When a group of 97 technology companies filed a legal submission against Donald Trump’s travel ban for citizens of seven Muslim-majority companies, the immediate question for many was not who had signed, but who had not. Absence from the brief became a source of embarrassment, and many new tech firms – including Adobe, Tesla, Zenefits, Postmates and Fitbit – quickly jumped on board.
As much as Silicon Valley likes to promote an image of innovative iconoclasm, companies have a herd mentality when it comes to political or social issues. Once one company goes out on a limb, the rest rush to follow. With near-unanimous opposition to Trump’s executive order, tech burnished its image as a bastion of progressive values – a reputation that had taken a major hit when top executives travelled to Trump Tower in December to make nice with the then president-elect.
A certain amount of self-congratulation for the industry’s enlightened liberalism has since been widely on display, from Airbnb’s Super Bowl ad to the 10th annual Crunchies, which took place on Monday night. The industry award show – tech’s version of the White House correspondent’s dinner – saw numerous impassioned speeches about Trump and the responsibility of tech companies to change the world for the better.
But the tech industry has long had a substantial rightwing streak. And outside of the spotlight, a cadre of powerful and well-connected industry figures with ties to Peter Thiel and some of tech’s most prominent companies are embedding themselves in the Trump administration.
Thiel’s unusual support for Trump’s candidacy made him seem like the loneliest man in Silicon Valley during the 2016 campaign, but like any industry that accumulates massive amounts of capital in the hands of a select few, tech has its fair share of old-school Republicans.
Figures like TJ Rodgers, the founder of Cypress Semiconductor, and Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, represent an earlier generation of conservative Silicon Valley. Rodgers and McNealy combined the standard small government/low taxes economic conservatism with a strain of social conservatism that is practically verboten in the industry today – both fought back hard, for example, against the first wave of activism calling for the hiring of black and Latino tech workers.
Other tech leaders, such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Intel’s Craig Barrett, Dell’s Michael Dell and AOL’s Tim Armstrong, have been major donors to the GOP, while HP’s Carly Fiorina and eBay’s Meg Whitman have both run (unsuccessfully) for elected office as Republicans. Intel’s current CEO, Brian Krzanich, appeared at the White House with Trump on Wednesday to announce the construction of a factory that had previously been announced alongside Barack Obama in 2011.
But none of them embraced Trump’s brand of conservatism the way Thiel did, and now the idiosyncratic billionaire is poised to exert significant influence on the government.
Thiel has long operated with a clubhouse mentality. As an undergraduate at Stanford, he co-founded the Stanford Review, a rightwing student newspaper whose writers regularly railed against free condoms and the divestment campaign against apartheid South Africa. Several of Thiel’s closest associates worked for the publication, including Keith Rabois, David O Sacks, Joe Lonsdale, Ken Howery, Stephen Cohen and Eric Jackson.
Rabois, Sacks, Lonsdale, Howery and Jackson all joined Thiel at his next major venture – Paypal. He picked up more friends at the company, including Elon Musk, Mark Woolway, and Scott Bannister.
Other rightwing associates – including Jim O’Neill, Kevin Harrington, Trae Stephens, Blake Masters, and Rob Morrow – are connected to the Thiel club through working for his various investment companies: Clarium Capital, Thiel Capital, Mithril Capital Management, Thiel Macro, and Founders Fund. Rob Morrow, who Politico described as Thiel’s “political consigliere”, is a longtime employee of the Thiel investment firms.
The Thiel Foundation and Thiel Fellowship, led by Jack Abraham, and Palantir – a data analysis company whose clients include the US intelligence community and defense department – are other meeting grounds for the ideologically like-minded. Lonsdale, Cohen and Howery co-founded Palantir with Thiel; Rabois and Sacks have invested in the company, and Stephens worked there before moving to Founders Fund.
To Aaron Ginn of Lincoln Network, a group that promotes libertarianism in the tech industry, many of Thiel’s associates form the core of the conservative movement in Silicon Valley.
Ginn named Thiel, Lonsdale, Banister, Masters and Rabois as key leaders in the community, along with Ellison and Andreessen Horowitz’s Ted Ullyat, a former Bush administration figure who later served as general counsel to Facebook.
“While overall the Bay Area is of a progressive persuasion, the actual people who work in technology are not,” Ginn said. “According to the polling that we have done, Silicon Valley technologists … are predominantly libertarian, with small government values outside the environment and healthcare.”
The Thiel cadre has influence that extends into many of the hottest Silicon Valley companies. Thiel is well known for his position on the board of Facebook, but he and his friends also have reach into companies including Airbnb, Lyft, Reddit, SpaceX, Uber and Zenefits, among others.
Now, while the rest of the tech industry turn up their noses at Trump, Thiel is placing his buddies in positions of power.
Woolway and Harrington joined the Trump transition team in early December. Lonsdale and Masters were also advising Thiel on the transition, according to Politico, and Abraham expressed interest in joining the administration to the Washington Post. Musk is a member of Trump’s economic advisory council who remained committed to engaging with the administration despite a significant backlash that prompted Uber’s CEO, Travis Kalanick, to drop out.
O’Neil has been floated as a possible head of the Food and Drug Administration, where he could bring his enthusiasm for cutting regulation to the agency that ensures drugs like thalidomide are not approved in the US.
“Since when has there ever been a VC, let alone a successful tech entrepreneur, who is part of the transition team? This is the first time that has ever happened,” Ginn enthused. “We could have the FDA radically changed. That’s one of the things that Peter Thiel has been focusing on. That would be a huge win for consumers and people in Silicon Valley.”
