In 2022, one of Silicon Valley’s more outspokenly eccentric billionaires, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, had two very conspicuous irons in the fire in the political arena. He was backing (with both money and encouragement) two young protégés who were running for the Senate. Both J.D. Vance of Ohio (hired and enriched by Thiel around the time Hillbilly Elegy hit the bookstands) and Blake Masters (co-author of Thiel’s own best-selling book on business start-ups, Zero to One) of Arizona won contentious Republican primaries after securing endorsements from Donald Trump. Vance went on to win unimpressively in his very red state. Masters, meanwhile, after earning fame for running some of the creepier campaign ads ever seen, lost to Democratic incumbent Mark Kelly by a margin sufficiently large that Masters, an election denier on Trump’s behalf in a state full of Republican election deniers, conceded defeat.
As Vance acclimated himself to the Senate and became a national pin-up boy for right-wing “populist” MAGA activists, Masters decided to make another try at the Senate but collided with the ambitions of another star of the mad fringe, Kari Lake. Reportedly edged out of the 2024 Senate race by Trump himself, Masters decided to parachute into an open Republican House seat in suburban Phoenix. But he entered a crowded GOP primary that included Arizona House Speaker Ben Toma, former congressman Trent Franks, and Abe Hamadeh, a fellow MAGA extremist and 2022 attorney-general candidate who was immediately endorsed by Lake. (Masters, of course, was endorsed by his fellow Thiel disciple Vance.) But then in December, the plot thickened when Trump endorsed Hamadeh.
Masters and Hamadeh proceeded to wage what one Arizona observer called “the dirtiest, nastiest congressional race in all the country.” Masters attacked Hamadeh (the son of Syrian immigrants) for his Islamic background and — tell me if this sounds familiar — for being childless and unmarried and thus having “no skin in the game.”
For his part, Hamadeh routinely called Masters “Blake the Snake” and made his opponent’s ties to Thiel an issue, as Axios reported: “Blake Masters is a desperate, power-hungry coward attempting to divide MAGA to appease his Silicon Valley puppet masters.”
Even as these two former allies hissed and spat at each other, the two big national pols in their warring camps joined forces when Trump chose Vance as his running mate. No one knows for sure whether Vance or even Thiel whispered Arizona advice into the former president’s ear, but on the weekend prior to the primary, Trump modified his original position on Truth Social to issue a “Complete and Total Endorsement” of both Masters and Hamadeh, which was a bit like endorsing both sides in a civil war.
The primary finally occurred on Tuesday, and Masters appears to have lost to Hamadeh (the race hasn’t been called yet, but Hamadeh leads by a 30 to 25 percent margin with 79 percent of the votes counted). At the same time, national headlines featured the steady humiliation of Vance as the veep nominee many Republicans deeply regretted.
While they are distinct individuals, obviously, Masters’s apparent demise isn’t the best sign for Vance, with whom he shares not only the Thiel connection and a strong bias against childless people but, well, an air of weirdness. The Bulwark’s Amanda Carpenter said this about Masters in 2022:
Masters—a Peter Thiel creation—is a bastard conglomeration of the internet and Trumpism. Take one part Silicon Valley bro and add one part rad-trad Crossfit philosophy, shake on some Stanford pretentiousness, stretch it out into something that resembles a slightly more human form than Jared Kushner and you’ll get the idea.
If Kamala Harris settles on Masters’s 2022 vanquisher Mark Kelly as her own running mate, she’ll have a sidekick who is experienced with Vance’s type of Republican bluster. Then again, every Democratic veep prospect is having great sport at Vance’s (and Trump’s) expense these days, particularly Minnesota governor Tim Walz, as the New York Times noted:
[W]e’re not afraid of weird people,” Mr. Walz said during an event organized by the Harris campaign. “We’re a little bit creeped out, but we’re not afraid.”
That should make Peter Thiel very afraid.
