candidate.
During the campaign, Vance offered top donors to his campaign an invitation to a small group dinner with him and Thiel.
Some of the ads Thiel’s PAC ran for Vance boasted his endorsement from former President Donald Trump and said Vance would help secure elections. Another said Vance would help finish Trump’s border wall, “end welfare for illegals,” and defund sanctuary cities.
Although Thiel enthusiastically backed Trump in 2020, he expressed disappointment with Trump's tenure and stayed on the sidelines in 2020.
Thiel hasn't backed any candidates in the 2024 campaign. He said last month that he'd vote for Trump "if you put a gun to my head."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: How PayPal founder Peter Thiel made JD Vance’s political career
