Controversial Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel will be a member of Donald Trump’s transition team, the campaign has confirmed.
Thiel’s involvement in a Trump administration has been the subject of frenzied speculation in Silicon Valley, where the businessman was the sole prominent advocate for the divisive Republican candidate.
On Wednesday, Thiel told the New York Times that he would not move to Washington or seek a seat on the supreme court, but said: “I’ll try to help the president in any way I can.”
It is not known what role Thiel will play in the transition team. The transition team and Thiel’s representatives did not respond to requests for further details. But it is likely that he will be expected to help the president-elect build bridges with Silicon Valley, a place where Barack Obama is hugely popular and where many people regard Trump with either distrust or outright disdain.
Thiel’s vocal and financial support of Trump made him an outlier in the largely socially liberal world of Silicon Valley. While other tech CEOs and venture capitalists railed against Trump’s aggressive xenophobia, anti-free trade saber-rattling and threats to individual companies such as Apple and Amazon, Thiel delivered a keynote address at the Republican national convention in July and donated $1.25m to support Trump’s campaign.
“I build companies and I’m supporting people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships,” he said at the convention. “I’m not a politician. But neither is Donald Trump. He is a builder, and it’s time to rebuild America.”
Thiel, 49, is a Stanford-trained lawyer who co-founded the online payments system PayPal in 1998. After PayPal was acquired by eBay, he launched a hedge fund, Clarium Capital, which at first grew to $8bn in assets but floundered after the 2008 financial crisis. His current wealth and stature derives in large part from his early investment in Facebook.
In 2004, Thiel was the first outside investor in the budding social network. His bet on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has provided him with a seat on the board of the world’s most powerful distributor of news, as well as the wealth to fund various eccentric interests, such as life-extending technologies and a fellowship for college dropouts.
On Thursday, one of those fellows, Cosmo Scharf, announced that he would be turning down the balance of his $100,000 grant from the Thiel Foundation, citing his disgust with Thiel’s support of what he called “our next Hitler-elect”.
Thiel also co-founded Palantir Technologies, with early investment from the CIA. The secretive data analysis firm was recently sued by the Department of Labor for allegedly discriminating against Asians in hiring.
Thiel has distanced himself from some of Trump’s core campaign proposals, such as banning Muslims from entering the country and building a wall along the US-Mexico border.
“I don’t support a religious test. I certainly don’t support the specific language that Trump has used in every instance,” he said during a question and answer session at the National Press Club on 31 October. He added that Trump voters interpreted the promise of the border wall to mean “we’re going to have a saner, more sensible immigration policy”.
“Build a Wall on the Southern Border” is the first item on the immigration plan published on Trump’s official transition website. Other items include blocking funding for sanctuary cities, which include San Francisco.
Other members of Trump’s transition team, however, clearly take the president-elect more literally. “If he says he’s going to build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it … my guess is he’s going to build the wall and the Mexicans are going to pay for it. I think that’s going to happen,” Anthony Scaramucci, Trump’s economic adviser and Thiel’s fellow on the transition team told New York magazine on Friday.
Representative Marsha Blackburn, another member of the transition team, wrote in an op-ed for Breitbart News that Trump’s plan to temporarily suspend Muslim immigration into the United States “could not be any more common-sense”.
Thiel’s personal politics are intensely libertarian. He has expressed interest in building floating colonies on the oceans free of the restrictions of government regulation, a movement known as seasteading. He has also bemoaned the extension of the vote to women, a constituency that he noted was “notoriously tough for libertarians”, in an essay.
Thiel co-founded the conservative Stanford Review as an undergraduate at Stanford. The publication became a home for many future Silicon Valley magnates, including venture capitalist Keith Rabois and Zenefits CEO David O Sacks, who shared his disdain for the left-leaning campus culture of the early 1990s.
Much of Thiel’s and Sacks’ work on the Stanford Review formed the basis for their 1995 book, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus. The book lambasts the movement to diversify student bodies and university faculties, the inclusion of writers such as Zora Neale Hurston and Rigoberta Menchú in the Stanford freshman curriculum; and campus groups such as the Black Students Union and MECha (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán).
The book also discredited the idea of date rape, writing that the definition of rape had been stretched to include “seductions that are later regretted”.
Thiel apologized for his “insensitive, crudely argued statements” on rape after the Guardian reported on the book’s contents in October. He also rebuked Trump for his boast that he sexually assaults women, saying that the comments were “clearly offensive and inappropriate”.
Despite this, the tech investor will find much common ground with Trump on their shared disdain for the press.
In May, it emerged that Thiel had secretly pursued a vendetta against the news and gossip blog Gawker, funding a legal case brought by the wrestler and reality TV star Hulk Hogan. Gawker had published a sex tape excerpt of Hogan with Heather Clem, the wife of his friend Bubba “The Love Sponge” Clem, which Gawker published along with a scathing descriptive article.
The suit led to an unprecedented $140m judgement by a Florida court against Gawker and its founder Nick Denton which pushed both into bankruptcy. Gawker Media, which includes the sites Jezebel, Jalopnik, and Gizmodo, was sold to Univision, but its flagship site was shuttered. A separate suit, also funded by Thiel, leveled against a Gawker writer, AJ Daulerio, is ongoing.
The suit caused consternation among first amendment activists concerned that the ability of a billionaire to use the courts, in secret, to destroy media outlets based on a private grievance – Gawker had previously outed Thiel as gay – would have a depressive effect on freedom of the press.
