JD Vance Is the Loyal Convert in Chief

Thiel, the Palantir founder and fellow member of the so-called PayPal Mafia alongside Musk, bankrolled much of Vance’s 2022 Senate run.

He is perhaps the most mysterious and most feared of Vance’s billionaire allies in the Trump administration, the source who served the first time around tells me. And they’re happy to see less of him compared to when he played a more publicly active and conventional role as a donor in 2016, including giving a speech at the Republican National Convention, where he notably lamented how “Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East.”

In Trumpworld, Thiel now gets credit for “putting his head down.” (“Now, does that mean he’s retreated from politics,” they say, “or retreated from politics in public?”)

Thiel did not return a request for comment.

The Man Holding the Cards

Although Vance partially established his brand in the party as a critic of “big tech”—including a wariness around data collection, a call to repeal Section 230, and even a willingness to break up some companies under antitrust law—his arrival on the ticket and subsequently in the White House brought with it a worldview and connections to a network of literal elites that have never been a comfortable fit with the populist MAGA wing, the backbone of the Trump movement for the past decade.

“The base always has a suspicion of tech, and Steve Bannon is a good symbol of that,” a Trumpworld source close to the president tells me. “There’s always this high suspicion level with the tech crowd, the tech bros.”

“JD continues to hold those cards with the tech bros,” the source close to Trump tells me.

“I think he’s only grown in strength, to the point where, we have an election in 2028 and I think he’s the front-runner, but is there even a list of challengers right now?” the former Trump administration official adds.

Some Trumpworld sources noted that Vance’s role as the ambassador for the libertarian tech right and its eccentric financiers was largely the result of a cash crunch facing the Trump campaign in the run-up to the 2024 general election.

Vance proved to be the right man at the right time, the source close to Trump tells me when recalling what they describe as a “perfect storm” of factors going in Vance’s favor this time last year. “At that point, [Trump] realized you kind of had to do something else.”

Just because Silicon Valley figures supported Trump doesn’t mean they have his ear directly, at least not all of the time. Larry Ellison, the billionaire executive chairman of Oracle, the expected US buyer of TikTok, has reportedly met privately with Trump several times in recent weeks. But Marc Andreessen, the billionaire investor and former software engineer who writes manifestos in his spare time, gained a reputation in Trumpworld for overplaying his relationship with Trump after he spent time at Mar-a-Lago working on vetting personnel during the transition, a senior administration source tells WIRED. Since then, Trump does not talk to Andreessen “that much,” the source told me. Andreessen, one of the tech right’s top thought leaders and influences on the Silicon Valley wing of the party, exercises his influence “through the vice president, primarily,” the senior administration source says.