Investors continue to pour money into NFTs and blockchain games

Thiel had initially been reluctant to spend more on Masters, the Thiel Capital COO, beyond an initial $15 million donation to the Saving Arizona PAC. Instead, he wanted Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to foot the bill. After all, did McConnell want to win the Senate or not? But by playing hardball on funding, McConnell got Thiel to throw more money at his pet policy project while still reserving the McConnell-affiliated Senate Leadership Fund for other tight races.

McConnell’s venture paid off. Now it’s time to see if Thiels will pay off as well.

The stakes are high, as the Arizona and Ohio Senates will determine Thiel’s role in shaping the future of the Republican Party. Thiel has donated to over a dozen congressional campaigns this midterm cycle. But unlike the more established politicians in this cohort, Vance and Masters are homegrown, one-time hires by the man himself — Thielian without compromise.

If Masters and Vance win, so does Thiel’s vision for the GOP. It’s a vision to move beyond the country club, NAFTA Republicans; it is a more buttoned-down, competent version of Trumpism, capable of translating the former president’s blustering anti-establishment, anti-technocrat rhetoric into an actual social and economic program.

As it stands, Vance has a strong lead in Ohio. Electoral models from FiveThirtyEight give Vance about a 71% chance of winning the race, despite opponent Tim Ryan outscoring him nearly 11 to 1. At a recent GOP fundraising event, Thiel told guests that Vance didn’t need more funding because the Ohio race was “done in my mind.”

But out in Arizona, Masters is still playing catch-up against incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly. The same FiveThirtyEight models give Kelly an 80% chance of winning. And heading into Election Day, Kelly will have a huge amount of money to spend on TV ads since he outspent Masters by nearly 8 to 1, even for Thiel’s latest $5 million pledge.

Masters dismissed polls showing Kelly with a comfortable lead. He’s right to point out that this race is very much up for grabs — let’s not forget those polling metrics from 2016. In either case, Masters undeniably has a tougher road ahead of Vance.

Thiel supports Masters and Vance in part because he believes Democrats have hitched the wagon to Big Tech, to the detriment of the American middle class. In his keynote speech at this year’s National Conservatism conference, Thiel took the established resource curse theory from economics and reconfigured it as the “technology curse,” which he defines as when a “strong technology industry is associated with social dysfunction rather than progress.” In both cases, the general idea is that an abundance of wealth allows corrupt and incompetent governments to stay in power, while the economy sustains itself with minimal ingenuity.

Thiel argues that technological wealth enables distorted political dynamics, which in turn have led to the housing crisis and a wider erosion of the middle class. And while he identifies “wokeism” as the religion of our resource-rich state, Thiel still says it shouldn’t be confused with “the most important thing going on.”

Therefore, Thiel tells us, Democrats have no choice but to hitch the wagon to technology and “pretend they can do [the] California [model] work for the country as a whole.” Alternatives such as the “false blue-collar model” or the redistributive “globalist financial model” work even worse than California, he claims.

So where does that leave the Republicans? Thiel criticizes the party as it stands now for being too nihilistic—only defining itself in opposition to wokeism and the broader California model. Instead, he wants the party to return to “some kind of broad-based growth that is not inflation-promoting, not cancer-causing, and not some kind of narrow real estate”.

But that’s about where the recipe ends. We can extrapolate from other Thiel statements that he wants more investment in non-software technology (“atoms, not bits”), and of course he will always be in favor of less regulation. But apart from that, Thiel’s vision seems more defined by what it is not, than what it is is. Ironically, it suffers from the same ideological nihilism he identifies within the conventional GOP.

It’s important to note that Thiel doesn’t want Republicans to kill the golden goose: A tech executive reading this might think that Peter Thiel wants nothing more than to wrest government power from the Democrats and use it to destroy tech companies, but that’s only half right : He wants state power, but not as a means to destroy technology.

“It’s just like Saudi Aramco isn’t the main problem in Saudi Arabia — it’s the most functioning institution,” Thiel analogized to suggest we should blame the superstructure around Apple and Google, not the companies themselves. So Thiel identifies technology as fundamental to the problem, but doesn’t want to destroy it as part of the solution.