Eyebrows were raised on Thursday morning when The Huffington Post reported that GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump wants to nominate PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel to the Supreme Court. Both Thiel and Trump’s camps have denied that Trump wants this to happen, with Thiel’s spokesman, Jeremiah Hill, going as far as saying that “Huffington Post’s sources are lying” in a statement to Forbes. The Huffington Post, however, is standing by their story.
There is definitely plenty of reasons to think that The Huffington Post‘s reporting on this is inaccurate, but on the off chance their reporting is correct, here are seven things you need to know about Thiel.
1. Thiel is a successful venture capitalist. He co-founded PayPal in 1997 with the intention of providing an alternative to the “inconvenient” use of paper money. After selling PayPal, Thiel founded the hedge fund Clarium Capital. Thiel co-founded Palantir as well, a company that specializes in “data analysis” that was partly funded by the CIA. He also was Facebook’s first outside investor. According to Forbes, Thiel is worth an estimated $2.7 billion.
2. Thiel hasn’t “practiced law in years.” He graduated from Stanford law school in 1992, according to Forbes, and did apply for clerking positions for Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy at one point, but he never got selected for one. His rejection of a clerkship is what eventually led him towards a career of venture capital.
3. Thiel funded wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. Hogan sued Gawker for publishing a sex tape of him without his consent, with Thiel helping pay for his legal fees. The lawsuit forced Gawker to file for bankruptcy.
Gawker outed Thiel as gay in 2007, and they tried to worm their way out of it by claiming they didn’t, saying that Thiel’s sexuality “was known to a wide circle who felt that it was not fit for discussion beyond that circle,” which basically fits under the definition of outing someone. With the weight of the lawsuit hanging over them, Gawker attempted to smear Thiel for supposedly wanting to infringe on freedom of the press.
“Gawker, the defendant, built its business on humiliating people for sport,” Thiel said back in May. “They routinely relied on an assumption that victims would be too intimidated or disgusted to even attempt redress for clear wrongs. Freedom of the press does not mean freedom to publish sex tapes without consent. I don’t think anybody but Gawker would argue otherwise.”
4. Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican National Committee and railed against “fake culture wars.” “I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform,” Thiel said. “But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.”
Thiel also thought it was a waste of time to argue about transgender bathroom policies.
“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union,” Thiel said. “And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”
5. Thiel has an interesting view on monopolies. When the left likes to smear capitalism, one of their common talking points is that capitalism creates monopolies, which people should be opposed to. Thiel, on the other hand, embraces monopolies with open arms.
In his 2014 Wall Street Journal piece “Competition Is for Losers,” which was adapted from his book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Thiel argued: “In a static world, a monopolist is just a rent collector. If you corner the market for something, you can jack up the price; others will have no choice but to buy from you. Think of the famous board game: Deeds are shuffled around from player to player, but the board never changes. There is no way to win by inventing a better kind of real-estate development. The relative values of the properties are fixed for all time, so all you can do is try to buy them up.”
However, Thiel argued that the world is “dynamic,” not static, and the monopolies that exist are “creative monopolies”:
Even the government knows this: That is why one of its departments works hard to create monopolies (by granting patents to new inventions) even though another part hunts them down (by prosecuting antitrust cases). It is possible to question whether anyone should really be awarded a monopoly simply for having been the first to think of something like a mobile software design. But something like Apple’s monopoly profits from designing, producing and marketing the iPhone were clearly the reward for creating greater abundance, not artificial scarcity: Customers were happy to finally have the choice of paying high prices to get a smartphone that actually works. The dynamism of new monopolies itself explains why old monopolies don’t strangle innovation. With Apple’s iOS at the forefront, the rise of mobile computing has dramatically reduced Microsoft’s decadeslong operating system dominance.
Before that, IBM’s hardware monopoly of the 1960s and ’70s was overtaken by Microsoft’s software monopoly. AT&T had a monopoly on telephone service for most of the 20th century, but now anyone can get a cheap cellphone plan from any number of providers. If the tendency of monopoly businesses was to hold back progress, they would be dangerous, and we’d be right to oppose them. But the history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents. Monopolies drive progress because the promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate. Then monopolies can keep innovating because profits enable them to make the long-term plans and finance the ambitious research projects that firms locked in competition can’t dream of.
Here was Milton Friedman’s view on monopolies:
6. Thiel has funded Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in the past. According to The New York Times, Thiel donated $250,000 to Cruz’s attorney general campaign, and then in 2012 gave $2 million to Club for Growth, which supported Cruz’s Senate campaign at the time.
7. Thiel once wrote that he has little faith in democracy. Thiel wrote in his 2009 Cato Institute essay “The Education of a Libertarian”:
To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Leftists flipped out at this statement, causing Thiel to clarify: “It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.”