🌊 The Making of J.D. Vance

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In 2022, J.D. Vance was neck-and-neck in his Ohio Senate race. He needed Trump’s endorsement to pull ahead – and knew just the guy to secure it.

Vance had grown up in a broken family in Appalachia before enlisting in the Marines, graduating from The Ohio State University, and enrolling at Yale Law, the US’ top-ranked law school. Vance later wrote, “The most significant moment of my time at Yale” occurred in 2011, when he attended a talk by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s most prominent conservative intellectual.

Thiel was born in Germany and split his childhood between Ohio, California, and southern Africa, places his father worked as a chemical engineer. A science fiction nerd with a liking for Ronald Reagan, he graduated as valedictorian of his high school in 1985 and enrolled at Stanford University, where he studied philosophy.

During Thiel’s time at Stanford, the university replaced its "Western Culture" program with a diversity-focused "Culture, Ideas, and Values" one. That inspired Thiel to co-found his own conservative and libertarian newspaper, where he fleshed out his own political beliefs. He continued to do so as a law student at Stanford, which jostles with Yale for the title of the US’ top-ranked law school.

After graduating, Thiel lasted less than a year at one of the US’ most prestigious law firms, before becoming a financial trader who moonlighted as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan’s former Secretary of Education. Less than three years after that, Thiel launched a venture capital firm and began investing in nascent tech companies during the dot-com boom.

In 1998, Thiel co-founded a tech startup, “Confinity.” One year later, that company launched a product called “PayPal,” which let people who otherwise couldn’t process credit cards take digital payments.

Thiel wanted to create a company that could transform the world, and he believed PayPal was that: “Paper money is an ancient technology and an inconvenient means of payment,” he wrote soon after launching PayPal. “You can run out of it. It wears out. It can get lost or stolen. In the twenty-first century, people need a form of money that's more convenient and secure, something that can be accessed from anywhere.”

PayPal didn’t replace paper money but was wildly successful and paved the way for Confinity to merge with Elon Musk’s nascent financial startup, X.com. Thiel would eventually earn a fortune and parlay that into launching trading firms; creating Palantir, a security-focused big data company; and investing in tech startups.

Those included Facebook, in which he invested $500,000 for 10.2% in 2004. That – the first outside investment in Facebook – would become one of the greatest investments in history.

As Thiel accrued his fortune, he became one of Silicon Valley’s leading philosophers, known for his belief in technological progress and libertarian policies.

“I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent,” he wrote in a 2009 essay.

Yet in that same essay, Thiel wrote that he had stopped believing politics was a path to “freedom”: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he concluded, advocating for achieving “freedom” through technology, not the law.

Two years later, he delivered the defining speech of J.D. Vance’s law school career. So what did he say?

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