Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel seems an unlikely choice to serve as an adviser for any presidential administration. The avowed libertarian, after all, has long eschewed the stifling bureaucratic culture of Washington, D.C. “In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms,” Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay published by the Cato Institute. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology.” Thiel seems an unlikely fit for the Trump White House, in particular. While he is, like Trump and many of his closest advisers, incredibly wealthy, Thiel is also gay and an intellectual in an administration that is antagonistic toward both gay rights and intellectuals.
Now, Thiel’s early bet on Trump’s fortunes is beginning to pay off as he reportedly consolidates his power in Washington, D.C. “Once Election Day came and went, Peter Thiel was a major force in the transition,” one senior Trump campaign aide told Politico. “When you have offices and you bring staff with you and you attend all the meetings, then you have a lot of power.”
Thiel has been using his power primarily to help staff the Trump administration, vetting candidates to lead the Federal Trade Commission and helping elevate associates from his investment firms to serve in the Department of Commerce, the Pentagon, and even the National Security Council. Another Thiel ally, Yale computer scientist David Gelernter, also won an audience with the president to potentially serve as his science adviser. Back in San Francisco, Thiel’s employees have reportedly begun referring to their boss as “the shadow president.”
Several Thiel associates who have been appointed or are rumored to be candidates for top positions in the U.S. government share the billionaire’s distaste for bureaucracy and regulation, which Thiel believes is holding the country back from a technological revolution. Among them is Jim O’Neill, a libertarian and managing director at Thiel’s venture capital firm, Mithril Capital Management, who is being considered to run the Food and Drug Administration despite—or, perhaps because of—his hostility toward the central mission of the agency. “We should reform [the] F.D.A. so there is approving drugs after their sponsors have demonstrated safety—and let people start using them, at their own risk,” O’Neill, who served during the George W. Bush administration in the Department of Health and Human Services but otherwise has no medical background, said three years ago at a Rejuvenation Biotechnology conference. “Let’s prove efficacy after they’ve been legalized.”
“The fact that Jim is even in consideration for the position is astonishing,” one Thiel associate told Politico. “It’s legitimately an outrageous coup for Peter to be able to put somebody at that high a level of government.” Another Thiel aide, Kevin Harrington, was recently put on the National Security Council. Trae Stephens, a Thiel associate who worked at Thiel’s secretive billion-dollar big-data start-up Palantir, helped oversee the Defense Department transition; Mark Woolway, who Thiel knows from his days at PayPal, is helping to staff the Treasury Department.
More worrisome than Thiel’s influence over staffing are his unusual views on the relationship between science and society. While the presence of a technologist in Trump’s inner circle should be welcome, Thiel’s brand of techno-futurism often tends toward the apocalyptic, with the billionaire advocating less regulation and oversight to allow experimental developments to advance unrestrained. Like many in Silicon Valley, Thiel subscribes to the idea that one must “move fast and break things” to move forward, and worry about the consequences later. Technological progress, he argues in his book Zero to One, has stalled in part because the federal government has grown too big, and entitlement programs too generous. He has encouraged promising college students to drop out of school to found start-ups and is a leading proponent of seasteading: building floating libertarian islands in international waters that would serve as experiments in life free of government control. Thiel also has a well-documented obsession with life-extension technologies, including extending his own lifespan with blood transfusions from young people. On Bloomberg TV in 2014, Thiel explained that he was taking human-growth hormone pills as part of his plan to live 120 years. “It helps maintain muscle mass, so you’re much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis,” he said.
At the same time, Thiel is grounded enough to know who in Trump’s administration to befriend to move closer to the levers of power. “Thiel is immensely powerful within the administration through his connection to Jared [Kushner],” a senior Trump campaign aide told Politico. As much as Thiel professes to despise politics, he clearly knows how to play the game.
