Asshole of the Month: Peter Thiel
There has been a lot of chatter about oligarchy ever since Trump returned to the White House in January. Bernie Sanders says we are living in an “oligarchy on steroids.” Oligarchy means “rule by the few,” but increasingly, we are ruled by millionaires and billionaires, and the proper term for that—“rule by the rich,’’ who almost by definition are few in number—is plutocracy.
In past decades, most of the plutocrats with outsize influence in our government and culture came from Wall Street, especially Goldman Sachs, the “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money,” in the words of journalist Matt Taibbi. But in recent years, the most influential plutocrats have come from the opposite coast: Silicon Valley. Arguably, the most powerful of our new tech-bro plutocrats is not Elon Musk, but venture capitalist and mega-funder of conservative causes Peter Thiel.
Thiel was born in West Germany; the family moved to Ohio when he was one, then to the German colony of Swakopmund in present-day Namibia before finally settling in California when he was ten. According to biographer Max Chafkin (The Contrarian), young Peter Thiel changed elementary schools seven times and was unpopular, often bullied by his classmates and neighbors. In fact, they planted “For Sale” signs in his family’s yard before asking, “When are you moving?”
He was seduced by the heroine of all emerging right-wing adolescents, novelist Ayn Rand, while attending San Mateo High School, and he eventually moved on to Stanford University, where the bullied nerd was determined to show the world that he was a Randian free-market superman! After the university replaced its Western Culture program with a Culture, Values and Ideas course that addressed diversity and multiculturalism, Thiel cofounded The Stanford Review, a conservative, libertarian newspaper that received funding from Irving Kristol, publisher of the archconservative rag The Weekly Standard.
