Peter Thiel’s Embrace of Trump Has Silicon Valley Squirming
When the technology investor Peter Thiel takes the stage just before Donald J. Trump at the Republican convention this week, he will become the most prominent public face of a species so endangered it might as well be called extinct: the Silicon Valley Trump supporter.
Nobody knows what Mr. Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, will say (he declined an interview), but in the tech industry, his appearance at the convention is being greeted with more apprehension than excitement. Venture capitalists have a special term for investment opportunities that offer the potential for a big return but also carry a great deal of risk: high beta. For Silicon Valley’s political aspirations, Mr. Thiel’s speech is the ultimate high-beta performance.
On the one hand, an emissary from tech will have a national platform to push the industry’s agenda and, more important, its worldview. By the end of Mr. Thiel’s speech on Thursday night, it’s possible he will have succeeded in showing off an ideology that is rarely encountered in public — the hands-off-my-stuff, techno-libertarian vision that is a hobbyhorse of Mr. Thiel and a few other Silicon Valley bigwigs.
And if Mr. Trump wins the White House, Mr. Thiel will have a direct line to a chief executive who hints at a penchant for making big things happen for his supporters. In 2004, Mr. Thiel made a $500,000 investment in Facebook, the earliest big bet on what was then one of many social networks. Facebook succeeded beyond anyone’s guess, and Mr. Thiel’s half million turned into close to half billion; he now sits on the company’s board. In some ways, the bet on Mr. Trump is a similar long-shot play that could pay off “big league,” as the Republican nominee might say.
On the other hand, this could end quite badly.
Mr. Thiel, who was last in the news for his financial support of Hulk Hogan’s legal fight against Gawker Media, has a slate of political views that stand out of line with most in tech, and perhaps most Americans. He once wrote that “the 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.” After that, he suggested, things went south because, among other things, women were given the right to vote. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump’s views — on issues including immigration, encryption, antitrust regulation and free trade — as well as his overall tone and temperament have been met with steely opposition by many in tech.
The danger, then, is that not only could Mr. Thiel’s public embrace of Mr. Trump backfire on him, but it could also become another plot point in the larger story line that Silicon Valley is exclusionary and narrow-minded and that its innovations are advancing global inequality.
What’s more, the speech could spoil what had been growing areas of overlap between the Republicans and the tech industry. In the Obama years, much of Silicon Valley has become very close to Democrats. This year there was an opportunity for a Republican to make overtures to tech — but with Mr. Trump, that chance seems to have passed.
“Where Trump has stood on immigration reform, or how he called for a boycott of Apple, or on a number of other issues, it almost seems like he’s gone out of his way to smite Silicon Valley leaders on the issues they care about,” said Mason Harrison, a Silicon Valley Republican who has worked for several presidential campaigns, including Mitt Romney’s and John McCain’s. Mr. Harrison said he would vote this year for Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate.
Mr. Harrison was one of the few Silicon Valley Republicans willing to chat openly about their options this year. Virtually every prominent Republican in the industry whom I called declined to comment or was willing to speak only anonymously about the strained connection between the tech industry and the Republican Party.
To people who work in the industry, the diminished state of the Republican Party among techies may not come as a surprise. Though Silicon Valley has a reputation for libertarian leanings, most people in the industry tend to identify with Democrats. Both in votes and in fund-raising, President Obama trounced Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain in Silicon Valley.
Greg Ferenstein, author of “The Age of Optimists,” a book about tech and politics, has studied start-up founders’ political views. He has found that while founders tend to support some libertarian points of view (they are for free trade and tend to be skeptical of labor unions), they are generally aligned with Democrats on many major policy areas. They are for increased immigration, for greater environmental protections, for more government spending on research and infrastructure, and for health care mandates like the one in the Affordable Care Act, among other ideas.
People in Silicon Valley “are supporting policies that are very much pro-capitalism and pro-government at the same time,” Mr. Ferenstein wrote last year. He added, “No, Silicon Valley is not a libertarian hotbed; rather, we are witnessing the rise of an entirely new type of Democrat.”
A few Republicans in tech told me they had been enthusiastic that this year’s slate of presidential candidates could remake the Republican brand among techies. Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Rand Paul all seemed personally comfortable with tech (Governor Bush’s 2006 official portrait shows him standing next to his cherished BlackBerry), and several had expressed interest in addressing crucial policy issues that were of concern to some in the industry. For instance, appointments at the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Labor might have given the industry some of what it wanted on issues having to do with labor rulings and privacy and antitrust investigations.
Then Mr. Trump won the nomination and the Republicans’ brand in Silicon Valley fell through the floor. Though he runs a popular Twitter account, the New York businessman is widely seen as a tech ignoramus by people in the industry. Last year, in response to the threat posed by terrorists’ recruiting people online, Mr. Trump said he would enlist the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to help him “close up” essential parts of the internet — an idea that was mocked as ridiculously unworkable. He also said he would force Apple to make iPhones in the United States, has threatened Amazon with an antitrust investigation and proposed boycotting Apple because of its standoff with the government over encryption — none of which won him friends in tech.
A bigger problem than Mr. Trump’s policy ideas was his tone. Though Silicon Valley has well-known problems with diversity in its work force, people here pride themselves on a kind of militant open-mindedness. It is the kind of place that will severely punish any deviations from accepted schools of thought — see how Brendan Eich, the former chief executive of Mozilla, was run out of his job after it became public that he had donated to a campaign opposed to gay marriage. Mr. Trump’s comments about immigrants, women and so many other groups have made him a kind of kryptonite in Silicon Valley.
Mr. Thiel, a billionaire known for his unusual positions, does not appear to be too bothered by kryptonite. And some on the right said they were open to hearing what Mr. Thiel had to say in defense of Mr. Trump.
“This is our democratic process, and I don’t think we should try to shout down Peter Thiel because he’s not saying the same thing that everyone else here is saying,” said Garrett Johnson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Initiative, a tech-policy research group. But Mr. Johnson, an African-American Republican who said he was also voting for the Libertarian candidate this year, said he doubted that Mr. Thiel could persuade him to support Mr. Trump.
“As a black guy in Silicon Valley, I just find it very hard to support a candidate who has been called racist,” Mr. Johnson said.