In “Tech Tycoon Peter Thiel Shies From Trump Re-Election Campaign”, the Wall Street Journal’s Rob Copeland, Keach Hagey and Tripp Mickle reported yesterday that billionaire Peter Thiel, California’s biggest supporter of President Trump, will be sitting out this year’s presidential election campaign because Thiel thinks that Trump will probably lose and that Trump’s odds keep getting longer.
Peter Thiel was one of Trump’s biggest backers in 2016. And despite Thiel’s controversial positions (among other things, he has written that letting women vote was bad for capitalist democracy), the Trump campaign even let him give a speech supporting Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, where he said:
I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American. I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform; but fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline, and nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.
And Thiel has been richly rewarded. His company Palantir Technologies received an $800 million data mining contract from the Pentagon, and has built on longstanding relationships with federal health agencies to be one of the leading data mining companies for tracking COVID-19 issues. And this week, Anduril, another of his companies, reportedly received a deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars to build a virtual wall along the US–Mexico border.
Despite these rewards, Thiel has soured on Trump. In May, the Daily Beast’s Lachlan Cartright, Asawin Suebsaeng and Lachlan Markey reported in “Billionaire MAGA Fan Peter Thiel Has Had It With Trump’s COVID-19 Response” that Thiel has not donated to Trump’s campaign since 2018. They wrote:
One person in Thiel’s circle tells The Daily Beast that Thiel has been “shit-talking” Trump over what he views as the president’s hamfisted and botched handling of the pandemic that has resulted in a stalled economy, massive job losses, and a U.S. death toll approaching 90,000.
Although Thiel still says he supports Trump, he’s no longer backing Trump’s campaign financially, so this “support” is almost zero by 2016 standards.
It seems that Nick Bilton’s piece “’Does He Believe Chaos Is a Ladder He Can Climb?’ Trump-Enabler Peter Thiel’s Dinners Are the Hottest Ticket in L.A. So What’s His Endgame?” published last year in Vanity Fair was prescient. Bilton wrote:
The contempt one imagines Thiel has for Trump’s intellect leads to another question, this one about Thiel and his own political ethics. “Was Thiel ever really a supporter of Trump?” one entrepreneur who has spent time with Thiel asked me rhetorically. “Does he believe that chaos is a ladder he can climb?...” ... In the entrepreneur’s viewpoint, Thiel’s support of Trump isn’t about Trump’s diabolical governance and frantic tearing apart of society and democracy for his own gain, but, rather, that Thiel is likely — and this is just an educated guess — benefiting, either financially or intellectually, from the crumbling of society as we know it.
So: Thiel is bailing because he’s squeezed Trump for all he can, he doesn’t care whether US society is crumbling, and he wants to turn to his next challenge. Vladimir Putin, take note.