From DEI to DOGE: how Peter Thiel foresaw the future

Peter Thiel has won.

Behind the chaotic first month of the Trump administration lies a sweeping political vision laid out by Thiel, the billionaire tech investor, cofounder of PayPal, and destroyer of Gawker. Sure, Project 2025 drafted the blueprint for Donald Trump's war on government. Yes, Elon Musk is targeting federal workers with the same chopping-block zeal he brought to Twitter. But Thielism predates all that.

Way back in 2009 — right after Barack Obama took office, back when serious thinkers were solemnly prophesying the end of both racism and the Republican Party — Thiel wrote an essay for the Cato Institute titled "The Education of a Libertarian." In it, he laid out almost everything that Trump and his followers are putting into practice today. It's all there: the wholesale gutting of government agencies, the attempt to erase diversity from the historical record, the ratcheting back of regulations and public aid, even the obsessive love affair with cryptocurrencies. Thiel's essay "presaged the need to slash and burn all federal programs," says Becca Lewis, a researcher at Stanford who studies the rise of what she calls "techno-authoritarianism" in Silicon Valley.

In his essay, Thiel argued that the great task facing the world was "to find an escape from politics in all its forms." For Thiel, that doesn't just mean bad government — it means any government, even the democratic kind. He blamed what he viewed as the sorry state of things on two culprits — "the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries" and "the extension of the franchise to women." The growing ranks of poor and female voters, he lamented, had made it virtually impossible for libertarians to prevail at the ballot box. The solution? Reject the "unthinking demos" and create a world "not bounded by historical nation-states."

Think I'm exaggerating Thiel's position? Here's the money quote: "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Who would build this new, democracy-free world? Why, tech entrepreneurs, of course. "The project of techno-libertarianism in the 1990s was not just saying these technologies are cool and they're going to spread," says Dave Karpf, a researcher at George Washington University who studies tech culture. "It was also saying that we need to keep government out of it. Because the engineers, investors, and entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley will build the future. No taxation or regulation, and the future will arrive — if we allow it."

One step toward this government of, by, and for corporate interests was what Thiel sought to create with PayPal: "a new world currency, free from all government control and dilution — the end of monetary sovereignty, as it were." Take away government-backed money, and you take away government's power of the purse. It's easy to see in this sentiment why the Trump administration is touting the deregulation of cryptocurrencies. The connection is direct: David Sacks, now serving as Trump's crypto czar, went to college with Thiel and was a cofounder of PayPal.

Putting an end to democracy, in the Thielist view, also requires putting a stop to diversity. Back when Thiel and Sacks were at Stanford and the term for "woke" was "political correctness," they cofounded The Stanford Review, a right-leaning student newspaper that took aim at multiculturalism. They even wrote an anti-diversity book called "The Diversity Myth."

Thiel's main reason for opposing government is that it hinders the freedom of tech titans like him to do what they will.

The anti-woke seeds Thiel planted were soon sown throughout the Valley. "As Thiel and the other PayPal folks built out their startup networks, they incorporated that same ethos," Lewis says. "It was very much a white, male workforce, often very conservative, because they were drawing on networks from The Stanford Review. There is a real politics of aggrievement underlying it, and any time their power gets challenged, that aggrievement comes back out."

Thiel's main reason for opposing government, as Max Chafkin's biography of him makes clear, is that it hinders the freedom of tech titans like him to do what they will. In his 2009 essay, Thiel opposes "confiscatory taxes" and "totalitarian collectives." Two years later, in an article for National Review, he was even more explicit about why he hates democracy. "I am not aware of a single political leader in the US, either Democrat or Republican, who would cut health-care spending in order to free up money for biotechnology research," he wrote, "or, more generally, who would make serious cuts to the welfare state in order to free up serious money for major engineering projects." How dare people prioritize health and welfare above technology? (Thiel blamed the intransigence on hippies.) "When technology's unregulated," Thiel once told a reporter, "you can change the world without getting approval from other people. At its best, it's not subject to democratic control, and not subject to the majority, which I think is often hostile to change."

So: no government, no regulations, and a bunch of tech CEOs in charge of steering the world, without having to consult with anyone who doesn't look and think like them. And if your goal is to get rid of democracy, then trying to use the public schools to advance your cause is a waste of time. "The broader education of the body politic," Thiel wrote in his essay, "has become a fool's errand."

Thiel's vision of a world freed from the tyranny of democracy proved influential. His essay helped jump-start the creation of the "intellectual dark web," a loose affiliation of techno-libertarian online forums, podcasts, nonprofits, and academic institutions, many of which Thiel helped to launch. (The man who coined the phrase "intellectual dark web," in fact, was an investor working for Thiel.) That's because if you think you're smart and special, you want more than a big bank account. You want an intellectual-sounding rationale for why you deserve it.

Thiel was the "alpha throughline" of the new movement, according to Gil Durán, a journalist who has reported on the tech industry for years. Thiel mentored the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, founded the military contractor Palantir, and handed out $100,000 checks to hundreds of "Thiel Fellows." He funded the entries into politics of Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, as well as Vice President JD Vance. He was a major donor to Trump, and it was the sale of PayPal that launched the fortunes of Musk, the techno-libertarian fellow traveler who is now grinding up the entire notion of government — just as Thiel prescribed. As Karpf recently wrote, "Musk and Thiel's latest acquisition is, effectively, the United States government."

Back in 2009, when Trump was just a fledgling birther on the margins of politics, Thiel seemed to intuit that the world would arrive at its current inflection point. Even as tech appeared to be on the verge of creating the utopia it had promised us, brimming with cool gadgets and thrilling social networks, Thiel cautioned against believing that the war had been won — "the notion that technology has a momentum or will of its own." Instead, he warned, we were engaged in "a deadly race between politics and technology" — and only technology could ensure our freedom. Indeed, the very notion of "democratic capitalism" seemed to him "an oxymoron." And when it came to the battle between the public sector and private wealth, Thiel was clear which side he was on.

"The fate of our world," he wrote, "may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism."

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.