Peter Thiel

Paypal Co-Founder with Elon Musk, “The PayPal Mafia”, Palantir Technologies Chairman (Data Analytics), Founders Fund (Tech VC), Surveillance technology and virtual border wall startup with Palmer Luckey, Thiel Capital Management 1990s; Y Combinator adviser 2015-17, Patrick Collison & first investor in Stripe summer 2010, used by the RNC’s fundraising site “Revv”, with Elon Musk, Box CEO Aaron Levie, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital. TechCrunch

Tech Billionaire (1st VC Facebook investor) Peter Thiel bankrolled the lawsuit defending Hulk Hogan against Gawker’s release of a sex tape.”Why should I care? Critics have argued that Thiel’s money gives other billionaires a blueprint for how to silence media outlets they dislike.” Forbes June 21, 2016   Read More on the First Amendment Freedoms page.

Thiel is a supporter of Alt-Right trolls who have enacted “Meme Wars” against Presidential elections in the US, and potentially Europe as well.

Meet Silicon Valley’s Secretive Alt-Right Followers Mother Jones Josh Harkinson March 10, 2017 “Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who reportedly gave Trump more than $1 million during the campaign and was an adviser on Trump’s transition team, has circled neoreactionary ideas. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote on the Cato Institute’s blog in 2009, adding that women and “welfare beneficiaries” have through their voting habits “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron” (He clarified two weeks later that he supports women’s suffrage and redirected blame for the supposed demise of democracy on “unelected technocratic agencies.”)Mother Jones

Alt White: How the Breitbart Machine Laundered Racist Hate Buzzfeed Joseph Bernstein October 5, 2017 “[Milo] Yiannopoulos also had a private relationship with the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, though he was more circumspect than some other correspondents. After turning down an appearance on Yiannopoulos’s podcast in May 2016 (Thiel: “Let’s just get coffee and take things from there”), Thiel invited the Breitbart tech editor for dinner at his Hollywood Hills home in June, a dinner Yiannopoulos boasted of the same night to Bannon: “You two should meet. … An obvious candidate for movie financing if we got external. … He has fucked [Gawker Media founder Nick] Denton & Gawker so many ways it brought a tear to my eye.” They made plans to meet during the July Republican National Convention. But much of Yiannopoulos’s knowledge of Thiel seemed to come secondhand from other right-wing activists, as well as Curtis Yarvin, the blogger who advocates the return of feudalism. In an email exchange shortly after the election, Yarvin told Yiannopoulos that he had been “coaching Thiel.”“Peter needs guidance on politics for sure,” Yiannopoulos responded.

“Less than you might think!” Yarvin wrote back. “I watched the election at his house, I think my hangover lasted into Tuesday. He’s fully enlightened, just plays it very carefully.”Buzzfeed 

How the “Alt-Right” Went From the Fringe to the White House  Mother Jones March 10, 2017I investigated the role of “alt-techies” in the extremist movement emboldened by Trump. “Thiel is reportedly an investor in Yarvin’s cloud computing company, though Yarvin told me that he and Thiel have never discussed neoreaction. Michael Anissimov, another well-known neoreactionary blogger, was formerly the media director of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has received funding from the Thiel Foundation.

While a student at Stanford University in 1987, Thiel founded the conservative Stanford Review to inspire campus debate by “presenting alternative viewpoints.” In the 1995 book The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, Thiel and former Stanford Review editor-in-chief David O. Sacks argued that multiculturalism at colleges was hurting education. In one bizarre passage, they speculated that some college date-rape cases were actually “seductions that are later regretted”—a comment for which Thiel apologized last October, telling Forbes, “Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise.”

DeploraBall co-sponsor Jeff Giesea, also a former Stanford Review editor, worked for Thiel Capital Management in the late 1990s. Last year, Giesea partnered with far-right blogger Mike Cernovich on MAGA3X, a digital operation dedicated to waging meme warfare on behalf of Trump’s campaign. Enlisting a network of pro-Trump Twitter influencers such as former BuzzFeed employee Anthime Gionet (a.k.a. Baked Alaska) and right-wing troll Jack Posobiec, the group spread Breitbart News contentand memes based on conspiracy theories such as #SpiritCooking and #Pizzagate. The DeploraBall stirred controversy among the alt-right when Giesea and Cernovich decided to remove Gionet from their “featured guests” list after he posted several anti-Semitic tweets. But Giesea told me that he generally agrees with the views of alt-right fellow travelers such as Yiannopoulous. In January, he told BuzzFeed, “I see Trumpism as the only practical and moral path to save Western civilization from itself.” Mother Jones

Pepe the Frog: from kids’ book to the KKK

Inside Marine Le Pen’s “Foreign Legion” of American Alt-Right Trolls  Mother Jones

Here’s How Far-Right Trolls Are Spreading Hoaxes About French Presidential Candidate Emmanuel Macron   Buzzfeed April 25, 2017

“Macron Antoinette”: Alt-Right Targets France by @DFRLab  Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab who follows the alt-right internet presence

Oculus Founder/alt-right troll Palmer Luckey teaming up with Peter Thiel to build surveillance tech BoingBoing CORY DOCTOROW  June 5, 2017 “Palmer Luckey, the guy who founded Oculus, sold it to Facebook, and then used the money to fund racist, far-right meme creation in the 2016 election cycle is now running a Peter-Thiel-backed startup to build surveillance technology that could be part of Donald Trump’s border wall.

Peter Thiel is the Donald Trump advisor who secretly funded the litigation campaign that destroyed Gawker, secretly bought citizenship in New Zealand, and openly says that democracy is not compatible with freedom and that giving women votes made America hostile to capitalism.

As as he sees it, according to those familiar with the plan, the technology can be used for many kinds of perimeter security, including military bases and stadium events, where it could be used to detect drones. Software would help the system figure out which objects to ignore, like birds and coyotes.

Those familiar with the plan say Mr. Luckey believes his system, which can be mounted on telephone poles, can be built far more cost effectively than Mr. Trump’s proposed wall on the Mexican border — and with fewer obstacles from landowners.

The company, which is based in Southern California and has a warehouse there, is being self-financed by Mr. Luckey for now. He has hired a handful of people, including Christopher Dycus, who recently left Oculus and was the company’s first employee. Eventually, he wants to explore new applications of other technologies including drones, Mr. Luckey has told people.

Mr. Thiel’s investment firm, Founders Fund, plans to invest in it, according to people with knowledge of its plans. They said the firm sees Mr. Luckey’s venture in the mold of Palantir Technologies, a data-mining company co-founded by Mr. Thiel, which serves a wide range of clients, including intelligence agencies. A spokeswoman for Founders Fund declined to comment.”

Oculus Founder Plots a Comeback With a Virtual Border Wall  NY Times June 4, 2017

Palantir Technologies, Silicon Valley’s most secretive start-up, raises $880M CNBC December 24, 2015 “The 12-year-old start-up uses so-called big data – massive data sets that can be analyzed by computers to reveal trends and hopefully lead to better decision-making – and applies it to areas ranging from defense to fraud. Adam Jeffery | CNBC

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir.

It is considered one of the most secretive Silicon Valley companies, with clients including the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The company was rumored to have helped provide the data that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, although this has never been confirmed.

CNBC has reached out to Palantir to ask what it intends to do with the money raised but is yet to receive a reply.

It is likely that the money will be spent on further developing its technology.

Morgan Stanley and S F Sentry Securities were brokers on the fundraising deal and earned themselves $32 million in commissions, according to the SEC filing. Backers include In-Q-Tel, a not-for-profit venture capital firm that invests in technology companies in order to support U.S. intelligence agencies, and Founders Fund.

PayPal co-founder, Peter Thiel, is Palantir’s chairman and a partner at Founders Fund, another venture capital firm investing in technology companies.”

Y Combinator has quietly cut ties with Peter Thiel The Verge By Natt Garun 

Peter Thiel Has Been Hedging His Bet On Donald Trump : Peter Thiel has said publicly that Trump’s administration is “off to a terrific start.” Privately, he’s told friends that there is a 50% chance the current presidency “ends in disaster.” A