MAKING OF A PRESIDENT

Chapter Five — The Ticket and the Money Behind It

Draft 1. Approximate length: 4,000 words. Voice: continuous. The chapter does one thing: walk the reader through the vice presidential selection in July of 2024 and the unprecedented public coordination of the technology billionaire network in the campaign that followed. By the end of the chapter the reader understands that the 2024 election was the first American presidential election in modern history in which a small cohort of named billionaires not only funded a ticket but openly took credit for the ticket, declared what they expected from it, and were given, after the election, formal positions in the executive branch from which to ensure that what they expected was delivered.

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On the night of July 13, 2024, Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

You remember the moment. You remember the photograph. You remember the way the country, for about an hour, held its breath.

I want to tell you something about that hour, because what happened in it is part of the story of how JD Vance became the vice president.

Within minutes of the shooting, Elon Musk posted on X that he was endorsing Donald Trump. Musk’s previous public position had been that he would stay neutral in the 2024 election. The neutrality had been, in the months leading up to Butler, increasingly fictional — Musk had been amplifying Trump-aligned content on his platform for some time — but the formal endorsement had not been made. Butler was the moment of the formal endorsement. Within minutes of the gunshot, the richest man in the world had publicly committed himself, his platform, and his money to the Trump campaign.

Within hours, Palmer Luckey, the Oculus and Anduril founder, posted the photograph of Trump with his fist raised. The photograph had been taken by an Associated Press photographer in the seconds after the shooting. The photograph would, within twenty-four hours, become the iconic image of the campaign. Luckey posted the photograph without caption. The post was retweeted millions of times.

Within forty-eight hours, Donald Trump announced JD Vance as his running mate.

I am going to ask you to consider whether the timing of the announcement was a coincidence.

The announcement of a vice presidential running mate is the most consequential decision a presidential nominee makes between winning the nomination and election day. Campaigns spend months on the decision. Polling is run. Vetting is conducted. Candidates are interviewed in person and in writing. By the spring of 2024, several names were on Trump’s known shortlist — Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota; Marco Rubio, the senator from Florida; Tim Scott, the senator from South Carolina; and JD Vance. The decision had not, as of the second week of July, been announced. Reporting from inside the campaign suggested that Trump was leaning toward Burgum, who was perceived as the safer choice.

Then Butler happened. Then Musk endorsed. Then the photograph was distributed by the network’s most enthusiastic poster. Then, within forty-eight hours, the announcement came, and the announcement was Vance.

I cannot tell you, with certainty, that the network’s coordinated activation in the hours after Butler was the decisive factor in Trump’s selection of Vance. I do not have the inside reporting that would let me make that claim with confidence. What I can tell you is that the chronology is what the chronology is. In the seventy-two hours during which the most consequential decision of the campaign was being finalized, the technology billionaire network executed a coordinated public mobilization that included an endorsement from the richest man in the world, a financial commitment of more than a hundred million dollars to the campaign, and the distribution of the campaign’s iconic image. At the end of those seventy-two hours, the candidate who was most closely associated with the technology billionaire network was selected.

You can decide for yourself what to make of the chronology. I am simply giving it to you.

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In the weeks that followed the announcement, the network went public in a way that, in the history of American presidential campaigns, is unprecedented.

I want to give you a partial list of what happened in those weeks.

David Sacks held a fundraiser at his home in Pacific Heights that raised approximately twelve million dollars in a single evening. The guest list was not made fully public, but the names that became public included Chamath Palihapitiya, the Sri Lankan-Canadian-American venture capitalist and All-In podcast co-host; Jason Calacanis, another All-In co-host; Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz; Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir co-founder; Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital; Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the cryptocurrency billionaires; David Marcus, the former PayPal president and former head of Facebook’s cryptocurrency project; and a number of others whose names are recognizable to anyone who follows technology business news.

Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz released, on the firm’s official podcast, a long episode titled, in essence, Why we are endorsing Trump and Vance. The episode ran for approximately ninety minutes. The argument, summarized: the Biden administration’s proposed regulations on artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency are an existential threat to the venture capital business. The proposed twenty-five percent tax on unrealized gains for households worth more than one hundred million dollars is, in Andreessen’s words, the thing that would make startups completely implausible. The endorsement was an investment decision. The endorsement was, more accurately, the announcement of a coalition.

Elon Musk’s America PAC began running, across multiple battleground states, the largest political advertising campaign by an individual donor in American history. Musk himself appeared at Trump rallies. Musk hosted Trump on Spaces, the audio feature of X, in a conversation that drew tens of millions of listeners. Musk offered, in October, a daily one-million-dollar prize to a randomly selected registered voter in a swing state who signed a petition pledging support for the First and Second Amendments — a scheme that the Department of Justice later suggested might have violated federal law against paying people to register to vote, though no charges were brought.

Joe Lonsdale, the Palantir co-founder, gave a series of speeches and interviews in which he explained that the Vance pick was, for the technology sector, exactly what we needed. Lonsdale used the phrase we without specifying its referent. The referent was clear from context. We was the network.

The Winklevoss twins committed jointly to America PAC at a level that placed them among the top ten individual donors of the cycle. The brothers gave interviews in which they described the Trump-Vance ticket as the only ticket compatible with the future of cryptocurrency in the United States.

Peter Thiel, who had publicly stated at the beginning of the cycle that he intended to stay out of the 2024 election, did not visibly fundraise. He did, however, host meetings at his home in Los Angeles between Vance and major donors who had not previously committed. Thiel’s role in 2024 was less the role of a check-writer than the role of a coordinator. He had already written his check, in 2021, in the form of the fifteen million dollars that put Vance in the Senate. The check had paid out. The investment was now the investment of his time, and he spent his time well.

These activities, taken together, were not the ordinary activities of wealthy individuals supporting a political ticket. They were the activities of a coordinated faction announcing its arrival in American political life as a force capable of operating, openly and at scale, in support of a ticket whose nominee had been cultivated by the faction’s leading members for more than a decade.

I am not aware of any prior American presidential campaign in which a comparable coordination, at a comparable scale, was conducted as openly as the technology billionaire network coordinated in support of Trump and Vance in 2024. There have been wealthy donor networks before. There have been coordinated campaigns before. There has not been, in modern American history, a moment in which a small cohort of named billionaires acted, in public, in concert, with their faces and their names attached, to deliver a presidential ticket they had jointly produced.

The 2024 election was that moment. The country watched it happen and, for reasons I will not try to explain in this chapter, mostly did not register what it was watching.

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I want to tell you what the network got, in the months after the election, because what they got is the strongest evidence that the analysis I have been giving you is correct.

In the first hundred days of the second Trump administration, the following things occurred.

Elon Musk was given an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the building that physically adjoins the West Wing of the White House. The office was the headquarters of an entity called the Department of Government Efficiency, which was, in legal terms, a kind of advisory body created by executive order. The advisory body proceeded, in the spring and summer of 2025, to direct the firing or buyout of approximately a quarter of the federal civilian workforce. The advisory body operated with the explicit endorsement of the president. The advisory body’s actions were, at every step, defended publicly by Vice President Vance.

David Sacks was named the administration’s crypto czar and AI czar, a dual position whose responsibility was to coordinate, across the executive branch, the policies on cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence that the network had spent the campaign demanding. The position was created by executive order. There was no Senate confirmation process. The position was given to a man whose previous responsibilities had been hosting a podcast and managing his own venture investments.

Marc Andreessen reportedly assisted in the staffing of multiple administration positions, including positions at the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Commerce, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Andreessen had no formal title and required no Senate confirmation. He simply, in the months after the election, recommended people, and the people he recommended were appointed.

Joe Lonsdale’s Palantir Technologies, in the year following the election, received a series of federal contracts that, by the end of the year, exceeded by an order of magnitude the total federal contracts the company had received in the previous five years combined. The contracts were not procured through the ordinary competitive bidding process. Many of the contracts were awarded under emergency or sole-source authority.

Vice President JD Vance, in the same period, became the most public face of the administration’s effort to dismantle the federal civil service, restructure the universities, defund public broadcasting, and reorient the foreign policy of the United States away from its post-1945 alliances and toward a transactional relationship with rival powers, particularly with respect to artificial intelligence and trade. In speeches at the Munich Security Conference, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Conservatism Conference, Vance articulated, in his own words, the program that the network had funded him to articulate. The program was the program. The man delivering it was the man the network had built to deliver it.

This is what the investment paid out.

I am going to give you a number. The number is not exact, because the full accounting is not yet possible — some of the post-election deals are still being signed, some of the contracts are still being awarded, some of the regulatory changes are still being made. The number is conservative.

The technology billionaire network spent, across all of its political activities in support of the Trump-Vance ticket, somewhere between three hundred million and seven hundred million dollars in the 2024 cycle. This includes direct super PAC contributions, indirect contributions through nonprofits, paid media at the firms involved, and the value of the social media platforms used to amplify the campaign’s messages.

In the first year of the administration, the network received, in the form of federal contracts, regulatory rollbacks, tax preferences, and direct policy decisions favorable to the network’s business interests, value that the most credible estimates I have seen place at between fifty and one hundred billion dollars.

The return on the investment, in other words, was somewhere between one hundred and three hundred times the principal. In percentage terms, the return was between ten thousand and thirty thousand percent.

This is what fifteen years of cultivating a candidate buys, when the cultivation is successful and the candidate is placed in the office for which he was cultivated.

The country gave that return to the network. The country did not realize it was giving the return. The country thought it was electing a president and a vice president. The country was paying out on an investment.

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I want to close this chapter with a small observation about something Musk said.

In December of 2025, on his social media platform, Elon Musk wrote a post in which he predicted that the country was about to enter what he called twelve years of Trump-Vance-Vance. The post was referring to the prospect of Trump serving out the remainder of his second term, Vance succeeding him in 2028, and Vance serving two terms of his own.

The post was, on its face, a casual prediction. The post was, considered carefully, something else.

The man who wrote the post was the largest donor of the 2024 cycle, the operator of the social media platform on which most American political communication is now conducted, a senior figure in the executive branch of the United States government, and the most prominent member of the technology billionaire network that funded the ticket. When this man predicts twelve years of Trump-Vance-Vance, he is not making a prediction. He is announcing an intention.

The intention is to use the network’s wealth, organizational capacity, and platform control to deliver, over the course of the next twelve years, a continuation of the political arrangement that the network has spent the last fifteen years building. The continuation requires, at minimum, that JD Vance succeed Donald Trump in 2028, that he be reelected in 2032, and that the political arrangement of which he is the public face — the arrangement in which the federal government acts substantially as an operating company for the network — continue and deepen.

This is what is on the table. This is what was on the table when JD Vance walked onto the stage in Milwaukee in July of 2024. This is what the country was watching, when it watched the convention.

The country was watching a man who was being placed not for one office, not for one term, not even for one administration. The country was watching a man who was being placed for twelve years, with an option for more.

The country, mostly, did not see that. The country saw a hometown boy from Middletown, Ohio, with a beautiful wife and a moving life story, raising a hand to a crowd in a navy suit and a red tie. The country watched the show that the network had built for it to watch.

This is the show the first six chapters of this book are about. This is the show I have walked you through. The show is real. The show is on the record. The show is verifiable in any of forty different newspapers and on any of a dozen government websites.

What the show is hiding, the show cannot hide forever. What the show is hiding is what the rest of this book is about.

In the next chapter — the last chapter of the part of this book that I owe you — I am going to consolidate what we have learned, and I am going to tell you what to look for in the chapters that follow. I am going to tell you, also, the limits of what I can tell you in this part of the book and where the next part begins.

Then, when you trust me, we will walk.