And yet when it came to the circumstances surrounding his untimely departure from Facebook, Palmer grew quiet before growing intense, urgent, and triggered.
Palmer’s NDA barred him from talking to anyone but a government officer about it. Good thing he was in luck. I ask questions for a living, often of people who don’t want to answer them. And Palmer had a story to tell.
“Mark Zuckerberg fired me from the company I created, for supporting Trump.”
At first, it sounded disgruntled and impossible to prove. It turns out Palmer kept the receipts, and my jaw damn near hit the ’70s-style carpet when he showed me the messages. Facebook absolutely fired one of America’s great geniuses for backing Donald Trump. They even forced Palmer to issue a statement that they drafted and pretended was his own. There was no grey area in this fight. Zuckerberg was freaking out that an inventor and major shareholder had the audacity to back the ultimate winner. When he was brought before Congress, the android-like Zuckerberg was prepared for every question save one: “Why was Palmer Luckey fired?” His answer was perjury. He would be prosecuted if Palmer gave his evidence to the Senate or the Department of Justice.
Palmer also showed me a Facebook post he had written in 2012 encouraging Donald Trump to run for president. Palmer had even used the lessons he’d learned from The Art of the Deal to build his companies. (Palmer’s whole story was later recounted in a best-selling book, The History of the Future, and in the Wall Street Journal.)
It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is extremely, almost monomaniacally left-wing. Palmer had been forced by one of the most powerful companies in the world to vote the way they wanted. He has since become a major donor to the Republican Party, including, in the spirit of full disclosure, to me.
But regardless, what happened to Palmer struck me as totally wrong. Worse yet, I was to learn that Palmer wasn’t alone. Silicon Valley won’t stop until we all think the same way—or else.
If Silicon Valley would do this to billionaires and their own colleagues, what would they do to the rest of us? If they could disappear the wunderkind who let us see a virtual reality, how easy is it to erase you and me?
More importantly, who would stop them?
The sometimes less-than-social network of Big Tech conservatives includes some of America’s brightest minds and most-needed voices. It is truly a secret society, but I had been inducted. They had waited in vain for a politician who understands what we are up against. Believing I could be helpful in the fight against Silicon Valley, I was soon introduced to its most famous architect-turned-dissident: Peter Thiel.
I have become friendly with this PayPal cofounder and Facebook first investor. We have had breakfast at his home in L.A., lunch on Capitol Hill, and cocktails in the Big Apple. Peter once rolled out of bed in his home, high up in the West Hollywood hills, to greet me wearing nothing but his underwear and a nightshirt. Weird, but OK! I have never met Peter in the Bay Area. There’s a reason: he travels.
“Wherever there’s a major shift in the American landscape in the past half-decade—be it political or cultural—there, somewhere on the donor list of the political campaign, or among the investors in the controversial technology, is Peter Thiel,” writes City Journal. Peter’s so involved that they call his clique the “PayPal Mafia.” His investments include Airbnb, LinkedIn, and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Indeed, Thiel is the don of the PayPal Mafia—there’s scarcely a major tech company that Peter hasn’t founded or backed—and yet he left it all behind.
Why?
One of the least contrarian things Peter has ever done by normal American standards is back candidate Trump, but for that he has been made to pay a steep social price—I call it the Trump Tax, and it is especially steep in the tech world. Protestors chanted outside his home. Entrepreneurs refused to take his venture firm’s money (or at least made a show of doing it reluctantly). He was a pariah and yet it turned out he was a prophet. The brilliant among us often are. And Peter is the most brilliant man I’ve ever met. We need him back on the Trump team ASAP.
Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO and then Thiel’s fellow Facebook board member, had written him an email telling him that he was going to give him a bad performance review—not because Peter was bad on the board but for backing Trump and “showing seriously poor judgment.” Naughty, naughty, Peter!
Peter didn’t back down. He gave an electric Republican Convention speech in 2016 and received a standing ovation when he declared, “I’m proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I’m proud to be an American!” When Donald Trump got in trouble over his old “locker room talk” tape for his bawdy comments, many fair-weather Republicans deserted him. Not so Peter. He doubled down with a donation and gave a great speech making the unafraid case for Trumpism and America First when it was most needed.
One of Peter’s key insights is that because it effectively costs nothing to distribute the latest and greatest software, your company can get to scale very quickly and literally take over the world. If you have a really good idea, you really can get it everywhere. That’s when the network effects really kick in. Thiel and his co-author Blake Masters write about that tendency in Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or
