Silicon Valley Billionaire Peter Thiel Swoops In To Bail Out Vance’s Campaign
February 8, 2022
Columbus, OH — Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel already donated $10 million to a super PAC to support Vance but apparently, that isn’t enough. Now he’s retiring from Meta’s board to devote more time to helping bail out J.D. Vance’s flailing campaign.
The announcement from Thiel comes the same day as a new Politico report says that Vance “needs a course correction ASAP.” According to the pro-Vance super PAC’s pollster, Silicon Valley’s Vance problem is that Ohioans know his anti-Trump past, and his “association as a Never Trumper has only grown since November.” Vance has called Trump an “idiot,” “reprehensible,” and “noxious.”
Silicon Valley Vance is a chess piece in Peter Thiel’s scheme to create a Big Tech political class. Vance worked for Mithril Capital, a venture capital firm founded by Thiel, and then Vance worked at Revolution LLC, a tech investment firm founded by AOL co-founder Steve Case.
In the year leading up to his Senate run, Vance made nearly $1 million, and a “great deal of his income as listed in the new disclosure report came from ventures linked to Facebook board member Thiel and other tech investors.” As Vance would say (with zero self-awareness about how this applies to him), “Establishment Republican apologies for our oligarchy should always come with the following disclaimer: ‘Big Tech pays my salary.’”
“Silicon Valley Vance’s campaign is so desperate they need a Big Tech billionaire to quit his day job to prop up his flailing campaign. With few allies and his poll numbers sinking, Silicon Valley Vance’s hail mary effort to save his campaign will only remind Ohioans of what got him here in the first place: his Big Tech ties and his anti-Trump past,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.