Peter Thiel is the conservative gay billionaire behind JD Vance’s rise to power

On Wednesday night, as Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) prepared to accept the Republican Party’s nomination to be Donald Trump’s running mate, MSNBC’s out host Rachel Maddow laid out the 39-year-old Ohioan’s unusual path to power.  

“Writing a memoir and otherwise being Peter Thiel’s intern is not usually the way you get to be a vice presidential nominee,” she observed.

Related:

Peter Thiel dropped $3.5M to help transphobic candidate JD Vance win the Ohio GOP primary

The Hillibilly Elegy author, a protege of Thiel’s, also won Donald Trump’s endorsement, despite once comparing Trump to Hitler.

It turns out Thiel, the gay conservative billionaire co-founder of Paypal, has been an integral part of practically everything about Vance’s life and career, from his work in the tech sector to his conversion to Catholicism to his selection as Trump’s running mate.

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Vance first met Thiel after at a lecture the venture capitalist gave in 2011 while Vance was at Yale. It was “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School,” Vance wrote in a 2020 essay for The Lamp, a Catholic magazine. 

In the talk, Thiel detailed what he called the failures of elite institutions and his belief in Christianity, which led Vance to reconsider a career in law and pushed him into tech.

Vance landed his first job at biotech company Circuit Therapeutics in Silicon Valley at the recommendation of Thiel in 2013, according to The New York Times, and Thiel pitched Vance in 2016 for his role as a principal at Mithril Capital, a venture firm that Thiel co-founded.

Around the same time, Thiel wrote a promotional blurb for Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which went on to become a best seller. The book recounted Vance’s family history in Kentucky and Ohio and was a well-timed account of white working-class grievance as Donald Trump ran on an appeal to the same group.

While Thiel came out as a Trump supporter, Vance didn’t follow his patron’s lead — yet.

“My god what an idiot,” Vance tweeted about Trump in October 2016.

In 2020, Vance founded his own venture firm, Narya Capital, with $120 million in funding from Thiel and other tech titans he’d connected Vance with. Thiel served on Narya’s leadership advisory committee, and even the name of Vance’s venture was inspired by Thiel: all of his companies’ names are based on The Lord of the Rings books; Narya refers to a ring of power made for elves. 

In July 2021, Vance made the leap to politics when he announced his campaign for the U.S. Senate representing Ohio. Thiel bankrolled the run with $15 million.

Along with the career switch, Vance changed his mind about Trump. Thiel brokered an endorsement, introducing his candidate to Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

“Like some others, J.D. Vance may have said some not-so-great things about me in the past, but he gets it now,” Trump said when he backed the Senate run, “and I have seen that in spades.”

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