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Inside the powerful Peter Thiel network that anointed JD Vance
JD Vance’s rise as a Silicon Valley investor shaped his ideas about tech, an industry that stands to gain if he wins the White House.
The former president fielded repeated calls from tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg and billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Vance’s former employer and mentor, imploring him to add the onetime Silicon Valley investorto the ticket, according to three people familiar with the entreaties, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the private conversations. For Thiel, Vance’s presence on the Republican ticket is the payoff on a prescient bet placeda decade ago, when he embraced the Yale Law School graduate with Rust Belt roots as his protégé — joining a roster that included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Especially after the publication in 2016 of his memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance impressed Thiel’s rarefied Silicon Valley set with what they saw as an omnivorous intellect, mild manner and outsider story of growing up working-class in Ohio — anarrative that resonated after the 2016 election, as tech elites sought tounderstand how their obsession with building the future was leaving so many Americans behind.
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