What Is Peter Thiel Thinking? – The New Republic

Post-2020, I think a couple of things happened. One was there was this opening created by January 6 and the end of the Trump presidency for someone like Thiel to come along, where you have this obvious constituency for these hard-right ideasbut not a lot of people, besides Donald Trump really, trying to claim it. And especially when you look at the donor class, they had mostly tried to back away from Trump. So I think, for Thiel there was kind of an opportunity there to raise his profile, and he did it in this very weird way, by writing these gigantic checks to former employees, neither of whom had any obvious business running for Senate. Vance, of course, had a little bit more of a profile. He wrote this successful book and everything but hadnt done a whole lot besides that. And then Blake Masters, he was Thiels top assistant. Hes someone whos more or less been Thiels right-hand man for a decade.

Was he only drawn to Vance and Masters because they are employees? Were their politics particularly enticing to Thiel?

Thiels whole playbook, for his entire career in business, is about networks and finding people who have worked for [him] before and giving them bigger jobs. Hes actually very good about going out and settling them in parts of his empire. He has a type, and I think in lots of ways Masters and Vance fit that type, and I think its not that surprising that they first found their way into his orbit and then used that to catapult them to positions of political prominence. Obviously Thiel is capable of backing people who arent his employees because he backed [Kris] Kobach, but I think the fact that they are very much close to him, loyalespecially in the case of Masterslongtime aides, that plays a big role in it.

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What Is Peter Thiel Thinking? - The New Republic