Yahoo Finance How Peter Thiel's Senate candidates would take his big tech ideas to the beltway
Peter Thiel took a unique approach to this election cycle: putting nearly all his money and influence behind two candidates who strongly echo his political views.
That might just pay off for the billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of Paypal.
Thiel has placed his chips on Blake Masters and J.D. Vance, former employees who are running for U.S. Senate seats in Arizona and Ohio, respectively. Victories from one or both of them would set Thiel up for influence in Washington next year on one issue in particular: Big Tech.
“I think Thiel's greatest influence on the Senate will truly be his philosophy on business and his perspectives on the American economy,” say Jake Denton, a Research Associate at the Tech Policy Center at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He adds that Thiel's candidate will potentially be "able to explain to the broader Senate delegation it's important to these constituents and to our voters that we're holding big tech accountable."
After making his fortune in Silicon Valley, Thiel stepped off of the board of Facebook this year specifically to focus more on politics. He reportedly had grown more and more uncomfortable with the companies willingness to police political speech on the platform and determined that the best way to force change was on the outside through the political process.
One week from election day, Vance has maintained a polling edge in Republican-leaning Ohio while Masters has surged into contention in Arizona. The Cook Political Report currently rates Arizona a toss up and Ohio as leaning Vance's way.
Campaigns being waged against ‘Big Government, Big Tech and Big Business’
A quick run through the messaging from both the Vance and Masters campaigns shows two campaigns often trying to inject technology themes into their race alongside key issues in ever race this year — like inflation and immigration and crime.
Self-parody, and beyond https://t.co/dnZsZJIqj8
— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) October 21, 2022
In Arizona, Masters comes to the race as one of Thiel’s most direct proteges. He attended Stanford, where he was taught by Thiel and later was the co-author of a book with him. He then worked as COO of Thiel Capital and president of the Thiel Foundation. Master faces a difficult challenge in trying unseat Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), the retired astronaut who was first elected in 2020.
Masters has taken to saying Kelly is “California’s 3rd Senator’ and promises to take on “an unholy alliance between Big Government, Big Tech and Big Business" adding that "this regime, working hand in hand with the Democrats, is weaponizing technology to destroy America as we know it."
It's a message that J.D. Vance has also echoed almost exactly—and is an important concern of Thiel's.
One of the most notable moments from Masters in recent months was when he softened his rhetoric around the 2020 election—but continued to take a swipe at big tech at the same time. But Masters is notably not saying Joe Biden's victory is legitimate. Instead it was “big tech censorship that sent Biden into the White House” as he claimed in a Fox appearance. That's in contrast to Donald Trump’s preferred culprit: baseless claims of voter fraud.
The balancing act is reminiscent of Thiel himself. He was, for instance, a key supporter of Trump in 2016, but then took a pass on the President during the 2020 campaign before returning to the political fray again this year.
It’s a similar story over in Ohio where J.D. Vance is running after a stint working at Thiel's VC firm Mithril Capital. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) is Vance’s opponent and likes to call him a “puppet to Peter Thiel,” but that hasn't stopped Vance from gaining the edge in the race.
“I know the technology industry well,” Vance touts on his website, where he promises to break the companies up.
While Vance spends plenty of time talking about inflation and crime, he also weighs in regularly on a host of technology topics from Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter to notable tech journalist Kara Swisher to the policies of the University of California, Berkeley. Those are tweets you could easily imagine Thiel sending-out—if he had an active account (which he doesn't appear to have).
Representatives from the Masters and Vance campaigns didn’t respond to questions from Yahoo Finance regarding their plans for Big Tech if elected. A representative for Thiel also declined to weigh in.
‘A lot of potential to bring a bigger new right coalition’
But what all the campaign rhetoric will lead to in 2023 remains an open question. Washington has struggled to regulate big tech for years with even a relatively modest bipartisan effort finding itself stalled in the face of intensive lobbying. That bill would bar Big Tech from favoring their own products over competitors - such as Amazon and it's complicated relationship with 3rd party vendors.
It doesn’t appear likely that Thiel’s acolytes would be inclined to push that effort over the finish line.
They have different priorities - in addition to Vance's call to break the companies up. A key concern of Thiel (and Vance and Masters) is the perceived silencing of conservatives on technology platforms. Thiel also cut checks in 2021 for figures like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI), and Harriet Hageman (R-WY) who often echo those same concerns.
But Denton says the realities of Washington - where Democrats are unlikely to support any move to make social media even more of a free-for-all - means immediate action could be more likely on the antitrust front: from closer scrutiny of mergers all the way up to breaking up the giant companies.
Denton says that "you already have folks ready for the task." He cites recent actions, like the bipartisan House passage of a modest effort to reform merger filing fees, as a sign that lawmakers may be up to the task in the years ahead. He adds that a lack of tech expertise among existing senators means that tenured senators maybe be eager to let the newcomers lead.
If that happens, Thiel's influence will be massive.
Vance and Masters—if one or both of them prevails with voters next week, that is—will, Denton says, "preach this new worldview that I think really speaks to the middle class Americans who are looking at Silicon Valley from the outside and thinking, what the hell's going on there?"
Ben Werschkul is a Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.
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