Guardian - Broligarchs Lining Up Behind Shitstain, And Vance Is Their Wholly-Owned Subsidiary
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But it’s some lesser-known figures in Silicon Valley who last week boarded the Trump bandwagon who are perhaps even more telling. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who own one of the most storied and influential venture capital (VC) firms in Silicon Valley, have declared they’re all in for Trump alongside a host of lesser-known but important names who have either followed suit or who beat them to the punch, including the Winklevoss twins and investors and podcast hosts Chamath Palihapitiya and David Sacks.
Back in 2016, Peter Thiel was the voice in the wilderness. And in that meeting in Trump Tower, it was Thiel’s hand that Trump picked up and stroked. (And whose data mining firm, Palantir, picked up billions of dollars in contracts from Trump’s Department of Defense, and, most controversially, Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, where it profiled and surveilled migrants.) The principle that underpins Silicon Valley investing is to bet early and bet big. It worked for Thiel with Facebook. It worked for Thiel with Trump. And last week another of his bets paid off, though few could ever have predicted how spectacularly.
Because JD Vance, the new potential VP, is Thiel’s creature. He is a man Thiel moulded in his own image through lavish investments in his business and political careers. Thiel gave Vance a job at his VC firm, Mithril Capital, backed him to start his own venture fund, Narya Capital, then later invested $15m in his successful run for the senate. Max Chafkin, Thiel’s biographer, describes Vance as his “extension”. The payoff from Thiel’s early gamble in Trump is a lesson that has not passed others by. As with their other obsession, crypto, the best time to have invested in Trump was 2016, and the second best time is today. We already have a word for what we’re watching now: it’s oligarchy. And we’ve already seen how this plays out. In Putin’s Russia, political and commercial interests are one and the same.
Thiel is betting – again – on the same phenomenon in America. Betting that he will be first among a new breed of tech bro oligarchs – a new super-class of broligarchs. In Trump’s America, there will be hard choices for everyone, including the billionaires. Though it may be less hard for them. Vance has said he wants to deregulate crypto and unshackle AI. He’s said he’d dismantle Biden’s attempts to place safeguards around AI development. And while he has it in for the legacy monopolies of Google and Facebook – the platforms that his ideological bedfellows in the “new right” see as part of the “censorship industrial complex” suffocating rightwing speech – Silicon Valley is betting on a gloves-off, regulation-free, pro-business goldrush.
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/20/tech-broligarchs-court-trump-vance-elon-musk-peter-thiel
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