It was one of the worst days in the short life of Donald Trump’s administration—an administration that has not known many good days. But, as it turned out, the afternoon of July 12 was the time I’d scheduled an appointment with Steve Bannon, the man who, a month later, would leave his post as the president’s chief strategist. And as I walked through the West Wing, the simmering distress was unmistakable.
In an alcove, National-Security Adviser H. R. McMaster huddled with Reince Priebus, the soon-to-be-ex chief of staff. Jay Sekulow, the public face of President Trump’s legal team, furiously checked his cell phone. While aides conferred on an outdoor patio, brows furrowed, a top White House adviser took me aside and gravely confided, “The situation is even worse than you can imagine.” But I was not there to discuss the latest bombshell: the revelation that Donald Trump Jr. had hosted a previously undisclosed meeting with some shadowy Russians. No, every other reporter in the nation’s capital was already pursuing that story.
Instead, I had come to discuss another subject entirely. And Bannon, seeing me lingering in a hallway, popped out of a conference room and shepherded me into his office—at the time a virtual command center for the Trump Revolution, just steps from the Oval. To some, Bannon—intense, brooding, and sardonic—was the intellectual architect of a stunning election upset; to others, he was a persistent dog whistle who riled up Trump’s base and America’s basest instincts. But in the White House that week, few cast a longer shadow.
“Can you believe this?!” he said, pointing to a wall of TVs with breaking-news alerts about the Russian rendezvous. Another wall served as a sort of mood board, papered with startling policy goals: “Begin removing more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants,” “Cancel [Obama’s] unconstitutional executive action[s],” “Impose term limits on all members of Congress.” Bannon, despite the prevailing angst of the day, was engaged, gregarious, and happy to speak on the record. The reason? I was interested in a man who, in some ways, was his ideological soulmate: Peter Thiel, the elusive tech billionaire, who, far from public view, has wielded outsize clout within the new administration.
“I cannot overstate his impact on the transition,” Bannon began, describing Thiel as a hidden hand in shaping Team Trump. “You will see in the near term that Peter will be taking on new responsibilities, like intelligence.” While Trump and his communications squad may rail about Washington’s permanent bureaucracy, especially those in national-security positions, Bannon talked about having been in the trenches alongside Thiel as part of an offensive against the so-called Deep State (a term used in certain quarters, recently on the far right, to describe what they see as a force within the government, including the intelligence agencies, that consistently asserts its power in order to maintain the status quo). Indeed, as Bannon and others avowed, Thiel—a man most Americans could not pick out of a lineup—was apparently poised to assume some serious, and seriously controversial, responsibilities.
Who, then, is Peter Thiel? What are his goals? And what has he been doing sub rosa for Donald J. Trump? In search of answers, I met with an array of Thiel confidants from Washington, D.C., to New York, to San Francisco. And throughout, I kept coming back to a single scene that I had watched on TV last December.
The Early Adopter
The setting was a sunlit conference room in Trump Tower. The timing was pivotal: five weeks before Trump would assume the presidency. Around the table sat many of Silicon Valley’s most powerful entrepreneurs, who had gathered for what the president-elect’s team had labeled a tech summit. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Apple’s Tim Cook were there. And Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet/Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Intel’s Brian Krzanich, and Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX.
Trump opened the session by paying homage to Peter Thiel, who sat to his left, in a gray pin-striped suit. A tech-investing savant, data-mining wizard, and enthusiastic Trump supporter, Thiel—thin, pale, and invariably serious—was credited with coaxing some of the heavyweights, several of whom had publicly endorsed Hillary Clinton, to make an appearance. “I want to start by thanking Peter,” Trump said, “because he saw something very early, maybe before we saw it, and of course he’s known for that in a different way. He’s ahead of the curve.” Then he warmly grabbed Thiel’s hand with two of his own, adding, “I want to thank you. You’re a very special guy.”
Special indeed. For the previous year, Thiel had been seeing a lot of things very early. In the spring of 2016, he became what his peers might call an early adopter when, after backing former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. Carly Fiorina’s presidential run, he switched his allegiance to Trump. “[Peter] took a lot of flak for his support,” Michael Anton told me over coffee in Washington. Anton, whom Thiel had lobbied to place on the National Security Council (N.S.C.), had gained a measure of notoriety for his widely read and contentious essay comparing the 2016 presidential election to United 93—the hijacked 9/11 flight on which heroic passengers stormed the cockpit. (Trump, in Anton’s view, was the only candidate who could save an imperiled nation.) “I think Peter took a brave stance in going against the grain. But that’s who he is.” Another senior White House official, who considers Thiel a friend and mentor, observed, “As a successful gay man, Peter thinks Donald Trump plays an important moderating influence on the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which is out of step with Peter’s libertarian instincts and his lifestyle.” Thiel drove home the point, in this official’s view, when he was rewarded with a prime speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in July 2016 and famously asserted, “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.”
Three months later, Trump’s fortunes appeared to dip when a video surfaced in which he was heard making misogynistic remarks to Access Hollywood’s Billy Bush. But Thiel stood firm. Within days, he donated $1.25 million to the Trump cause, and Thiel’s bullishness—doubling down during one of Trump’s darkest hours—gave the candidate a much-needed boost.
The wager paid off. Trump defeated Clinton in an Electoral College upset, and a few days later Thiel was named to the executive committee of the president-elect’s transition team (chaired by Mike Pence), along with several insiders who would come to inherit the West Wing. Thiel, working with a close-knit group of Silicon Valley imports at Trump Tower and his own pied-à-terre on Union Square, according to two administration officials, advised the incoming senior staff on science, technology, security, and intelligence matters—and helped fill jobs in the Plum Book, which lists thousands of politically appointed positions within the federal government. Bannon discussed that transition period wistfully, as though recalling simpler times: “After Jared [Kushner], who looked after foreign affairs, [ex–national-security adviser Michael] Flynn, Reince [Priebus, the former chief of staff], who made the trains run on time, and myself, Peter had the biggest impact.” Moreover, Bannon and two Thiel allies in the White House have claimed that Thiel, as recently as September, has remained actively engaged in advising the administration.
A Contrarian Libertarian
By now, the ascension of Peter Andreas Thiel, 50, is Silicon Valley lore. Born in Frankfurt, Germany, he immigrated to the U.S. as a child, attended college and law school at Stanford, and worked at the white-shoe law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and at a unit of Credit Suisse as a derivatives trader. In 1998, he co-founded the company which would become PayPal with some fellow over-achievers, among them Elon Musk, the electric-car innovator. In time, Thiel and other PayPal alumni, including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman and Yelp’s Russel Simmons, became known as the PayPal Mafia.
By 2004, Thiel had entered the ranks of history’s shrewdest investors when he wagered a relatively modest sum—$500,000—on a 10.2 percent stake in Facebook. Though he has since sold many of those shares for more than $1 billion, he remains on Facebook’s board. With some of his PayPal pals, he launched Founders Fund, a venture-capital operation that presciently invested in a host of big-name start-ups, including Airbnb, Lyft, SpaceX, and Spotify. Thiel’s net worth, over time, would grow to $2.7 billion. (His portfolio has also included Thrive Capital and Oscar Health, two firms started by Joshua Kushner, Jared’s younger brother, and Cadre, a real-estate tech company, which Jared co-founded.)
Thiel’s powers of prediction, however, failed him for a time while he was running Clarium Capital, a $7 billion hedge fund that lost 90 percent of its value in three years, following the global economic implosion a decade ago. But he had also helped found and direct influential ventures such as Palantir Technologies, the $20 billion data-analysis outfit. What’s more, his science incubator, Breakout Labs, bankrolls biotech start-ups. He co-hosts exclusive conferences that bring together thought leaders with divergent views. His 2014 book, Zero to One—part manifesto, part how-to manual for entrepreneurs—topped The New York Times best-seller list. His name has even been floated as a possible candidate for governor of California—and ambassador to Germany.
Thiel’s purview is as vast as his ambitions. He has homes or properties in San Francisco, the Hollywood Hills, New York, Hawaii, and New Zealand, where he acquired citizenship a few years back. (He is a keen fan of The Lord of the Rings, which was filmed there.) According to one of his friends, “Thiel has said to me directly and repeatedly that he wanted to have his own country”—even placing a dollar value on “owning” a sovereign state: $100 billion.
Through it all, Thiel, who guards his privacy, has become known for challenging conventions, including those as seemingly immutable as death, taxes—and tuition. To wit: he takes daily doses of human growth hormone to stave off the effects of aging. He has supported the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to build floating cities beyond the reach of traditional governance. And his Thiel Fellowship hands out $100,000 grants to budding entrepreneurs who agree not to go to college. Such maverick ideas make Thiel “something of a revered figure for his successes in the tech and venture-capital worlds,” claimed author and biotech journalist David Ewing Duncan. “And despite what many see as his controversial backing of Trump, if you’re a young entrepreneur you don’t want to cross him because he has the power to invest in your next big dream. There is a case to be made that renegades should be defended.”
It was Thiel, after all, who secretly funded the invasion-of-privacy lawsuit that pro wrestler Hulk Hogan brought against Gawker Media, resulting in a $140 million verdict for Hogan (since negotiated downward) and bankrupting the gossip-and-news franchise, whose blog (Valleywag) had earlier “outed” Thiel. Regarded warily for his stealth, single-mindedness, and tenacity, he is, in a way, a Silicon Valley Steve Bannon.
Still, Thiel stands out in an industry that seems to mint large lives. It is not hard to find peers—even those with divergent political beliefs—who speak of him glowingly. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told me, “People say we don’t have enough heroes, enough courageous people. Well, here’s one. Here’s a guy who has had an impact.” Though Schmidt had been on the Hillary Clinton bandwagon, he was quick to acknowledge that Thiel’s support for, and now access to, Donald Trump gave the tech sector a strong advocate in Washington—an important role now that some of the biggest social-media and search firms are under the microscope regarding their susceptibility to foreign manipulation, overseas collection of private users’ data, security safeguards, possible monopolistic practices, lack of regulatory oversight, and tolerance of hate speech. “He took a controversial position that no one else in the Valley did”—namely, backing Trump—“and he stuck to it,” insisted Schmidt, who conceded that had the election gone the other way he might well have been occupying Thiel’s catbird seat as an unpaid but immensely powerful adviser to the president of the United States. (BuzzFeed reported that Thiel, as recently as May, had privately expressed reservations about Trump—at a time when three current administration sources told me Thiel was firmly in the president’s fold.)
And yet a number of people who describe themselves as either Thiel’s friends or longtime associates would speak with me only on the condition of anonymity, citing a variety of reasons: non-disclosure agreements they had signed with one or more of Thiel’s entities, fear of retribution from Trump-administration officials, or reluctance to alienate Thiel or the PayPal Mafia. These individuals—including several in his inner circle—would only arrange a meeting or a conversation using tradecraft worthy of C.I.A. case officers. They communicated via encrypted apps (ones that do not register on a cell phone’s call log). Two of them, to check my bona fides before agreeing to sit down with me, requested screenshots of Google searches about me—explaining that if they were to run the searches themselves, and someone combed through their search histories, they might be identified as a source for this article.
Some of these individuals insisted that there is a perplexing duality to the man. Said one friend and colleague who has known Thiel for nearly 20 years, “He exempts himself from the rules he applies to others. He’s a hard-core libertarian who rails against state surveillance except when he’s profiting off of it. He’s a strong believer in personal privacy but is happy to kick-start and sit on the board of Facebook, which monetizes every ounce of Americans’ data.” He described three prime movers in Thiel’s life: achieving immortality, resisting state control over his actions, and acquiring the money necessary to pull it off. Paradoxically, he added, Thiel distrusts authority: “That’s [partly] what motivated him years ago to run headlong into the intelligence field. He understood that, in a technological world, power is wielded by the intelligence community. You can only trust that community if you trust—or better yet, if you are—the person at the switch.”
And as three senior White House sources confirmed, he has already been invited to be that person. According to two of those officials, Thiel has been in discussions to become the chair of the lofty P.I.A.B.—the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. This high-level intelligence post (previously held by Establishment figures such as Brent Scowcroft, Les Aspin, and Warren Rudman) independently monitors America’s spy agencies and was established in 1956 to counsel the president. These two sources recounted that Thiel and the administration had been in the process of firming up the details of his role and staffing; then, in August, one of them texted me to say the offer to Thiel was now in limbo. Another White House source, however, told me in September that Thiel remains the president’s choice to lead the P.I.A.B., and when asked why Thiel has not distanced himself from the administration as many business leaders have, the official replied, “Peter is not a fair-weather fan. . . . He’s on board.”
If the position were ever to come through, however, Peter Thiel, a man who is already well versed in intelligence gathering for profit, might be “spying” on the spies in the U.S. government. Said one of those White House insiders, “[The] P.I.A.B. [job] is one of the most significant [advisory] positions that any American can hold. . . . President Trump wants a fresh set of eyes on this.” Another senior official had this to say: “What Peter has been offered”—the P.I.A.B. role—“is a hugely important position. It’s the only meaningful executive-branch oversight of the intelligence community. This P.I.A.B. will have more authority than it did under Obama. . . . [Peter] is not going to just sit back. As a libertarian, he is interested in the oversteps the intelligence community has made in the past. . . . Once”—or if—“he gets in there, he’s going to ensure that there isn’t inappropriate collection of [data on] U.S. persons.” (Trump, to be sure, hasn’t masked his skepticism of the intelligence community, sometimes criticizing the value of its activities and findings. He has fired the head of the F.B.I. He has pared back the President’s Daily Brief. And he has consistently downplayed the spy agencies’ conclusion that Russian agents attempted to interfere with the 2016 election to benefit Trump.)
Disruption, Washington-Style
With his résumé and Rolodex, Peter Thiel was eminently qualified to help Trump build out his latest large-scale acquisition—the United States government. “Of all of the issues we were looking at in preparation for assuming power, 25 to 30 percent were part of Peter’s portfolio,” Bannon explained. Thiel, according to three administration sources, has weighed in on, and suggested candidates to handle, among other things, anti-trust policy, the drug-approval process, cyber-security, and intelligence. Said one top Trump adviser, “When we have conventionally-minded people putting forward conventional approaches, Peter will come up with something radically different.” “Radical” may be soft-pedaling it. According to Bannon, “Peter’s whole mandate was to be disruptive and put forward people who could shake up the system.”
Early on, a cluster of Thiel associates, including Anton, joined Team Trump—comprising a group that one senior administration official referred to as “Peter’s embeds.” Some landed at the White House, including Michael Kratsios, the former chief of staff at Thiel Capital, who was named deputy chief technology officer, and Kevin Harrington, a veteran of the Thiel Macro hedge fund, who came aboard the N.S.C. as deputy assistant to the president for strategic planning. For the F.D.A., the name of Jim O’Neill, a managing director of Thiel’s Mithril Capital and co-founder of the Thiel Fellowship, was floated as a candidate for commissioner. Although that idea was nixed (O’Neill lacks a medical degree and, along with Thiel, has advocated shortening the drug-approval process), sources said he may still be named to a White House position, which could make him a Trump ambassador to Silicon Valley. At the Pentagon, Justin Mikolay, chief lobbyist for Thiel’s company Palantir, was named special assistant to Secretary of Defense James Mattis.
“It’s not unheard of for an outsider to be given a portfolio of jobs to fill or candidates to present,” observed an expert to whom Thiel’s team turned for help because of his years advising different administrations on new hires. “In my conversations, they made it clear that they want young, aggressive disrupters, not experienced, government-savvy people.” But this insider was baffled by how Thiel’s team was trying to fill vacancies. “They were not working off a short list. They literally had one name for each job. It was as if somebody had said to them, ‘Just give us somebody.’ ”
A senior White House official close to Thiel had a different take: “Washington is afraid of Peter Thiel. He defies the rules. . . . He has put forward candidates that have his innovative mind-set, and they’re either stuck in limbo [awaiting approval] or are losing out to people who are lobbying types or are financially connected. For a guy from Silicon Valley, he expected things to move faster. He expected that we would beat back and drain the swamp, but the swamp is winning.” In fact, Steve Bannon, a man who could hardly be characterized as an ideological milquetoast, maintained that some of Thiel’s candidates “were perhaps too disruptive to the system,” and he recalled how during the transition he and Thiel had a standing Saturday lunch at the latter’s New York apartment, where, to hear Bannon tell it, Bannon was the moderating influence. “I’ve been accused of being the internal mastermind of disruption, but at the end of the day I still [had] to make sure we balance[d] disruption with running the country.”
Even so, as Bannon conceded, “there is no doubt that the travel ban was written [and first issued in January] to disrupt and shake up the system so that people in government understood that when Donald Trump talked about ‘extreme vetting,’ he meant it. . . . We were trying to break the administrative state. The travel ban was done to disrupt a failing system and to drain the swamp.”
Sources in the administration contend that more disruption is coming. For starters, according to one senior White House adviser, there has been serious thought given to whether Amazon, Google, and Facebook are, in fact, “public utilities.” Said this senior official, “Maybe not Amazon, but certainly Facebook and Google. They’re virtually monopolistic. And ‘anti-trust’ ought to take a hard look at them. . . . Is [their] data a public trust? Is information now a common good? You are going to see a big drumbeat on this. I’m not saying anything’s going to happen, but it’s certainly going to be looked at. That will be an airburst over Brother Zuckerberg.”
And how does such talk sit with Thiel, who has longstanding interests in Facebook? Said another senior administration aide, “Peter has indicated that if he takes the P.I.A.B. position he intends to take a comprehensive look at the U.S. intelligence community’s information-technology architecture. He is super-concerned about Amazon and Google”—and Facebook, less so. “He feels they have become New Age global fascists in terms of how they’re controlling the media, how they’re controlling information flows to the public, even how they’re purging people from think tanks. He’s concerned about the monopolistic tendencies of [all three] companies and how they deny economic well-being to people they disagree with.” When I asked this source how likely it is that Thiel will assume the post, he answered, “He’s heavily leaning toward it. He feels there’s a lot of good he can do and it’s worth putting up with all the bullshit and scrutiny that will accompany his appointment.”
Private Eyes
Thiel is invested in a number of companies that operate in the intelligence arena. But such connections may raise potential conflict-of-interest concerns should Thiel ever assume a position overseeing the activities of the U.S. intelligence community. One company is Palantir, the data-mining giant. Another is Spaceflight Industries, whose BlackSky subsidiary provides high-resolution images from a constellation of private low earth satellites. Both Palantir and Spaceflight received key financing from In-Q-Tel, which is often described as the C.I.A.’s investment arm. Thiel has a sizable stake in both entities through Founders Fund and Mithril Capital Management, a global technology investment firm which he launched with longtime business partner Ajay Royan in 2012 and for which they have raised $1.39 billion. According to a high-ranking intelligence analyst, Royan has described Mithril as “an intelligence agency meets a think tank meets a highly disciplined underwriting company.”
Born in India and raised in the United Arab Emirates and Canada before coming to the U.S. in his teens, Royan graduated from Yale at age 20. He got his start with Thiel in 2003 at Clarium Capital, where he served as managing director and senior investor. He has been involved in various endeavors with Thiel ever since.
On the face of it, Palantir seems like another Thiel success story. The 13-year-old company has a roster of intelligence and law-enforcement clients. (A year ago, for example, the firm won a $222 million contract from the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command.) Palantir’s secret sauce is collating and analyzing vast and unwieldy streams of data to pinpoint patterns and anomalies, a process that has been effective in battling everything from terrorism to Medicare fraud. The company is positioned for a role in the Trump administration’s immigration-related efforts too: under contracts with the Department of Homeland Security, approved on President Obama’s watch and together worth more than $76 million, according to the Intercept, Palantir enables Immigration and Customs Enforcement to tap into biometric and geo-spatial data and records held by government agencies, to help identify and deport illegal aliens. (The New York Times has also reported that Thiel plans to invest in a start-up led by Oculus VR co-founder Palmer Luckey that seeks to employ high-tech sensors as part of a “virtual border wall” designed to detect illegal crossings along the Mexican border.)
Palantir’s co-founder and C.E.O., Alex Karp, in fact, was among the elite group invited to Trump’s tech summit—and to a similar meeting at the White House in June, which I attended as a member of the press pool. But despite Karp’s seat at the table, things might be bumpy back at the office in Palo Alto. Key clients have cut ties; some, like the N.Y.P.D., contentiously. Law-enforcement and intelligence agencies have gotten much better at doing what Palantir does. And concerns have been aired about a private company having access to so much sensitive information. (Palantir says it does not retain client data.) “Palantir operates behind the veil,” in the opinion of Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the A.C.L.U. “To what extent are they doing the government’s bidding? To what extent are they doing their own?” With the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency beset by leaks and hackers, he worries that private companies like Palantir could be “used as a way to launder activities for which the government wants to avoid public scrutiny. At the end of the day, Palantir is a for-profit company, and there’s an opportunity for abuse.” Stanley has noted that deploying Palantir’s software could be “anything between a good, efficient use of government resources and a true totalitarian nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale.”
A company spokesperson responded to this assertion directly: “We recognize that there are real risks of abuse of most information-technology platforms, including Palantir’s.” The company carefully evaluates the assignments it will accept, she said, and “invest[s] heavily in making privacy and civil-liberties-enhancing capabilities core features of our software architectures.”
Palantir, though, was caught red-handed in 2011, seeming to conspire with two other defense contractors to offer their services in waging a dubious cyber-and-disinformation campaign to discredit Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks and pressure American journalist Glenn Greenwald. The scheme was exposed when a PowerPoint presentation outlining its proposed tactics—and prominently displaying the Palantir logo—came to light (ironically, through a cyber-attack on the proposal’s main organizer). The plan boasted that Palantir’s clients could “leverage the same all-source intelligence platform used throughout the US national security and law enforcement communities.”
When I asked Greenwald about the incident, he said, “Palantir literally took part in planning how they could destroy my journalism career by forcing me to make some [James] Bond–like choice between ongoing advocacy of WikiLeaks or having my career destroyed. . . . Imagine if the F.B.I. or C.I.A. had been caught doing this. It would have been a huge scandal. But because it fell into this gray zone of private companies performing intelligence functions—where there isn’t the kind of oversight or accountability reserved for government agencies—it was ignored.”
When the slide presentation surfaced, Palantir C.E.O. Alex Karp appeared genuinely mortified and quickly apologized. “Palantir Technologies does not build software that is designed to . . . engage in so-called ‘cyber attacks’ or take other offensive measures,” Karp said in a statement. “On behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters.” After the controversy, the company set up an advisory panel to help enforce its “core commitment” to “protecting privacy and civil liberties.” Even so, Greenwald remains suspicious of Peter Thiel’s motives. “As someone who was literally targeted by his company for exercising my civil liberties, I find it hard to think of a less trustworthy person.”
Greenwald’s reporting on Edward Snowden—which helped The Guardian win a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for public service—remains politically problematic to some, but Greenwald’s take on Palantir is shared even by people I spoke to who regard Snowden as a traitor.
Like others I canvassed on the subject, one well-placed American spook said of Palantir, “People in the intelligence community resent the hell out of them because they don’t adhere to the same standards of conduct”—they are not reined in by government oversight. “It’s a big problem.” This source brought up a troubling question: what stops Palantir—or those holding its purse strings—from training its sights on individual Americans, whether as part of an outsourced intelligence program or simply to boost its bottom line, by vacuuming up data from Facebook (and its other services, such as WhatsApp), Twitter, Internet providers (which log users’ Web histories), insurance and credit-scoring companies, health and location-based apps, or even information from those long-sacrosanct voter rolls, which the Trump administration has requested that the states hand over to the feds? (“Palantir is not in the data-collection or surveillance business,” counters the company’s spokesperson. “We support customers in integration and use of data assets to which they have legitimate and lawful access.”)
Above and beyond Palantir, concerns have been raised about how data analysis could have factored into Team Trump’s 2016 victory. Two tech C.E.O.’s insisted that Thiel’s mastery of the dark arts of data, paired with his wealth and ideology, could explain the president’s deep respect for a man who is in many ways his polar opposite (cerebral, introverted, press-averse). “The person who understands Facebook better than anyone [besides Mark Zuckerberg] is Peter,” said one. “He’s been on the board the entire time.” (Trump, admittedly, had help from the data firm Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Steve Bannon has sat. The company is bankrolled by Trump patron Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund mogul, and has been credited with identifying potential Trump voters in several swing states so the campaign’s social-media team could push pro-Trump or anti–Hillary Clinton stories to their newsfeeds.)
Palantir, for its part, insisted the company played no role in the Trump campaign’s data-mining efforts. A Palantir representative told me that Karp, in fact, had openly supported Hillary Clinton. When I asked Bannon about whether Thiel had some part in the data operation leading up to the election, he said, “When I joined the campaign, we were 16 points down and 85 days out. So I wasn’t working closely with Peter at that point.” He paused for a moment and then added, “Jared was interfacing with him pretty regularly.” On data?, I asked. “Data and other things. Ask Jared.” A source close to Kushner, however, denied that Thiel “worked with Jared on the campaign’s data operation.” The role that data played in Trump’s victory appears to be of particular interest to legislators and prosecutors delving into the campaign’s interactions with Russian associates. As has been widely reported, separate probes, in the words of the McClatchy news service, have been “examining whether the Trump campaign’s digital operation—overseen by Jared Kushner—helped guide Russia’s sophisticated voter targeting and fake news attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016.”
The Peter Principle
Thiel has declined repeated requests to participate in this article or to address questions about Palantir or his role in the Trump administration. But Bannon—in his White House office and in other conversations—spoke in detail about Mr. Thiel’s Washington sojourn. At one point I inquired about murmurs I’d heard regarding a possible move by the Trump administration to discard one of President Obama’s orders, known as Presidential Policy Directive 28 (P.P.D.-28). Bannon grabbed his BlackBerry (yes, he’s a holdout) and looked up the specifics of the edict, which was intended to help safeguard civil liberties without actually rolling back the surveillance capabilities of the country’s intelligence agencies. “Oh yes,” he said, smiling, “Peter is all over this. This is one of his babies.” And then, as if to reinforce the point, he continued, “Peter has a working group on this.”
In sum, said a senior White House official, “Peter is going after the Deep State.” Peter Thiel, the contrarian, prognosticator, and strategic thinker, plays to win. But whatever his endgame is, his knack for forecasting—and disruption—has already proved to be one of the powerful, unseen forces shaping how Donald Trump governs America.
