Let others tremble at the thought that Donald Trump may go too far. Peter Thiel worries that Trump may not go far enough.
"Everyone says Trump is going to change everything way too much," says the famed venture capitalist, contrarian and member of the Trump transition team. "Well, maybe Trump is going to change everything way too little. That seems like the much more plausible risk to me."
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Thiel is comfortable being a walking oxymoron: He is driven to save the world from the apocalypse. Yet he helped boost the man regarded by many as a danger to the planet.
"The election had an apocalyptic feel to it," says Thiel, wearing a gray Zegna suit and sipping white wine in a red leather booth at the Monkey Bar in Manhattan. "There was a way in which Trump was funny, so you could be apocalyptic and funny at the same time. It's a strange combination, but it's somehow very powerful psychologically."
At the recent meeting of tech executives at Trump Tower - orchestrated by Thiel - the President-elect caressed Thiel's hand so affectionately that body language experts went into a frenzy. I note that he looked uneasy being petted in front of his peers.
"I was thinking, 'I hope this doesn't look too weird on TV,'" he says.
I ask if he had to twist arms to lure some of the anti-Trump tech titans, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
"I think, early on, everybody was worried that they would be the only person to show up," Thiel says. "At the end, everybody was worried they would be the only person not to show up. I think the bigger tech companies all wanted to get a little bit off the ledge that they had gotten on.
![Peter Thiel donated more than $1 million to Trump's campaign.](/web/20170113012828im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/q/k/k/4/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtqkjf.png/1484244458853.jpg)
One could have predicted Thiel's affinity for Trump by reading his 2014 book, Zero to One, in which he offers three prongs of his philosophy: 1) It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2) A bad plan is better than no plan. 3) Sales matter just as much as product.
But he was portrayed as an outcast in Silicon Valley and denounced as a jerk for supporting Trump and giving him $US1.25 million ($1.67 million). "I didn't give him any money for a long time because I didn't think it mattered, and then the campaign asked me to," he says.
![Peter Thiel, centre, listen as President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with technology industry leaders on ...](/web/20170113012828im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/k/u/z/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gtqkjf.png/1484244458853.jpg)
He recalls that he went through a lot of "meta" debates about Trump in Silicon Valley. "One of my good friends said, 'Peter, do you realise how crazy this is, how everybody thinks this is crazy?' I was like: 'Well, why am I wrong? What's substantively wrong with this?' And it all got referred back to 'Everybody thinks Trump's really crazy.' So it's like there's a shortcut, which is: 'I don't need to explain it. It's good enough that everybody thinks something. If everybody thinks this is crazy, I don't even have to explain to you why it's crazy. You should just change your mind.'"
The reaction from the gay community has been harsh, with one writer in The Advocate going so far as to suggest that Thiel was not even a gay man, because he did not "embrace the struggle."
"I think Trump is very good on gay rights," Thiel says. "I don't think he will reverse anything. I would obviously be concerned if I thought otherwise."
I ask him if he worries about the bromance with Vladimir Putin and Trump's bizarre affinity for dictators. "But should Russia be allied with the West or with China?" Thiel says. "There are these really bad dictators in the Middle East, and we got rid of them and in many cases there's even worse chaos."
So he doesn't worry about Trump sending an intemperate tweet and spurring a war with North Korea?
"A Twitter war is not a real war," Thiel says.
Thiel and Trump are strange bedfellows, given that much of Thiel's billions came from being one of the original investors in Facebook and Trump recently said it's better to send important messages by courier. ("Well," Thiel notes, "one does have to be very careful with what one says in an email.")
Trump, with his litigious streak and his pugilistic attitude toward the press and his threat to change the libel laws, naturally admired Thiel's legal smackdown of Gawker. The tech titan was disturbed by the "painful and paralysing" stories published on the gossipy website and other blogs under the Gawker banner, including a 2007 post that originally appeared on Valleywag blithely headlined "Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People."
So he secretly financed the lawsuit filed by Terry Bollea (the real name of wrestler Hulk Hogan) against Gawker for posting an excerpt from a sex tape showing Hogan with a friend's wife. A court ruled in Bollea's favor, in a judgment of $US140 million ($187 million), which drove the site into bankruptcy. (Gawker founder Nick Denton, who is also gay, described Thiel to Vanity Fair as "interesting - and scary.")
"It basically stands for the narrow proposition that you should not publish a sex tape," Thiel says. "I think that's an insult to journalists to suggest that's journalism now. Transparency is good, but at some point it can go in this very toxic direction."
Just as there was "a self-fulfilling Hillary bubble" where "everybody was just too scared to say this was a really bad idea" to support this "very weak candidate," Thiel believes Gawker manufactured "a totally insane bubble full of somewhat sociopathic people in New York." When the case went to court in Florida, he contends, the culture that "you could do whatever you wanted and there were no consequences" was exposed.
"There's some resonances between Hogan beating Gawker and Trump beating the establishment in this country," Thiel says. Hulk Hogan was "this crazy person" who didn't seem like the best plaintiff, but "he didn't give up."
Using two wrestling terms he learned, Thiel says that many people assumed Trump was "kayfabe" a move that looks real but is fake. But then his campaign turned into a "shoot" the word for an unscripted move that suddenly becomes real.
"People thought the whole Trump thing was fake, that it wasn't going to go anywhere, that it was the most ridiculous thing imaginable, and then somehow he won, like Hogan did," Thiel says. "And what I wonder is, whether maybe pro wrestling is one of the most real things we have in our society and what's really disturbing is that the other stuff is much more fake. And whatever the superficialities of Trump might be, he was more authentic than the other politicians. He sort of talked in a way like ordinary people talk. It was not sort of this Orwellian newspeak jargon that so many of the candidates use. So he was sort of real. He actually wanted to win."
While many predict that Trump will crash and burn, Thiel does not think he will regret his role.
I ask him how Trump, who is still putting out a lot of wacky, childish tweets, has struck him during the transition. Isn't he running around with his hair on fire?
"The hair seems fine," Thiel says. "Mr Trump seems fine."
The New York Times