Behind the chaotic first month of the Trump administration lies a sweeping political vision laid out by Thiel, the billionaire tech investor, cofounder of PayPal, and destroyer of Gawker. Sure, Project 2025 drafted the blueprint for Donald Trump’s war on government. Yes, Elon Musk is targeting federal workers with the same chopping-block zeal he brought to Twitter. But Thielism predates all that.
Way back in 2009 — right after Barack Obama took office, back when serious thinkers were solemnly prophesying the end of both racism and the Republican Party — Thiel wrote an essay for the Cato Institute titled “The Education of a Libertarian.” In it, he laid out almost everything that Trump and his followers are putting into practice today. It’s all there: the wholesale gutting of government agencies, the attempt to erase diversity from the historical record, the ratcheting back of regulations and public aid, even the obsessive love affair with cryptocurrencies. Thiel’s essay “presaged the need to slash and burn all federal programs,” says Becca Lewis, a researcher at Stanford who studies the rise of what she calls “techno-authoritarianism” in Silicon Valley.
In his essay, Thiel argued that the great task facing the world was “to find an escape from politics in all its forms.” For Thiel, that doesn’t just mean bad government — it means any government, even the democratic kind. He blamed what he viewed as the sorry state of things on two culprits — “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries” and “the extension of the franchise to women.” The growing ranks of poor and female voters, he lamented, had made it virtually impossible for libertarians to prevail at the ballot box. The solution? Reject the “unthinking demos” and create a world “not bounded by historical nation-states.”
Think I’m exaggerating Thiel’s position? Here’s the money quote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
His essay helped jump-start the creation of the “intellectual dark web,” a loose affiliation of techno-libertarian online forums, podcasts, nonprofits, and academic institutions, many of which Thiel helped to launch.
Thiel was the “alpha throughline” of the new movement, according to Gil Durán, a journalist who has reported on the tech industry for years. Thiel mentored the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, founded the military contractor Palantir, and handed out $100,000 checks to hundreds of “Thiel Fellows.” He funded the entries into politics of Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, as well as Vice President JD Vance. He was a major donor to Trump, and it was the sale of PayPal that launched the fortunes of Musk, the techno-libertarian fellow traveler who is now grinding up the entire notion of government — just as Thiel prescribed. As Karpf recently wrote, “Musk and Thiel’s latest acquisition is, effectively, the United States government.”
“The fate of our world,” he wrote, “may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.”
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