Carole Cadwalladr writes:

Less than a month after Donald Trump was elected president in November 2016, he invited the cream of Silicon Valley’s tech elite to a meeting at his transition team’s headquarters at Trump Tower.

It was an awkward affair. Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s Larry Page and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had facial expressions that ranged from a semi-rictus grin to full tech-mogul-in-a-hostage-situation. But then, in a sense they were. There was a new sheriff in town – and none of them had seen him coming.

But one person was in his element. Seated next to Trump, uncomplicatedly beaming, was a South African-born tech entrepreneur whose early investment in Facebook had made him billions.

This was Peter Thiel. And if this past week marked an inflection point, and there are many reasons to believe it did, the seeds of it were planted in the summer of 2016. This was when Trump was the outside candidate. The man no respectable west coast tech entrepreneur or east coast business elite wanted to touch.

Last week marked a decisive end to that era. A week in which Donald Trump not only appointed a tech bro to be his second in command, choosing Senator JD Vance to be his VP, but in which he received the benediction of the tech bro-in-chief, Elon Musk.

Musk has said he will donate $45m a month to Trump’s campaign, though his ongoing endorsement on X, the platform he bought and owns, is worth countless millions more.

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. [Continue reading…]