Tech billionaires helped JD Vance get close to power because he spent less than five years in Silicon Valley, but his connections with Peter Thiel and others became key to his political advancement. The Ohio senator was named by Trump as his running mate this week.
Last month, JD Vance flew to San Francisco to hold a fundraiser for Donald J. Trump, followed by a private dinner with two dozen tech and crypto executives and investors. He met all these connections through tech investor Peter Thiel – Thiel co-founded PayPal and Palantir and was the first outside investor in Facebook. In 2016, Vance, only 39 years old, worked for one of Thiel’s investment firms in San Francisco. He spent five years in Silicon Valley, working as a junior venture capitalist and biotech executive. Although he didn’t leave much of a mark on the tech scene, it was a defining period that fueled his astonishing rise within the Republican Party — and will likely shape his political future.
Vance’s tech career has been key to building relationships with billionaire executives and investors, as Thiel, investor David Sacks and X owner Elon Musk have repeatedly funded Vance’s political ambitions, introduced him to other wealthy donors, praised him on social media and lobbied Trump to elect him. second person. Before the 2022 midterm elections, Thiel transferred $15 million to support Vance’s Senate campaign. Sacks donated $1 million to a political action committee that supported Vance’s run. In a post on Truth Social, Trump cited Vance’s “very successful business career in technology and finance” as one of the reasons he chose her as his running mate.
Still, if Trump and Vance are elected to the White House in November, it’s unclear whether they will share Silicon Valley’s views. Vance praised the Federal Trade Commission, which has brought antitrust cases against the biggest tech companies, and called for Google to be broken up because it is, he says, an “extremely progressive tech company.”
Like many influential Republicans, Vance sees cracking down on big tech companies as a way to loosen Silicon Valley’s control over the distribution of speech online. Republicans have raised the issue in both Congress and the Supreme Court as content moderation policies related to election disinformation have increasingly come into conflict with generally accepted Republican talking points. He recently said he was concerned that Google might display search results about Joe Biden’s presidential credentials in a way that would unduly influence voters. “We have to stop this madness, and I think one way to do that is to stop the way these companies control the flow of information in our country.”
In a 2022 televised debate, Vance said he believed “the 2020 election was stolen from Trump” Following the Jan. 6 riots, Trump was banned from social media platforms such as X and Facebook, but Vance’s Jan. 6 He called those arrested “political prisoners” in his post on X. At the same time, Vance has also advocated for a looser approach to crypto regulation, a stance that appears to align with Trump and has attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in contributions from the likes of Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and Elon Musk. Vance criticized Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler for his approach to crypto, which “seems almost the opposite of what it should be.”
He worries about over-regulation of blockchain-based technology because he believes challengers to social media players such as Meta will rely on it for functions such as identity verification. It is not yet clear how much influence Vance would have in a second Trump administration, or how Trump’s own views would conflict with those of his running mate. “Vice presidents don’t set policy, presidents do,” said Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute. “Trump’s policies would destroy the federal government, and without a functioning federal government, antitrust laws cannot be enforced.” Vance acknowledged that he had not specifically discussed antitrust policy with Trump, but said he thought the former president’s “instincts are pretty good on that issue.”
While a student at Yale Law School, Vance met Peter Thiel, the former CEO of PayPal, in 2011, where he gave the speech. Thiel mocked the career prospects of law students and argued that their time could be better spent in Silicon Valley. “Peter’s speech was the highlight of my time at Yale Law School,” Vance wrote in a 2020 essay submitted to a Catholic literary journal. Vance graduated from Yale in 2013 and moved to San Francisco to work as an executive at Circuit Therapeutics, a biotech company. .Frederic Moll, Circuit’s CEO at the time, said he hired Vance because he was “a very smart guy with an impressive legal background, but I was also doing Peter a favor,” referring to Thiel. Thiel’s venture capital firm previously invested in one of Dr. Moll’s companies.
Vance remained in touch with Thiel, who wrote a blurb for Vance’s 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegyto “. He encouraged Vance’s hiring at Mithril Capital, a venture firm Thiel co-founded. Vance joined the company in 2016 as a director. Colleagues remember him mostly because he introduced them to the ultra-sweet Big Red soft drink, which is very different from La Croix seltzer, which defines Silicon Valley culture, said a fellow investor.
Vance’s fame began to rise when “Hillbilly Elegy” became a bestseller in 2020 a movie was also made of it Starring Glenn Close and Amy Adams. While Thiel gained attention by endorsing Trump, Vance went in a different direction, saying in an interview that he would never vote for Trump. A few months later, Vance left Mithril Capital after falling out with the firm’s managing partner, Ajay Royan. “My friend JD was a talented and valuable member of the Mithril team,” Royan said of him in a statement.
In 2017, Vance became a partner at Revolution, a venture firm founded by America Online co-founder Steve Case, and commuted between Ohio and Washington, where the company is headquartered. He worked there for about 18 months, but Case says “he didn’t work much.” In 2020, Vance founded his own venture firm, Narya Capital, in Cincinnati. To raise the $120 million fund, he turned to his tech-leader connections, including former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, to billionaire investor Marc Andreessen and Thiel became a member of Narya’s management advisory board.
During this time, Vance became interested in supporting technology platforms favored by conservatives, including the social network Parler. He advised Rebekah Mercer, Parler’s majority shareholder and major Republican donor, and considered investing in the company. Narya ultimately didn’t make the Parler, but he and Thiel invested in conservative-favorite YouTube competitor Rumble in 2021. Around this time, Vance co-founded the Rockbridge Network, a network of big conservative donors with some tech executives. In July 2021, he announced his candidacy for Ohio’s soon-to-be vacant Senate seat. Thiel agreed to endorse him and brokered talks between Trump and Vance, who asked him for the former president’s endorsement.
“JD Vance, like some others, may have said some not-so-nice things about me in the past, but now he understands, and I’ve seen that,” Trump said when he finally endorsed Vance’s Senate bid. Thiel’s relationship with Trump has since soured, while Vance’s has strengthened. At a conference in Aspen last month, Thiel said he would only vote for Trump “if there was a gun to my head.” But now that Vance has become Trump’s running mate, Thiel is much more likely to support him and sent a message to close associates to express his excitement.
Musk (Thiel’s partner from his PayPal days) also encouraged Trump to choose Vance in private conversations recently. On Monday, Musk called the selection of Vance an “excellent decision.” Vance also leaned on David Sacks, whom he called “one of my closest confidantes” at a spring gala. (Like Musk, Sacks was born in South Africa and was also a PayPal employee.) After the event, Vance introduced Sacks to Trump’s oldest son, Donald Trump Jr. The former president was impressed by Sacks’ wealth and media profile, which enabled him to speak at the Republican National Convention.
Source: sg.hu
