Billionaires and the Trump Admin: Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel

Net worth: $17.5 Billion (Forbes)

• Peter Thiel is the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund. He was also an early investor in Facebook. He has been a mega-donor for Republican candidates and causes since 2000. Though he tends to donate to Republicans, Thiel has also donated to Democrats, giving California Governor Gavin Newsom’s campaign $56,400 in 2015 and Representative Ro Khanna $2,700 in 2016. Thiel donated approximately $1.5 million to pro-Trump groups during the 2016 election cycle. In addition to financial backing, Thiel also provided Trump credibility as one of his most prominent Silicon Valley backers. He vouched for Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

• Thiel officially joined the Trump transition team as a member of Trump’s executive committee in November 2016. His involvement and influence over the Trump transition raised ethical concerns because Silicon Valley stood to gain from Thiel-backed candidates in key tech-facing jobs who may spare tech giants from regulatory oversight.

• In 2020, Thiel distanced himself and did not donate to Trump’s re-election bid, seemingly because Thiel thought the campaign was doomed to fail due to the economic damage done by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2023, Thiel’s relationship with Trump soured after the president attacked him for refusing to support his re-election bid. Before the 2024 election, Thiel said he wouldn’t donate to any candidates, though he did say he would vote for Trump, who selected Thiel ally JD Vance as his vice president after Thiel made calls encouraging Trump to pick Vance.

• “Over a dozen people with ties to Thiel — including current and former employees of his companies, as well as people who have helped manage his fortune or benefitted from his investments and charitable giving — have been folded into the Trump administration.” Some examples include (click here for full list):
  • JD Vance: Thiel was a mentor and former employer to JD Vance. Vance and Thiel’s relationship dates back to 2011, when Vance met Thiel after he gave a talk at Yale Law School “lamenting technological stagnation and arguing that the elite obsession with hypercompetitive jobs was crushing innovation.” In a blog post he wrote for Catholic magazine The Lamp, Vance described Thiel’s talk as “the most significant moment” of his time at Yale. Impacted by Thiel’s talk, Vance began planning for a career pivot outside of law. Vance joined law firm Sidley Austin in 2013 after graduating from Yale Law School. Less than 2 years later, in 2015, Vance left Sidley Austin to join biotechnology company Circuit Therapeutics as its director of operations. Vance got the job at Circuit Therapeutics despite his lack of experience because of his connection to Thiel. In 2016, Vance joined Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital.
    • That same year, Vance published Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, which propelled him into the limelight. Thiel wrote a blurb for Vance’s book. Vance left Mithril Capital in 2017. In 2019, Vance launched his own venture capital firm called Narya Capital and reportedly received backing from Thiel and other billionaire investors like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Thiel introduced JD Vance to Donald Trump in 2021 which made Vance more sympathetic to Trump and his policies (Vance has been critical of Trump in the past). Trump later endorsed Vance in his 2022 Senate run just weeks before election day. Thiel donated a record $15 million to Vance’s 2022 Ohio Senate Race, the largest amount of money donated to a single Senate candidate ever.
    • Much of Vance’s campaign advertising was handled by the Protect Ohio Values super PAC, which received donations from Thiel. Thiel also played a key role in recruiting around 10 major donors for Vance, including venture capitalist David Sacks, who contributed $1 million.
  • David Sacks: Sacks worked with Thiel at PayPal as the COO and Head of Product from 1999 to 2002. Sacks also wrote for the Stanford Review, the student newspaper Thiel founded as an undergraduate in 1987. In December 2024, he was named as the White House’s incoming “AI and crypto czar” who will also lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.
  • Clark Minor: Minor worked at Palantir as a software engineer and in other roles for almost 13 years from 2011 to 2024. He is now Chief Information Officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, where he oversees information security, cybersecurity, privacy and records management. The Department of Health and Human Services has contracts with Palantir.
  • Colin Carroll: He worked on “Growth and Strategy” at Anduril Industries from 2023 to 2025. Carroll moved to a new position as chief of staff at the Department of Defense from his role at Anduril.
  • Elon Musk: Musk and Thiel have been intertwined since the early days of PayPal, which Thiel co-founded and where Musk briefly served as CEO. Thiel’s venture fund, Founders Fund, “was an early investor in several of Musk’s companies, including space cargo business SpaceX, tunneling firm the Boring Company, and brain-chip startup Neuralink.” Elon Musk is a special government employee for the second Trump administration behind the Department of Government Efficiency.
  • Ryan Wunderly: Wunderly was a robotics engineer at Anduril Industries for over 4 years. He is now working inside the Treasury Department with Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
  • Jim O’Neill: O’Neill was the former CEO of the Thiel Foundation from 2009 to 2012. He also co-founded the Thiel Fellowship in 2010, which each year gives a handful of students $100,000 each to drop out of school and pursue entrepreneurial ideas. O’Neill is Trump’s nominee to be Deputy Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
  • Trae Stephens: He is a general partner at Thiel’s venture fund Founders Fund. Stephens is reportedly being considered for Deputy Secretary of Defense.
  • Michael Kratsios: He is “Thiel Capital’s former chief of staff and a director at Founders Fund–backed Scale AI, is reportedly handling tech policy during the Trump transition.”

• Some of Thiel’s views:
  • Politico described Thiel’s ideology as “a mishmash of libertarianism and nationalism that has led to his interest in cryptocurrency, funding of immigration hardliners, support for seasteading—floating autonomous ocean communities that are not subject to government regulations or taxes”. 
  • Thiel’s biographer described his political impulses as authoritarian.
  • In 2009, Thiel published an essay claiming that women being given the right to vote was a blow to libertarianism. His exact words are: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women – two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians – have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
  • In a 2009 Cato Institute essay, Thiel wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
  • In 2014, Thiel wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal called “Competition Is for Losers”, where he argued companies can maximize profits and better society by building a monopoly. Thiel claimed “monopoly” refers to companies that are so good at what they do that no other firms can offer a close substitute. He argued that monopolies were not only good for business but that “creative monopolists give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.”
  • In 2018, Thiel compared America to North Korea due to political correctness.
  • In 2023, Thiel called diversity initiatives “both very evil and very silly”.

For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Billionaires in Trump World tracker.