Chapter Two
MAKING OF A PRESIDENT
Chapter Two — The Network
Draft 1. Approximate length: 4,200 words. Voice: continuous with Chapter One. The chapter does one thing: replace the reader’s mental image of a single billionaire kingmaker with the reality of an industry. By the end of the chapter the reader understands that JD Vance was not adopted by Peter Thiel. He was the product of a coordinated network of technology billionaires, most of whom knew each other, most of whom shared the same goals, and most of whom had been preparing for a man like Vance for a decade before they found him.
There is a temptation, when you tell the story of how JD Vance became the vice president of the United States, to tell it as a love story between one young man and one billionaire. It is a clean story. It has two characters. It fits inside a magazine profile. It allows the reader to walk away thinking, well, that is unusual, but it is one billionaire and one senator and the country is large enough to absorb the unusual.
I am going to ask you to put that story down.
The story I want to tell you instead has somewhere between forty and four hundred characters in it, depending on how widely you draw the circle, and the circle is the point. The story is not about a billionaire. The story is about a circle of billionaires who have been holding meetings together, investing in each other’s companies, podcasting on each other’s shows, and writing checks to each other’s preferred candidates for somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five years. The story is not about Peter Thiel. The story is about the cohort Peter Thiel is a member of. JD Vance is not Thiel’s protégé. JD Vance is the cohort’s nominee.
The cohort has a name in some of the books that have been written about it. The most common name is the PayPal Mafia. The name is older than its current political form, and it refers, in the narrowest sense, to the men who built or worked at PayPal in the late 1990s and early 2000s and who, after PayPal was sold to eBay in 2002, took their winnings and reinvested them in other companies that became, by stages, the spine of the modern American technology industry.
The names in the narrow sense are: Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and then founded Palantir and the venture firm Founders Fund and the smaller venture firm Mithril Capital; Elon Musk, who arrived at PayPal as the founder of a competing company, X.com, that PayPal absorbed, and who then founded Tesla and SpaceX and now owns the social media platform that used to be called Twitter; David Sacks, who was PayPal’s chief operating officer and went on to found Yammer and to host a podcast called All-In that has become one of the most influential venues in American technology politics; Reid Hoffman, who was PayPal’s vice president of business development and went on to found LinkedIn; Max Levchin, who was PayPal’s chief technology officer and went on to found Affirm; Jeremy Stoppelman, who founded Yelp; Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, who founded YouTube; and, by extension and association, a number of others who orbited PayPal closely enough that the affiliation is real even if the founding membership is loose.
The reason I am giving you this list is that almost every check that has been written for JD Vance, from his first political campaign onward, has been written by someone on this list, by someone employed by someone on this list, by someone invested in by someone on this list, or by someone podcasting with someone on this list. The list is not exhaustive. The list is the spine. The body that hangs on the spine includes a wider class of technology billionaires, many of whom were never at PayPal but who are now politically aligned with the men who were, and who write checks to the same candidates that the men who were write checks to, and who appear at the same events, and who hold the same views.
This is the network. This is the thing I am going to ask you to look at directly.
Let me give you a moment in the network’s life that you can hold in your hand.
In May of 2024, two months before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, David Sacks held a fundraiser for the Trump campaign at his home in San Francisco. The home is on Pacific Heights and is, by published estimates, worth somewhere north of thirty million dollars. The fundraiser raised approximately twelve million dollars in a single evening. The guest list was not made public, but the names that became public afterward included some of the men I have just listed and a number of others who you have probably read about without realizing that they were in the same room.
Two months earlier, in March, Elon Musk had held a conversation with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. The conversation was reported on at the time as a kind of audition. By July, Musk was committing what the Wall Street Journal described as approximately forty-five million dollars a month to a pro-Trump super PAC called America PAC. The figure was later disputed by Musk himself in characteristically ambiguous social media posts, but the FEC filings that came out in the months that followed showed contributions of more than a hundred million dollars from Musk to America PAC by the end of the cycle. Whatever the exact monthly number, the order of magnitude is correct. One man wrote, personally, more than twice the entire 2020 fundraising total of the Republican Party’s congressional campaign committee.
Two months after that, in July, immediately after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, Musk endorsed Trump on the social media platform he owns. The endorsement came within minutes of the shooting. The platform is the largest open political conversation venue in the world. It is owned by a man whose financial commitment to the candidate had already, at that moment, exceeded the GDP of several small countries.
Two days after the endorsement, Trump announced JD Vance as his running mate. Within hours of the announcement, Palmer Luckey, the Oculus founder and Anduril founder and a Vance donor since 2022, posted on the same platform a single image — Trump with his fist raised and his ear bloodied in the seconds after the assassination attempt. He posted no caption. The image had been waiting. The endorsement had been waiting. The announcement had been waiting. The network was, at this point in the cycle, no longer making decisions. The decisions had been made.
I am laying these moments out for you in this order because the order matters. By the time the country watched JD Vance walk onto the stage in Milwaukee, the network had already raised tens of millions of dollars for the ticket, endorsed the ticket on the largest social platform in the world, and arranged for the iconic photographic image of the campaign to be ready for instantaneous distribution. The country thought it was watching the unveiling of a vice presidential nominee. The country was watching the public phase of a project that had been underway for approximately twelve years.
The project had a candidate before it had a name. The candidate was JD Vance. The name, the project did not need.
Let me tell you how the men in the network think.
I am going to do this with quotations from their own writing and their own interviews, because I do not want to characterize them and have you think I am putting words in their mouths. The words are theirs. The frame is what they have said, repeatedly, on the record, in their own voices, when they thought the people listening were in their own rooms.
In 2009, Peter Thiel published an essay in a libertarian publication called Cato Unbound, titled “The Education of a Libertarian.” The essay is short. You can find it online in less than a minute. The opening lines, which have been quoted many times since, read: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
The sentence is doing a lot of work. The man who wrote it has spent the fifteen years since writing it backing candidates and causes that align with the position the sentence describes. He has never publicly retracted the sentence. The candidates and causes he has backed have included, in chronological order: Ron Paul, the Tea Party, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump in 2016, Josh Hawley, Blake Masters, JD Vance, and, eventually, Trump and Vance in 2024. The arc is consistent. The arc is the arc of a man who has decided, openly, that democracy is an obstacle to the future he wants, and who is using his money to install in office men who will, in his judgment, reduce that obstacle.
Elon Musk has not, to my knowledge, written an essay arguing the same thesis in the same words. What Musk has done, repeatedly and increasingly publicly since 2022, is post on the platform he owns about the inefficiency of democratic institutions, the corruption of the federal civil service, the danger posed by what he calls the woke mind virus, and the necessity of reducing the size of the federal government by what he has, on multiple occasions, described as a percentage that would amount to most of it. He has, since the 2024 election, been given an actual office in the actual federal government from which to attempt this reduction. The office’s name is the Department of Government Efficiency, and the existence of the office is a thing that, three years ago, would have been considered a piece of speculative fiction by most people who study American government for a living.
David Sacks, on the All-In podcast, has been, of the three, the most direct. He has said, in episodes the listener can pull up on a phone, that the American administrative state is illegitimate, that the regulatory agencies created by Congress are unconstitutional, that the universities are captured, that the press is captured, that the courts are partially captured, and that the only way to repair the country is to elect a president and a vice president who will dismantle the captured institutions before the captured institutions dismantle the country. He has said this in conversation with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and a rotating cast of guests, and he has said it without anyone in the room pushing back, because the room is composed of people who agree with him.
I am giving you these three men’s words because I want you to understand that the network is not a financial network only. The network is also a network of beliefs. The men in the network share a set of convictions about the United States that, if you took them one at a time, would each be considered fringe by almost any historian of American political thought. Taken together, the convictions amount to a coherent and quite radical project. The project is to use the wealth that the technology sector has generated in the last twenty-five years to install in the federal government a class of officeholders who will, on behalf of the network, dismantle the regulatory state, the antitrust apparatus, the public university system, the public broadcasting infrastructure, the federal civil service, and, where possible, the procedural protections that make democratic government possible.
The project does not need every officeholder to be on board. It needs a small number in the right places. JD Vance is one of those places.
I want to be careful here, because I have just made a claim that, if I let it sit unsupported, you would be right not to trust.
The claim is that the network is a coherent project. The claim is that JD Vance was placed in the vice presidency to advance that project. The claim is that the men who funded and cultivated him knew, when they did so, what they were doing.
The evidence for the claim is in three places.
The first place is what the men have said, in their own words, in published essays, podcasts, and interviews. I have given you a few quotations. There are hundreds more. Anyone who wants to verify the disposition of the network can do so in an afternoon by reading or listening to the public material. The disposition is not a secret. The disposition is openly stated.
The second place is what JD Vance himself has said. Vance has, since his arrival in the Senate in 2023, given interviews and speeches in which he has articulated, with greater and greater clarity, the same convictions that the men in the network have articulated for years. He has called the universities “the enemy.” He has called the federal civil service “captured” and said that “the most basic thing the next Republican administration needs to do is fire most of the people in it and replace them with our own people.” He has spoken approvingly of what political theorists call post-liberalism and what the more candid members of his intellectual circle call the unitary executive, which is to say a presidency in which the executive branch operates with substantially less constraint from Congress, the courts, or the administrative state. He has, in short, said the things that the men who funded him have said, and he has said them in the rooms where saying them advances the project.
The third place is the financial record. I have given you most of it already. I will summarize it now in a single paragraph and ask you to hold the paragraph in your mind, because the paragraph is the receipt.
Peter Thiel gave fifteen million dollars to a single super PAC supporting JD Vance’s 2022 Senate primary campaign. At the time, this was the largest single contribution any individual had ever given to any single Senate primary candidate in the history of the Federal Election Commission. Elon Musk gave more than a hundred million dollars to America PAC during the 2024 cycle, with the explicit purpose of electing Trump and Vance. David Sacks raised approximately twelve million dollars at a single fundraiser at his home for the same ticket. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz used their podcast and their venture firm’s substantial reach to endorse and fundraise for the same ticket. Palmer Luckey, the Winklevoss twins, Joe Lonsdale, Doug Leone, Anthony Wood, Jimmy Haslam, Diane Hendricks, Steve Wynn, Kelly Loeffler, Richard Kurtz, Elizabeth Uihlein, John Catsimatidis, and Margaretta Taylor each wrote checks ranging from five thousand dollars to several million dollars to either Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign, the 2024 Trump-Vance presidential ticket, or both. The total amount of money flowing from this network into the Vance project, across his Senate run and the presidential ticket, is, by conservative estimates, in excess of two hundred million dollars. By less conservative estimates, the figure is several times that.
This is the network. This is the receipt. The receipt is on file with the FEC, in the public reporting of Forbes, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and Bloomberg, and in the published statements of the men involved.
If you are still with me, and I hope you are, I want to ask you to do something difficult.
I want you to stop thinking of these men as billionaires and start thinking of them as a political party.
Not a party in the legal sense. The Republican Party is the legal vehicle. I am using the word in the older sense — the way the Federalists were a party, or the way the Bourbons in France were a party. A party in the older sense is a coordinated faction with a shared program, a shared analysis of the country’s situation, a shared set of preferred outcomes, and the wealth and organizational capacity to pursue those outcomes through the existing institutions of state.
The technology billionaires I have been describing are, in this older sense, a party. They share a program. They share an analysis. They share preferred outcomes. They have, in the last decade, acquired wealth and organizational capacity sufficient to pursue those outcomes through the existing institutions of the United States, and they are, openly, doing so.
When you read the news from now on, I want you to read it through this frame. When Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz release a podcast announcing their support for the Republican ticket, you are not reading about two venture capitalists making a personal political choice. You are reading a press release from one of the country’s two functioning political parties — the technology billionaire party — about its endorsement decision for the 2024 cycle. When Elon Musk commits a hundred million dollars to a super PAC, you are not reading about a wealthy man’s personal donation. You are reading about a party transferring funds to its preferred ticket. When JD Vance gives a speech at the Heritage Foundation about firing the federal civil service, you are not reading about a senator’s policy proposal. You are reading the platform of the party that nominated him.
The party I am describing has a particular relationship to the older parties — Republican and Democratic — that the country is used to thinking of as the only parties. The relationship is one of capture. The technology billionaire party has, in the period from 2016 to 2024, captured the Republican Party in the same way that, in an earlier period, the Wall Street class captured the Democratic Party. The capture is not total. There are still Republican officeholders who do not answer to the technology billionaire party. There are fewer of them every year. By the time JD Vance walked onto the stage in Milwaukee in July of 2024, the capture was sufficient that the man chosen to be the second most senior officer in the federal government was a man whose career had been, from law school to Senate to vice presidency, almost entirely funded and cultivated by the captor.
This is the frame. This is the thing I am asking you to hold in your mind.
I want to close this chapter with a small detail that, if you are reading carefully, will tell you something about how the network thinks of itself.
In 2017, Peter Thiel published a longer essay than the one I quoted earlier, this one in a publication called First Things, titled “The Straussian Moment.” The essay is dense. It is a piece of political philosophy that argues, among other things, that the September 11 attacks revealed a fundamental incompatibility between liberal political theory and the actual conditions of the modern world, and that a serious response to those conditions requires what Thiel calls, citing Carl Schmitt, the political — a domain in which friend and enemy are distinguished by something other than the procedural rules of liberal democracy.
I am not going to summarize the rest of the essay. You can read it. What I want you to notice is the citation. Carl Schmitt was a German political philosopher of the early twentieth century. Schmitt is most famous, in the world of political philosophy, for two things. The first is his theory of the political, which Thiel cites approvingly. The second is that Schmitt joined the Nazi Party in May of 1933, served as a senior legal theorist for the Nazi regime, wrote essays defending the regime’s racial laws, and, until his death in 1985, never recanted his support for what he had done.
Citing Schmitt approvingly in 2017, in an essay about the inadequacy of liberal democracy, is not a neutral choice. The men who write essays of this kind know what Schmitt was. They know what citing Schmitt signals. The signal is to other people who have read Schmitt and who understand, when they see the citation, what kind of room they have walked into.
JD Vance, in a podcast interview in 2021, was asked about his political influences. He named, among others, Patrick Deneen, the post-liberal theorist, and Sohrab Ahmari, the Catholic integralist. Both of these men cite Schmitt in their own work. Both of them are part of the intellectual circle that overlaps with the technology billionaire party I have been describing.
When the country watched JD Vance walk onto the stage in Milwaukee in July of 2024, the country was watching a man whose intellectual lineage runs, by way of a particular set of philosophical citations and a particular set of billionaire patrons, to a tradition of political thought that has, in the last hundred years, taken some of the darkest turns the modern world has produced.
I am not telling you that JD Vance is a Nazi. I am not telling you that Peter Thiel is a Nazi. I am telling you that the citations are real, that the citations have a meaning, and that the men who make them know the meaning. I am telling you that the network that made JD Vance is a network whose intellectual self-understanding is more radical than the country has yet absorbed.
The next chapter is about the book. The book that made Vance famous. The book that was, when read in the light of everything I have just told you, an extremely sophisticated audition tape.
I will see you there.
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