Billionaire technology investor Peter Thiel has no plans to donate to candidates running for office in 2024, according to a person familiar with his thinking, citing frustration over the Republican party’s preoccupation with culture war issues. The decision to sit on the sidelines is Thiel’s latest step away from politics after a long and ambivalent history as a major donor.
Thiel was a prominent backer of Donald Trump in the 2016 election, and helped bankroll the 2022 Senate campaigns of Republican JD Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona. After Vance’s victory in the primary, Thiel said he planned to wind down his involvement in the 2022 election and would not be backing other candidates.
Reuters earlier reported new of Thiel’s decision to sit out the 2024 race.
The person familiar with Thiel’s decision-making said that he thought Republicans were too focused on restricting access to abortion and hot-button issues like transgender bathrooms rather than economic issues like keeping the US competitive with China and bolstering American innovation.
A representative for Thiel did not provide a comment.
Recently, Thiel was part of a coterie of tech industry leaders who met with US lawmakers in Washington over cocktails and branzino to discuss China’s rising technological threat.
Thiel, a long time conservative with libertarian leanings, made a similar criticism of Republican orthodoxy during a speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention in which he denounced “fake culture wars” and said that while he was “proud to be gay” he was more “proud to be an American.”
“We are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom,” he said. “This a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”
Masters, a protégé who worked at Thiel’s investment firm, lost in part after Democrats ran ads criticizing his past statements on abortion, which included saying there should be “absolutely no abortions” and that a solution was to “make it illegal” and “punish the doctors.”
Thiel gave a total of $35 million to super political action committees that backed Masters and Vance. He also donated more than $123,000 to candidates and party committees, making him the sixth largest Republican donor in the midterms, according to OpenSecrets.
Thiel donated $1.3 million to support Trump in the 2016 general election, but didn't back him in the primaries. He gave $2 million to a super PAC that supported former Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina's campaign in the Republican nomination contest.
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