Thiel - Vance's political inspiration and founder of Musk's dynasty

Source: Lu Hongyan

Thiel, the man who created PayPal with Musk, the first person to write checks to Zuckerberg and Vitalik, later invested in Musk's SpaceX, many unicorns, and invested in openAI with Musk, and is recognized as the soul of the "PayPal Mafia".

Of course, these are the foundations of his career, just the foundation.

On the surface, Thiel is a king maker, and no one objects to this.

Trump's designated vice president Vance was originally a political novice. It was Thiel who encouraged him to go into politics and run for senator, sponsored him at least 15 million US dollars, and brought him to the same stage with Trump.

After this, Vance changed. He used to say that Trump was a Hitler, but now he has become Trump's successor.

Before this, when Vance was just a small figure, Thiel gave him a job and took him under his wings like a chick.

Then Vance wrote a book "Hillbilly Elegy", which became popular.

Then, Vance converted to Catholicism, influenced by a French philosopher, Thiel's teacher at Stanford.

Then, Vance set up his own foundation, and Thiel also wrote a check.

Now, people say that Vance is a perfect match for Trump. A real country boy, 38 years younger, without a foundation, he must work hard to prove himself during the internship and rely on the promotion of the old man.

The two people complement each other completely, so Trump is the least wary of him and trusts him the most.

All the disadvantages of Vance in politics have become advantages with Trump.

This miracle may have been brewing as early as 2015, when Thiel took a fancy to Vance and then "Hillbilly Elegy" was hatched.

There is a very old word that can describe the relationship between Thiel and Vance, Godfather.

Many people have forgotten that Trump himself was also taken a fancy to by Thiel. That was also the first decision Thiel made when he first entered the political field.

During the 2016 election, all Silicon Valley elites rejected and looked down on Trump. Thiel was the only Silicon Valley tycoon who stood up to support Trump.

In Silicon Valley at the time, this was a very politically incorrect thing. Waterman, who later competed with Musk, was still the CEO of YC at the time. Even though Waterman and Thiel had an unusual relationship, they had to draw a line with him.

Even Facebook was under pressure to kick Thiel out of the board of directors.

But so what, Thiel still chose Trump.

The funny thing is that, if I remember correctly, Bezos criticized Thiel, saying that contrarians are usually wrong.

This sentence is particularly powerful, just as powerful as the "non-consensus" that Thiel pursues, but unfortunately, Thiel did win this round.

So Thiel's most successful venture capital is not Facebook, SpaceX, Airbnb, LinkedIn, or Spotify, but a president and a vice president.

After Trump was elected in 2017, Thiel became an advisor, but in the next few years, he realized that Trump was a disaster, and Trump and most of his subordinates finally turned against each other.

But Thiel did not give up. He made a comeback and prepared a dog for Trump this time, who was also his successor.

All the characteristics of this successor made him submit to Trump, so Trump would also pass on his political legacy to such a person.

This is real venture capital, in a field that you didn't seem to understand before, and you are enemies with all your old colleagues and those bigger Silicon Valley guys who support the Democratic Party.

But don't mistake Thiel for an ordinary venture capitalist who goes wherever there is money and success. That's not the case.

First of all, Thiel is a philosopher. He studied philosophy at Stanford as an undergraduate and has super deep thinking. For example, Bitcoin is liberalism and AI is communism.

His philosophy is to attribute all new things to the most basic human system and human nature.

Musk uses the first principles to build rockets, while Thiel uses the first principles to think about philosophy.

More importantly, Thiel is not a philosopher who talks about philosophy, but a preacher. He will pay for the philosophy he believes in, and use his money and power to pay for this philosophy.

Venture capital is a cover. Thiel is a Soros-like figure. He serves his ideology and is not a fence-sitter.

Someone asked, what do you think of Musk taking down X? Thiel said, as a business project, I am not sure about the result, but as an ideological project, I support him because it can transform the public opinion field.

Third and Trump, at least in 2016, saw the same point. Thiel said in several public speeches that the United States has failed and the elites who govern the United States have failed.

He cited some facts.

64% of Americans over 55 have less than one year's worth of savings to their name.

It's 10 times more expensive to buy medicine in the United States than in most parts of the world.

College tuition is rising much faster than inflation.

Excluding inflation, the median household income in the United States is lower than it was 17 years ago, and nearly half of households cannot come up with $400 in an emergency.

In the past 50 years, the top 0.1% of people have doubled their share of wealth, the same as the bottom 90%.

At the same time, the United States has fought for 15 years, spent nearly $5 trillion, more than 2 million people died, and more than 5,000 American soldiers died.

Even so, the United States is still in the swamp of war.

For these figures, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, that is, the ruling elite, will look at them from another perspective: these are the price of development, and the United States is stronger than ever.

But Thiel has a different view. His methodology is, let's look at the numbers themselves, return to reality, and let's be realistic. Problems are problems, don't beautify them.

So Trump said, make America great again. It means that the United States has failed. The success of Silicon Valley and Wall Street is not the success of the United States. Acknowledge this reality.

What Trump sees is the decline of American manufacturing, the decline of the middle class, and the hardship of people's livelihood.

We tell ourselves that we are making progress because grandma got an iPhone with a smooth surface.

But at the same time, she started eating cat food because food prices have already risen.

But Thiel looks deeper. Silicon Valley has not brought essential progress. He has a famous saying that what we wanted was a flying car, but what we got was 140 characters.

By the way, this is also what has happened in China in recent years. The consumer Internet has declined, and what is encouraged is specialization, excellence, and innovation.

This transformation is consistent with Thiel's idea. The bit world has created prosperity, but the bubble is huge. On the contrary, the atomic world needs more money and people.

Trump and Thiel agree on this point. The United States needs to revive industry. Trump needs manufacturing. Thiel uses a more philosophical word, the atomic world.

Trump is a conservative. Conservatives don't like homosexuals, but Thiel is a homosexual and married to his boyfriend.

Trump is a nationalist. What he wants is Americans. The country moves forward as a whole. So he is against immigration and wants to build a wall to block some outsiders who are more hardworking and capable.

And Thiel probably won't agree. He himself is a German immigrant. If he is against immigration, people like him and Musk will not exist.

But they are the same in one point. Under the premise of admitting failure, the current system must be broken before there is hope to build a new system.

No destruction, no construction.

And who owns this old system? They are the elites who run this system. They have a name called the establishment, called the deep state, including Silicon Valley and Wall Street.

In 2013, when Thiel was still living in San Francisco, he wanted to build a driveway for his house, but he needed a lot of certificates.

Among them, in order to cut down a big tree blocking the road, he needed to get a certificate for this, but he couldn't find a place to get this certificate.

So this is a sign that he thinks Silicon Valley has been "left" to the point of madness, extremely bureaucratic and incompetent.

But at the same time, a California lieutenant governor at the time could help Thiel get these certificates.

This is another sign that California has been corrupt and degenerate.

So Thiel moved away from San Francisco, this is an attitude. So Thiel did not hesitate to offend Silicon Valley in order to support Trump, because that is exactly what he wants to overthrow.

A few years ago, when Trump was still in office, a friend who was an investor told me that we should pay attention to the small circle of Trump/Bannon/Musk/Till. This is a loose yet tight organization with a common ideology.

Loose because they are all the bosses in their respective fields, and no one is the younger brother of anyone else, but tight because they want to do something together that they believe in.

Later, when Musk acquired Twitter, this friend said that this was a political gift and Trump could go back to work at Twitter at any time.

After Trump was assassinated, Musk was the first to jump out and call him a great historical figure.

Musk and Thiel co-founded PayPal. When their careers took off, they were comrades.

What Musk has been doing is what Thiel said, to build flying cars.

Musk has been making breakthroughs from zero to one in the atomic world. Musk is the first person to awaken America's manufacturing capabilities in all these years.

Thiel has a book called "From Zero to One", which is not a book about doing business or investing, but a book about philosophy.

Don't do things from one to ten thousand, create something out of nothing, and be truly innovative.

So when the whole Silicon Valley couldn't understand Trump, Thiel bet on Trump. For Silicon Valley and the current American system, Trump is the non-consensus from zero to one.

Thiel's investment criteria are,

First, they are unpopular.

Second, they are difficult to evaluate, so they are even more unpopular.

Third, they have risks, but not insurmountable risks.

Fourth, if successful, they are very valuable.

These four points are Trump.

Thiel is a philosopher. He will not do anything for any dogma. Non-consensus is not his dogma.

In college, Thiel was attracted by a French philosopher who said that people have a natural desire to imitate, and subconsciously tend to satisfy others and be like them.

In the words of Zhang Xiaolong many years later, it is to follow the crowd. Because people are reactors of the environment.

But the problem is that imitation will give rise to competition, because everyone wants to be the same, and competition invisibly forces everyone to imitate each other. This is a self-reinforcing closed loop.

So the rest is simple, give up following the crowd, resolutely not imitate, avoid market bubbles, and seize overlooked opportunities.

In the words of Buffett, who Thiel despises, when people are greedy, I am afraid, and when people are afraid, I am greedy.

Since from one to ten thousand is imitation, there is only one way left, from zero to one. Since consensus is imitation, there is only non-consensus.

But Trump and Vance are not Thiel's end point. King maker and Kingdom maker are different.

A king maker is someone who invests in one or several people, but a kingdom maker is someone who invests in a series of people, people of different dimensions, and then combines these things together to form a kingdom.

A kingdom cannot rotate without any part. In this new kingdom, Trump and Vance are just a part. You can understand it this way. The two of them are now a pair of gears.

Third's comrade Musk has never been a king maker. He only invests in himself and is obsessed with himself.

Musk himself is a king, and he is a kingdom maker.

The fun part is that Musk and Thiel are both out-and-out anarchists.

During the epidemic, Musk dared to defy the government's ban and asked the factory to start work. Mars colonization will be a form of anarchic self-organization.

Thiel believes that the government has fallen behind technology. He supports seasteading, which is to introduce the free market into the government, let 1,000 governments compete with each other, and people will choose.

So when these two people cooperate with a political strongman, it may be just because they think that the government has reached a time when it must be changed, but it does not mean that they will have the same idea as Trump later.

Trump is the stepping stone.

In the capitalist world, the fate of politicians is short-lived, and Trump only has eight years.

And entrepreneurs have much longer time, as long as he is still in charge of the company and has money.

They are called deep state, or dark state.

Think about it, when PayPal was sold, Musk and Thiel both cashed out tens of millions of dollars and were free. They were more ambitious than ever before.

They may have a tacit understanding. According to their respective characteristics, there happened to be a natural bifurcation, one doing plan A and the other doing plan B.

Musk is a Western medicine approach, make things, rush to the front and get things done.

Till is a Chinese medicine approach, make things happen, prepare conditions, and let things happen by themselves.

So you see, these two people incubated openAI at the same time, but Musk's idea is that when necessary, I must be the CEO myself. If I can't do this position, then I won't do it, withdraw, and go it alone.

But Thiel is different. He has always been in it and has always played a role. He has never thought about standing in the front.

So the core of the PayPal mafia is Thiel. When these people want to start a business, they will call Thiel. Thiel is the big brother who writes checks.

Musk is a warrior, and Thiel is an elder.

But the important thing is that they both want to create a dynasty. A dynasty that is bigger than the United States after Trump.

Mars is independent of the United States and the physical basis of the earth. You don't need a passport on Mars.

Solar energy allows you to get energy anywhere without a wire.

Starlink allows you to get information anywhere without an Internet cable.

Virtual currency allows you to buy things anywhere without a central bank.

All of these allow you to break away from a traditional sovereign state.

All of Musk's technologies revolve around anarchism, disorder, and absolute freedom. This is a firm and crazy ideology.

These things are not supported by ideology itself, but by technology, and technology is unstoppable.

Compared to Musk, Thiel did not directly create so many hard-core technologies, but it is precisely because he is Plan B, he is the elder.

One Vance surfaced, and there are already ten Vances below. He wrote a check to the 20-year-old Zuckerberg, and at the same time he has written checks to ten Zuckerberg Plan Bs.

Third is the one who is best at "relationships". When Thiel and another person founded PayPal, they agreed on the principle of recruiting only people they knew.

When Musk and Waterman were at loggerheads, Thiel could invite Waterman to his base in New Zealand to discuss doomsday survival.

When Musk and Zuckerberg had a fight, Thiel had been working with Zuckerberg for almost 20 years.

He was the one who stood between Musk, Waterman and Zuckerberg and could always pass messages.

Third's fund only targets breakthrough technologies. Their question to entrepreneurs is what you will be like in ten years, not what you will be like in two years. What role you are in science fiction, not what role you are in the real world.

When President Eisenhower resigned in 1960, he said that the military-industrial complex was threatening the United States.

Musk and Thiel are the military-industrial complex.

SpaceX has been receiving orders from the US Department of Defense and the Pentagon since the very beginning, otherwise it would have been dead long ago.

During the Russian-Ukrainian war, Twitter banned all the big names related to Russia, just like it banned Trump. It let Westerners see what they want to see.

Starlink is basically a declaration of war, and it directly helps Ukraine see Russia's deployment.

Palantir, Anduril and Clearview AI have all used AI-driven weapons systems and surveillance technology on the Russian-Ukrainian battlefield. They are all defense contractors and have investments from Thiel.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp was a classmate at Stanford before he co-founded Palantir with Thiel.

Anduril founder Palmer Luckey was "19, maybe 20" when he first met Thiel.

Clearview AI told investors in 2022 that by 2023, almost everyone in the world will be identifiable.

For example, at a protest, everyone's name, where they live, what they have done, and who they know can be known.

Of course, these are just the tip of the iceberg. Before those strange things surface, we don’t know who Thiel knows and who he has invested in.

What’s interesting is that when Thiel supported Trump, he said that we spent too much money and too many people died in a battle that we couldn’t win.

At the same time, the companies he invested in were on the battlefield, not only making money, but also honing the latest technology at a rapid pace.

What’s interesting is that Thiel despises the government, but thinks monopoly is a good thing and monarchy is the most effective form of governance.

Third is the kind of androgynous person, but we don’t know how the contradictory poles of female and male bite together like gears in his mind.

We also don’t know at what time which side will dominate the other side.

The military-industrial complex is not enough to describe Musk and Thiel’s vision. The power complex is more appropriate.

For the past 100 years, American hegemony has been a compound power.

The US dollar, the US military, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Twitter, Google, Facebook, Nvidia, this is a three-dimensional composite power with no blind spots.

The highest form of power is composite power, not individual power, because composite power supports each other and has a network effect.

Musk and Thiel also have a composite power body in their hands, and it is something beyond the country, unimaginable, and unprecedented.

A new dynasty with an innovative form but with the essence of a dynasty.

In fact, it is a system, and this system is designed by humans.

It has a creator and a top-down top-level design, which is first formed in a person's mind and then implemented with iron will.

How do I know they are iron will? Look at what they do, look at what they say, and most importantly, look at their eyes.