When JD Vance was a student at Yale Law School in 2011, he attended a talk featuring Peter Thiel, the conservative tech billionaire. Although Vance didn’t know Thiel at the time, over the next decade he would become Thiel’s employee, friend and the recipient of his largesse. Thiel’s millions paved the way for Vance to become a senator.
Thiel’s talk was “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School”, Vance would write in a 2020 essay for The Lamp, a Catholic magazine. In Vance’s telling, Thiel’s talk of the failures of elite institutions and belief in Christianity made him reconsider his own faith and immediately make plans for a career outside of law – one that wound through the worlds of tech and venture capital before politics.
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While Vance is best known for the hardscrabble origin story he laid out in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, in the years following his graduation from Yale he developed extensive ties with Silicon Valley’s investors and elites. His time as a venture capitalist, coupled with his status as a rags-to-riches media fixture, helped him make connections central to his political rise, as well as garner him influential supporters that pushed Trump to make him his vice presidential pick.
Following a brief period of work in corporate law after he graduated Yale, Vance moved to San Francisco and got a job at Thiel’s Mithril Capital venture firm in 2015. After Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller in 2016 and brought him to national prominence, Vance joined the venture capital firm Revolution, founded by the former AOL CEO Steve Case.
Vance remained a part of the tech VC world after returning to Ohio and leaving Revolution in early 2020. He received financial backing from Thiel to co-found the venture firm Narya Capital – which, like Thiel’s enterprises, was named after an object from The Lord of The Rings, this time a ring of power made for elves. Other prominent investors in Narya included Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO,and Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, who announced his own support for Trump this past week. The stated goal of Vance’s firm was to invest in early-stage startups in cities that Silicon Valley tended to overlook.
Narya Capital in 2021 led a group of conservative investors, including Thiel, to put money into Rumble, the video streaming platform that positions itself as a less-moderated and more rightwing friendly version of YouTube. Vance’s co-founder at Narya, Colin Greenspon, touted the investment as a challenge to big tech’s hold on online services – a frequent conservative talking point during the backlash to content moderation around the pandemic and 2020 presidential election. It was also around this time that Thiel, who heavily backed Trump financially during the 2016 campaign, brought Vance to first talk with Trump during a secretive meeting at Mar-a-Lago in February of 2021, according to the New York Times.
Vance’s long association with Thiel also proved lucrative during his run for senator in 2022. Thiel put a staggering $15m into Vance’s campaign and, according to the Washington Post, helped court Trump’s endorsement, leading to Vance winning a tightly contested Republican primary race and then the senate election.
Although Thiel has pledged in recent years to stay out of donations to the 2024 election, Vance has since flexed his other Silicon Valley connections to ingratiate himself to Trump. The Ohio senator introduced David Sacks, a prominent venture capitalist, to Donald Trump Jr in March, the New York Times reported, and attended Sacks’ pro-Trump fundraiser in June, co-sponsored by Chamath Palihapitiya, Sacks’ co-host on the popular podcast All In. The event, which cost as much as $300,000 to attend, was held at Sacks’s San Francisco mansion and featured the investor thanking Vance for his help making the fundraiser happen. During an informal conversation at the dinner, Sacks and Palihapitiya told Trump to nominate Vance as his VP choice.
Sacks spoke at the Republican national convention Monday. In the days prior, he had also called Trump to advocate for Vance as the VP pick, as had Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, the ex-Fox News host, according to Axios. Thiel also expressed his support for Vance in private calls with Trump, the New York Times reported. When Trump confirmed Vance would be his running mate, Sacks and Musk posted fawning celebrations on Twitter – with Musk saying the ticket “resounds with victory”.
Many of Vance’s wealthy tech elite and venture capitalist supporters now appear to be preparing to offer even more tangible support. Investors including Musk, Andreessen and Thiel’s co-founder in Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, are all reportedly planning to donate huge sums of money to back the Trump and Vance campaign.