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INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE PETER THIEL UNFTR Media: PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PRSXxrWdHo
Peter Thiel UNFTR Media May 23, 2023 60.2K subscribers ... 2,189 views ... 126 likes #AmericanHistory #Politics #SocioEconomics Bright, awkward and successful, Peter Thiel has risen to prominence in American society on the gamble that he can break it. A product of the Ivy League system who wants to take it down. A gay man who backs candidates that would degrade his civil rights. A hedge fund tech investor who thinks Silicon Valley hasn’t done anything innovative in 50 years. A Trump backer and advisor who walked away when he got what he wanted. Peter Thiel is known as a contrarian, but it may be simpler than that. He might just be a nihilistic prick. RESOURCES The Atlantic: Peter Thiel Hates a Copycat ProPublica: Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank Founders Fund: Portfolio The Intercept: How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Helped The Nsa Spy On The Whole World The Wall Street Journal: Tech Tycoon Peter Thiel Shies From Trump Re-Election Campaign SEC: Palantir Technologies Inc. Cato Unbound: The Education of a Libertarian The Intercept: The New New Right Was Forged in Greed and White Backlash Daily Beast: Blake Masters’ Views on Gay Marriage May Surprise His Political Master Peter Thiel Max Chafkin: The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power SUPPORT THE SHOW Become a Member or Leave us a Tip https://www.buymeacoffee.com/unftr Listen to the UNFTR Podcast https://www.unftr.com/subscribe Leave our Podcast a (5 star) Review https://ratethispodcast.com/unftr Buy our Native Roasted Coffee https://www.unftr.com/shop Check out our book list https://bookshop.org/shop/UNFTRpod Shop UNFTR Merch! https://www.unftr.com/merch ABOUT UNFTR Unfcking the Republic (UNFTR for short) is a longform podcast that covers U.S. politics through a progressive socioeconomic lens. Each episode is a deep and delicious audio dive into a particular subject that helps explain how we arrived in Bizarro America, the funhouse mirror version of what was originally intended. The UNFTR YouTube channel is designed to break some of these larger concepts into smaller more digestible pieces. #Politics #SocioEconomics #AmericanHistory Peter Burgess COMMENTARY The more I learn about Peter Thiel, the more I worry that he is evil to his core. The more I learn about Peter Thiel and his background, the more it seems he is a serious danger to society as I would like it to be. I have known about his association with PayPal for a long time ... but not much else. TO BE EXPANDED TO INCLUDE MUSH OF WHAT i NOW KNOE! Peter Burgess* Transcript 0:00 And we’re back with our third installment of Heroes and Villains. [MUSIC] So, minor hiccup in the 2nd installment by making Noam Chomsky, a personal intellectual hero of mine, the first to represent the hero segment as it was revealed a couple weeks after I posted the video that my man was literally a friend of Jeffrey Epstein. How’s that for timing? He’s literally 96 years old. You’d figure I was in pretty safe territory. Oh well. 99 and I have gone over that enough in the podcast and I’m not throwing out his work, I’m not canceling him as an intellectual giant. Just expressing my profound disappointment. But hey, maybe the subject of this week’s episode will have a change of heart and stop being such a prick. Maybe I have some sort of magical power. Anyway, this week’s villain is none other than PayPal co-founder, Facebook angel investor and titular head of the billionaire libertarian movement, Peter Thiel. Thiels Life 1:06 So what has Mr. Thiel done with his life to make him so deserving of this acknowledgment? We actually covered Thiel in an extensive podcast episode that I’ll link in the notes. Even since then, he’s been pretty busy. The intelligence and data peddling company Palantir, the firm he co-founded, recently shot up in valuation after announcing it was infusing AI into its platform to help win more wars. He just convinced his PayPal buddy David Sacks to join the board of Rumble, the conservative online platform that just purchased a podcast streaming service to expand its reach of “free speech.” Thiel is a key investor in Rumble. And apropos of the Chomsky revelations, it was just reported that Thiel also appears several times on Jeffrey Epstein’s calendar. Oh, and he wants to cryogenically freeze himself so he can live forever. And he’s already doing it with pets. I’m not kidding. So what’s the deal with Peter Thiel? Thiel is a master of the universe type who believes he’s somehow been ordained with 2:01 gifts from on high as evidenced by his disdain for all things fair. Democracy, multiculturalism, equity and inclusion, taxes, you name it. And if you’re not at all interested in learning about yet another rich tax evading libertarian jerk hell bent on destroying democracy, I’ll save you some time and give you the punchline. Thiel is a sociopathic manchild who partakes in fiscal and political filial cannibalism. There was always a case to be made that billionaires, simply by their very existence and their sheer lobbying power, pose a threat to democracy. How about a proudly pro-Trump billionaire who spends his millions funding candidates who push the Big Lie, invites to dinner a self-identified white nationalist, has said on the record he doesn’t believe in democracy. How about him? Shouldn’t we be paying more attention to a billionaire like Peter Thiel? Yes, Mehdi. We should. Dark money is leveraged almost evenly on both sides of the political aisle. But only Republicans seem to raise money from billionaires who have designs on tearing down 3:02 the political system and clearing a path for tax evasion and financial corruption. Even though there are other billionaires who put their money into play and unabashedly support conservative ideals, Thiel has emerged as something different altogether. [MUSIC] Peter Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany Early Life 3:23 in 1968 to a very Christian family. He spent some of his early years in Cleveland—hello Cleveland—that makes sense, where his father Klaus landed a job in engineering, specializing in oil refineries and heavy industry. A few years later, his father moved the family to apartheid South Africa where Peter would get his formative education at an elite whites-only school. His father would then switch from consulting oil companies to uranium mining in Namibia on behalf of the South African government. What a swell family. As biographer Max Chafkin writes in The Contrarian: “Klaus’s company was helping to oversee 4:00 workers who had not been told they were building a uranium mine and were thus unaware of the risks of radiation. The only clue had been that white employees would hand out wages from behind glass, seemingly trying to avoid contamination themselves. The report mentioned workers ‘dying like flies’ in 1976, while the mine was under construction.” The Thiels moved back to Cleveland for a cup of coffee after the mine opened but then landed in California overseeing the opening of a gold mine. Peter read Tolkien, enjoyed Dungeon & Dragons, played chess obsessively, had few friends and signed every yearbook with “have a good life.” You d--k! Peter proved to be an exceptional student, which earned him a spot at Stanford where he rocked a 4.0. While he was still painfully antisocial, he joined the college Republicans, started reading Ayn Rand and apparently told classmates that “concern about apartheid was overblown.” Outside of chess and developing an early affinity for white supremacy, Thiel had a devout Christian 5:03 upbringing. Although, he appeared to be unmoved by religion until he became enamored with the teachings of Rene Girard, a philosopher who maintained that Christ was the ultimate scapegoat of history and that humans are driven by envy to imitate what they saw before them. Under Girard’s influence, Thiel would rekindle his relationship with his religion and lean hard into the conservative aspects of Christianity. To this day, he has the ability to move seamlessly between lessons from Tolkien fantasy and those found in the bible, often quoting both in public lectures. Stanford Law 5:36 During his time at Stanford he started the Stanford Review, modeled closely after the Dartmouth Review, which was founded by another hard right libertarian douchenozzle named Dinesh D’Souza. And if you don’t, look him up. He’s awful. But it was his publication of a book called The Diversity Myth, which blamed women for rape and contained homophobic sentiments, that earned him his first bit of notoriety. 6:00 After graduation he was accepted into Stanford Law where he flourished academically as well. Armed with a law degree, he took a job at a white shoe firm in New York but didn’t last very long. He quickly left the law behind and became a derivatives trader but was uninspired and unhappy in the job. So Thiel packed up, left New York and headed back to the west coast to start a hedge fund. Because, why not? Unfortunately, the hedge fund also tanked, but he still had some money left over from family and investors so he switched from hedge fund to venture capital and this time things worked out a little bit better. Just another made it from nothing, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps kind of story that libertarians love so much. Of course this assumes you're a fan of apartheid, have the family support to get two advanced degrees, and the ability to leave three different professions while getting bankrolled with a million bucks. Anyway. As fate would have it, Thiel did hit the next one out of the park by investing in a little piece of technology created by a kid named Max Levchin. Levchin was a coder who programmed a way to pass information securely between palm pilots. 7:01 Levchin called it Fieldlink. Fieldlink morphed into Confinity and Thiel took the helm when he invested $250,000 left over from his failed hedge fund. Confinity became PayPal. “In its earliest days, PayPal employed no women, and there were no Black employees. Years later, Levchin would boast about rejecting a candidate who’d use the word hoops, instead of saying basketball.” Thiel wasn’t the only white dude who grew up in South Africa running a payment company with a bunch of tech bros. In fact, the other one was literally right next door and was called X.com run by a fellow named Elon Musk. While this makes for fun storytelling, here’s the upshot. Initially the two companies weren’t even aware of one another even though they were literally in buildings right next door and shared a dumpster. Both platforms were free and signing up users like crazy, but they were burning cash. Thiel struck a partnership with Ebay, and Musk was giving the platform away as fast 8:02 as possible but the dot com bubble was about to burst so the two companies, who were finally aware of one another, merged and raised $100 million dollars before the bottom fell out of the market. As soon as the market cratered, Thiel quiet-quit his own company and left Musk to pick up the pieces. He’s gone. So I’m not going to rehash how PayPal ultimately grew and bankrolled its investors and gave rise to the so-called PayPal mafia in Silicon Valley. But there’s one quick note that speaks to character. Musk had continued to build PayPal in Thiel’s absence, ignoring money launderers and fraudsters on the platform of course. It was still bleeding cash but became too big to ignore because of its strategy to just give away the technology. Here’s the upshot, Elon was a disaster as a CEO but he was also a workaholic. So when he took his very first vacation in years, Thiel stepped back in and organized a coup that threw Musk out and installed himself back at the helm with the plan to go public. 9:05 Playing everyone against one another, Thiel brought the IPO across the finish line but not before making one last strategic move on the chess board. He forced the board to part with more equity at the 11th hour, which they reluctantly awarded him through a loan to purchase more shares. And then he did something so crafty that even I have to give it a tip of the old cap. “The late Sen. William Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican, pushed through a law establishing the Roth IRA in 1997 to allow “hard-working, middle-class Americans” to stow money away, tax-free, for retirement. The Clinton administration didn’t want to give a fat tax break to wealthy people who were likely to save anyway, so it blocked Americans making more than $110,000 ($160,000 for a couple) per year from using them and capped annual contributions back then at $2,000.” 10:00 That’s the lede to a Propublica article on Peter Thiel’s ingenious move. When Thiel forced the board’s hand to give him the money to purchase shares in the PayPal IPO, he used $500,000 in his Roth IRA to purchase more. There were three important devices that allowed him to do this. One, you cannot use Roth IRA money to purchase shares in a company you control. He didn’t have control of PayPal, just a stake. Two, it had to be valued under a certain amount, which it was since this was pre-IPO. And, three, you have be a real douchebag, which he is. Essentially, all the gains on the shares of stock from that point forward grew inside the Roth account and Thiel can extract these gains tax free when he turns 59. He’s only a couple of years away. Thiel would repeat this maneuver over his career as would many others when Congress relaxed the rules on contributions even further. According to ProPublica, at the end of 2019 Thiel’s Roth IRA was valued at $5 billion. 11:06 We’re all just pawns on Peter’s board. There are key elements in Thiel’s origin story that are essential to his character. Most of the bios and wiki entries are consumed with his investment prowess and now his political interventions. Thiel would indeed go on to provide the seed funding for Facebook after cashing out from PayPal. His investments now include Elon Musk’s SpaceX - yes, he has since made up with Elon Musk - Stripe, AirBnB, Asana, Spotify, Twilio, Lyft, Oculus, CreditKarma, ZocDoc and dozens of other tech companies that have changed the world or are in the process of it. Despite the fact that Thiel is on record routinely criticizing Silicon Valley for its lack of innovation. Today, he’s a bogeyman to those on the left who see his involvement in free speech platform Rumble as evidence that even his investment strategy is moving to the far right and not just his political contributions. 12:01 And many wonder if they go beyond speech to real world destruction of the political system. Take, for example, Palantir - a company that Thiel was instrumental in funding and generating connections for lucrative contracts. Now you might remember Palantir’s involvement in hunting down undocumented immigrants during the Trump years. As The Intercept wrote in 2017, “Palantir has never masked its ambitions, in particular the desire to sell its services to the U.S. government — the CIA itself was an early investor in the startup through In-Q-Tel, the agency’s venture capital branch. But Palantir refuses to discuss or even name its government clientele, despite landing “at least $1.2 billion” in federal contracts since 2009.” Some see this as evidence that Thiel, through proxy investment Palantir, had designs on supporting some of Trump’s most evil policies. But while Thiel was certainly a vocal supporter of Trump, even snagging a prime time slot at the 2016 Republican Convention, the fact is that Palantir did even better under Obama. 13:04 It’s also true that most of Thiel’s recommendations for hires as a member of Trump’s transition team weren’t chosen and that Thiel eventually pulled support for Trump’s re-election bid. Like I said, this dude’s hard to pin down. As the Atlantic points out, “Thiel’s greatest start-up hits share no particular industry theme, but most reflect this appetite for radical outsiderism.” Another quick piece of information to file away for later, by the way, is the fact that Palantir’s IPO filings showed that the company hadn’t yet turned a profit by 2020 despite years of lucrative contracts. Hold onto that thought. Aside from his investments, which are a matter of public record and have won him accolades in financial circles, I find his backstory more illuminating. The outsider. The contrarian. Self-made billionaire. These are compelling narratives that when matched with wealth buy you access and a voice in the public square. But to accomplish what? To say what? In 2009, Thiel wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” 14:03 lamenting that “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.” This is where Thiel gets interesting later in life. If you can judge someone by the company they keep and the things they do, then it creates a devastating circumstantial picture of someone who is more than an opportunistic investor. People like Thiel are characterized these days as “incels'' when they’re young. Disassociated misogynists who live largely online and are incapable of relationships. Then there’s the alt-right wing of the Republican Party that does things like storm the Capitol. We’ve got white Christian nationalists who are anti immigration, xenophobic survivalists who want to take away bodily autonomy and give power to the states. And we have the billionaire libertarian tax evaders who support far right candidates to clear a path for the groups above and their patrons to avoid taxes. 15:02 In the center of this venn diagram sits Peter Thiel. The brilliant Natasha Leonard wrote a piece for the Intercept earlier this year that speaks to the formation of the New Right. Here’s an excerpt: “Now, in our era of Trumpian reaction, we are seeing reports about a new New Right. Like the New Rights that came before it, it’s a loose constellation of self-identifying anti-establishment, allegedly heterodox reactionaries. The newest of the Rights is similarly fueled by disaffection with liberal progress myths and united by white supremacist backlash — this time, with funding largely from billionaire Peter Thiel.” In our politics it shows up in the form of donations but also candidate selection. And this is where Thiel has upped the ante compared to billionaire funders of years past. Candidates have always sought the approval and funding of the billionaire libertarian set. What’s different about Thiel is that he’s literally constructing candidates in his likeness from the ground up such as Blake Masters and J.D. Vance. 16:00 These weren’t just his hand picked candidates he personally funded, with Vance going on to secure a victory. They were both employees of his at one time. He’s criticized the very concept of democracy, saying that majorities are dangerous. Just look at North Korea. That climate science isn’t a science. He thinks nationalism can be dangerous, but at least it’s an antidote against globalization. Despite securing advanced degrees from one of the top universities in the country, he’s vehemently opposed to higher education and even started a fund for college students with good ideas. The only thing they have to do is drop out of college to get them. inconsistencies So let’s rack up the inconsistencies that he likes to frame as contrarian. Two advanced degrees from Stanford but encourages students to drop out of college. He’s a devout Christian who evades taxes and quotes Tolkien. He’s a gay man who backs openly homophobic candidates like Blake Masters and wrote in his book the Diversity Myth that Stanford should seal its glory holes and that women are to blame for redefining coercion and seduction as rape. 17:04 He routinely shits on California. And he lives in California. Famously ousted Elon Musk from PayPal when Musk was on his honeymoon. Then became an investor in Musk’s SpaceX. He believes the government is evil and the surveillance state is corrupt. But co-founded his Palantir with the CIA and relies on government contracts to make money. He took money from friends and family and bombed as a hedge fund only to start PayPal because he saw it as a way to bring down governments by replacing currency. As a white dude who thinks apartheid was a fine system, he sees no merit in the idea of privilege. A white dude from a family that literally made its money from engineering oil refineries, uranium mines and strip mining. Supported their friendless child through not one but two advanced degrees only to watch him piss them away when he quit the legal profession, quit being a derivatives trader and blew almost all of his friends and family’s money in his hedge fund. A dude who took that remaining money and backed a technology he believed could destabilize 18:04 governments, earned revenue from porn and gambling, looked the other way at money laundering and global fraud, basically fucked his business partner and never made a fucking penny because he worked his contacts in the investment community to take on millions that he gave to customers to sign up for his free product. Then he took that money and hid it in a tax shelter, thereby abusing a system that was designed to help low to middle income earners. [MUSIC] Peter Thiel failed as a lawyer. Failed as a hedge fund manager. Leveraged every ounce of his white privilege to invest in something that never turned a profit. Palantir never turned a profit but its largest customer is the government, the very thing Peter Thiel wants to destroy. SpaceX’s largest customer is also the government, which Peter Thiel wants to destroy. He backed Trump because he wanted to tear down the wall of government institutions then abandoned Trump when he didn’t get any of the appointments that he wanted. Now he’s trying to take over the government by installing hand picked Senators and backing myriad other Big Lie candidates. He shits all over Silicon Valley for its lack of innovation yet runs a fund that invests in Silicon Valley companies. He appears at conferences to talk about entrepreneurship, Christianity, libertarianism and is even giving foreign policy speeches. He can quote philosophers and kings. Probably hold his own against a grandmaster in chess. He’s made a bloody fortune rolling the dice on ideas that have the ability to hasten the creative destruction of legacy industries and society. Peter Thiel is trying to hijack what’s left of our democracy because democracy attempts to organize political and economic realism in a way that supports humanity and society. So, of course Thiel doesn’t get it. He’s acquired the financial wherewithal to participate actively in the destruction of this democracy for the very same ruthless reasons. He has a chip missing. And that would be almost fine, I suppose, if he left well enough alone. But he won’t. 20:00 He’s not content being Howard Roark. He wants to be John Galt. Peter Thiel is mad at the world because he doesn’t fit into it. He’s a petulant child with too much money. Pete’s a nihilist who wants to eat the world and we won’t let him. Here endeth the lesson.

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