What should we make of Donald Trump’s choice of J.D. Vance as his running mate? Ordinarily, this is not a question I would spend much time thinking about. When presented with the option of being governed by an open-faced shit sandwich, one doesn’t normally agonize too much about the choice of bread.
But given Vance’s background as a tech investor and close ally of some of the industry’s least savory culture warriors, it is worth taking a few minutes away from the chaos and hair-tearing to wonder what the decision could mean for Silicon Valley.
It depends on which version of Silicon Valley we’re talking about: the traditionally nerdy HP-ish, Googly, Facebooky one, or the more recent dirtbag iteration typified by Bitcoin grifters, eyeball-scanning AI weirdos and killer-drone-wielding sociopaths.
If you mean the first version, then a Trump-Vance ticket is likely a mix of good (lower taxes!) and bad. Both Trump and Vance have criticized “big tech” for censoring conservative voices, and Vance has explicitly called for removing the Section 230 legal protections that allow big social networks to operate.
But if you’re a fan of that second version of Silicon Valley—the one that loves to boost crypto and autonomously kill people—then the prospect of Vance in the White House could be all your Christmases come at once.
That’s because Vance isn’t just a friend of Silicon Valley’s worst billionaires; he is their creation. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor turned digital defense contractor, enabled his entire political career.
It was Thiel who, in 2017, hired Vance to work at his Mithril Capital firm (Mithril is a metal featured in “The Hobbit”) and later invested heavily in Vance’s fund Narya Capital (Narya is a ring in “The Lord of the Rings”). Thiel then donated more than $15 million to Vance’s Senate campaign and personally escorted Vance to Mar-a-Lago to patch over his former “Never Trump” stance.
Before Thiel announced that he was taking a break from democracy, he introduced Vance to David Sacks, his old PayPal Mafia colleague. Sacks promptly donated $1 million to a pro-Vance Super PAC and hosted a fundraiser for him. Sacks and Vance later worked together to organize Trump’s only San Francisco campaign fundraising event, aimed at nudging the candidate to further embrace and deregulate cryptocurrency. Thiel has reportedly made more than $1.8 billion from Bitcoin and other currencies.
Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time Thiel and his cronies have tried to buy an outsize role in Trump’s legislative agenda. After all, it was Thiel who rescued Trump’s 2016 campaign with a $1.25 million donation a week after the “Access Hollywood” tape, in the apparent hope of gaining influence in a future administration.
That proved to be a rare Thiel miscalculation. For all the bluster around Truth Social, Trump is probably the least tech-literate president of our lifetime. Famously, he doesn’t use email and relies on aides to print out websites for him. He was also the laziest president since George W. Bush. Paired with luddite Vice President Mike Pence, who barely believed women should be allowed to drive, the first Trump administration gave Thiel and his techie friends nothing but a bunch of tax cuts and some humiliating photo ops. In 2023, a clearly frustrated Thiel said the Trump administration “[C]ouldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. … I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”
Not the same mistake twice
Fast-forward to 2024 and Thiel is not going to make the same mistake twice. Whereas last time he simply donated money to Trump’s White House bid, this time he has donated an entire candidate.
And that candidate will have a broad mandate to give his former boss whatever he wants. Trump has made clear he intends to spend much of a second term chasing petty grievances, locking up his opponents and destroying NATO. So, just as Bush was happy to let former Halliburton executive Dick Cheney plan America’s wars, so Vance will be able to set the White House’s tech policy to suit his Silicon Valley paymasters – a tech policy that coincidentally might involve a lot of new military spending.
Thiel casts himself as a pacifist: When he endorsed Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, the big applause line was “It’s time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country.” But he is perhaps best known today as co-founder of surveillance tech company Palantir (named after a crystal ball in—what else?—“The Lord of the Rings”). The company makes intelligence-gathering tools for the CIA and the NSA. Even more fun, it builds software that directs drones and artillery strikes to shorten the “kill chain” in war zones around the world.
Thiel is also a major investor in Anduril, founded by his protégé Palmer Luckey. Anduril (a sword in “The Lord of the Rings,” because the Dirtbag Valley has apparently read only one book) makes drones that can kill people without needing a human controller. It also builds and operates sentry towers for the U.S. Border Patrol.
The best-case scenario is that with Vance as Thiel’s inside man, a second Trump administration would be a further boon for those companies and other portfolio investments, such as OpenAI, Neuralink and SpaceX.
The worst case?
Let us note that, following the horrifying assassination attempt at Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, it was Vance who—almost immediately, before anything was known about the shooter—issued an ironically grotesque statement blaming the Biden campaign’s rhetoric.
Trump has made no secret of his position on the Constitution (it should be “terminated”) and spying on American citizens (he famously encouraged Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails). Vance, too, has pledged allegiance to Trump’s lawbreaking, boasting that he would have voted to overturn the 2020 election. Vance and Trump are also proud adherents of the libertarian mantra of “laws for thee, but not for me”: Vance’s proposal to gut Section 230 protections specifically exempts small companies like his own Rumble platform. (Again, the hypocrisy apple doesn’t fall far: Thiel is an avowed libertarian who builds surveillance tech for the government and allegedly was an FBI informant, sharing information on “political corruption” and “Silicon Valley intrigue.”)
In the past, you’d have to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that a president and vice president might consider using tech made by their donors’ companies to surveil and smear political enemies. When it comes to Trump, you’d have to be an idiot to believe they wouldn’t.
And I don’t just mean enemies like President Biden and Clinton. I mean any number of the groups that Trump, Vance and their supporters have sworn to take on, including women, trans children, liberals, judges, jurors, the FBI, executives at social networks that aren’t Rumble, immigrants and librarians. If, as is statistically likely, you are a member of one or more of those groups, you might want to think about spending the next four years or so completely off the grid.
Still, it’s a great time to be a war profiteer in Silicon Valley. And, with four years of Trump and Vance, the party can only get wilder.
Paul Bradley Carr has written about Silicon Valley for 25 years. His next book, The Confessions, will be published next year by Atria. paulbradleycarr.com