Nitish Pahwa writes in Slate about Silicon Valley’s devotion to J.D. Vance, although women are not so happy in light of Vance’s misogyny.
Pahwa writes:
Who was happiest about Donald Trump’s Monday decision to pick Ohio Sen. and former ivory-tower Appalachia whisperer J.D. Vance as his vice presidential hopeful? It wasn’t rural America, swing-state independents, or women voters. It wasn’t the conservative intelligentsia or the Catholic hard-liners, despite Vance’s self-pronounced conversion. It certainly wasn’t the traditional Republican donors currently opening up their checkbooks for Trump, or even Vance’s own Senate colleagues.
In actuality, it was the Big Tech and venture capital ambassadors who were the happiest of all. Trump had been the target of a heated effort from Silicon Valley types of all strata (well, mostly billionaires) to get Vance to the VP slot. Or, as Axios reported Monday, “a secret lobbying campaign continued into yesterday morning, with Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson and tech investor David Sacks all calling Trump to try to lock in Vance.”
Musk, of course, has struck up a close relationship with Trump in recent months, regularly chatting on the phone with the former president and helping to organize executives who desire to oust President Joe Biden over his pro-worker, pro-tax, and pro-regulation agenda. “Excellent decision by @realDonaldTrump,” Musk tweeted to the ex-president, who still hasn’t returned to posting on the social network formerly known as Twitter.
Longtime VC, podcast host, and political influencer Sacks gave a Monday night speech at the Republican National Convention that, like many of his other screeds, mostly made the case against Biden instead of one for Trump. He did, however, tweet his satisfaction with Vance, praising his military service and subsequent critiques of forever wars, calling him “an American patriot, with the courage to fight America’s wars but the wisdom to know when to avoid them.” (Sacks’ tweet also erroneously implied that Vance had enlisted “when the Twin Towers came down,” even though he couldn’t join and serve until a few years after 9/11.)
It’s not just them. The burgeoning (and amply funded) corpus of anti-regulation, anti-“woke,” pro-crypto, and A.I.–enchanted “effective accelerationists” are fully taken in with Vance. On X, Oculus and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey celebrated the coming matchup of “Tech Bro vs Kamala Harris,” while Chamath Palihapitiya—a now-right-leaning VC who co-hosts the megapopular All-In podcast with Sacks—reveled in the potential for “a Bestie adjacent as the VP.” (Besties refers to the four All-In hosts, who recently interviewed Trump on their show.)
Why the obsession with Vance? By the time his star began to rise with the 2016 publication of his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he had pivoted from a career in law to a Silicon Valley gig at Mithril Capital, one of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firms. At that time, Thiel—who’d co-authored an anti-“multiculturalism” bookwith Sacks in the 1990s—was one of Trump’s few outspoken tech-world surrogates, a position that had earned him a speaking slot at the RNC that first nominated Trump for president.
The conservative Vance wasn’t fully aligned with his boss, though: He frequently criticized Trump even while attempting to explain the candidate’s appeal to rural Americans. He also disparaged Silicon Valley in an interview with Slate as “more of a bubble than D.C.” and New York, full of Richie Riches with “no real sense of how frustrated and how destitute a lot of people outside of Silicon Valley are.” In an early-2017 New York Times op-ed, he expressed some admiration for both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama while also “hop[ing] for better policy from the new administration, a health reform package closer to my ideological preferences, and a new approach to foreign policy.” Just two months later, he wrote another Times piece about why the “optimism [that] blinds many in Silicon Valley to the real struggles in other parts of the country” had spurred him to move back to Ohio from California.
Although Vance may have left the Bay Area, he hadn’t left his position with Thiel’s company and remained a “friend and big fan” of him. He got more involved in the VC arena, joining Steve Case’s Revolution firm as a partner in managing a fund that aimed to support more startups based outside the coasts. As reporting from Business Insider has indicated, it is unclear how successful he really was at that mission.
It was clear that Vance’s return home was less about uplifting the “hillbillies” he had whitesplained to the liberal bubble with his memoir and more about seeking higher power. He teased a run for office as far back as late 2016, in a Washington Post interview about his moving plans, and floated the possibilityagain two years later, while joining a conservative influence group chaired by Federalist Society maven Leonard Leo. When that run for office flamed out, he dug deeper into the VC realm, starting a Cincinnati-based fund backed by Thiel and Marc Andreessen in 2020.
