By EFE
01 Sep 2024, 21:27 PM EDT
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is also a political powerbroker. Although he supported Donald Trump in the 2016 election, he is now resisting funding his campaign despite being behind the meteoric rise of the former president’s right-hand man, JD Vance.
Thiel co-founded PayPal with Elon Musk and, with another group of investors, created the big data analytics software platform company Palantir, which went public via a direct listing in 2020.
The 56-year-old Silicon Valley titan was also an early investor in the social network Facebook and now serves as managing partner of Founders Fund, a wealthy San Francisco-based venture capital fund.
Today, Thiel has amassed a fortune valued at around $9.2 billion and his investments include Striple and Space X, two of the most valuable unicorn companies in the world, according to data from Forbes.
Challenging Silicon Valley
His powerful influence in the political arena became known when he declared himself one of the largest investors in Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016, contributing a sum of $1.2 million.
The support for the New York tycoon went even further after his speech at the Republican convention, where he publicly supported Trump, a position that challenged that of Silicon Valley, home to the most powerful technology companies in the world.
But everything changed in 2020, when the tech billionaire stopped donating to the former president (2017-2021) in his re-election race.
Last year, he also turned down a request to contribute to the Republican candidate’s campaign and added that he would step away from political financing this year after citing his disappointment with Trump.
Supporting Trump was “crazier” and “more dangerous” than he expected, Thiel said in an interview with The Atlantic last November.
Friend of Vance but not so much of Trump
As his discontent with the former US president grew, Thiel joined a quiet campaign to support Vance’s political rise. Along with other Silicon Valley donors, he pushed for his successful bid for the US Senate in 2022, according to The Washington Post.
In an effort to leverage his connections and further advance his career, now toward the US vice presidency, Vance asked his billionaire benefactor and mentor last Thursday to reconsider his decision and invest in his campaign.
“I’m going to continue to talk to Peter and persuade him that he’s obviously a little bit burned out on politics, but he’s going to be really burned out on politics if we lose and if Kamala Harris is president,” Vance said in an interview with the Financial Times newspaper.
“He’s fundamentally a conservative guy and I think he needs to come out of the sidelines and support the candidacy,” he added.
The call to revive a major investor in his campaigns comes at a key moment for the Republican camp, which is seeing its rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, gradually narrow the gap in the polls with Trump and receive record donations from major investors.
Since President Joe Biden withdrew from the race on July 21 and handed her the baton as the Democratic candidate, Harris has been enjoying her popularity momentum, also boosted by the Democratic convention that took place last week in Chicago.
The campaign announced Sunday that it has raised $540 million in the past month, “a record for any campaign in history.”
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