The Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel’s relationship with Donald J. Trump turned ice-cold in the middle of 2023, when the former president excoriated Mr. Thiel on a private phone call over his unwillingness to support Mr. Trump’s re-election bid.
Now, after Mr. Trump chose one of Mr. Thiel’s closest political acolytes as his running mate, there appears to be a thaw.
Mr. Thiel is warming toward supporting the Republican ticket, he said in an interview on Friday, although he stopped short of making a formal endorsement. He also said he was not yet prepared to make a big donation to help elect Mr. Trump and his vice-presidential pick, Senator JD Vance of Ohio — remaining noncommittal and sounding dour about whether his money could make a difference.
“I always try to resist getting swept up in excitement,” Mr. Thiel told The New York Times over breakfast in Washington, making his first comments about the Republican ticket since Mr. Vance’s selection. “But in spite of many misgivings I had earlier this year, it makes me more hopeful that a second Trump term will be better than the first.”
Mr. Thiel has been plain that he believed the first Trump term did not deliver on all of its promise. But he had to tend to his relationship with Mr. Trump in 2022 as two allies who once worked for him, Mr. Vance and Blake Masters in Arizona, ran in Republican primaries for Senate where the former president’s endorsement proved critical. Mr. Vance won, but Mr. Masters lost the general election to Senator Mark Kelly.
Mr. Thiel was the person who introduced Mr. Vance to Mr. Trump in early 2021, and yet Mr. Vance now has a far stronger relationship with Mr. Trump than Mr. Thiel does.
Still, over the final few weeks of the veepstakes contest, Mr. Thiel made calls to privately encourage Mr. Trump to choose Mr. Vance. And during the Friday interview, Mr. Thiel was clearly excited that it had worked out.
He praised the Ohio senator, whose book “Hillbilly Elegy” he had written a blurb for back in the day: “I think JD is smart. I think he’s charismatic. I think he is not a crazy person. And I think he is fundamentally a good person,” he said, adding. “I don’t even know who else they could have found who’s all four of those.”
Mr. Thiel appears to be burned out by partisan politics, though. After spending $35 million in 2022 to support Mr. Vance and Mr. Masters, Mr. Thiel has indicated that he wants to reel back his political involvement. He has nevertheless been an object of close observation by the Trump campaign, and the selection of Mr. Vance in part reflected an attempt by the Republican Party to consolidate its support among megadonors like Mr. Thiel.
Mr. Thiel donated just over $1 million to support the Trump ticket in 2016. But more significant than the money was the credibility the venture capitalist offered Mr. Trump, vouching for him in a prime-time speech at the Republican National Convention and serving as his key emissary to Silicon Valley. As the industry’s most prominent Trump supporter, he became one of its most controversial characters — all for a relatively little amount of money.
Mr. Thiel donated nothing to Mr. Trump’s re-election bid in 2020. And this time around, he seems weakly motivated to get involved financially.
Asked if he planned to donate to Mr. Trump’s campaign or allied groups, Mr. Thiel would say only that he was supremely confident in the ticket — suggesting that the former president did not need his money, effectively, and so he was “disinclined to do it.”
“I went on record saying I would not give money to super PACs, and I still feel I have to stick with that,” he said. “I think it’s going to be very different from 2016 or 2020. I don’t think the election is going to be close. I think Trump and JD will crush the election by a solid margin — 4 percent or 5 percent of the popular vote. And it doesn’t matter what I do. It doesn’t matter what Democrat donors do.”
Mr. Thiel offered that he thought the 2024 election mimicked the 1968 race, when a Democratic administration was unpopular and challenged by a third-party candidate, George Wallace. This year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the third party candidate, and Mr. Thiel took the rise of Mr. Kennedy as a sign that “people are really, really unhappy with the incumbents” and another sign that Mr. Trump would win just like Richard Nixon did 56 years ago.
But he also said the race mimicked the 1980 and 1992 campaigns, when Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton soundly defeated their opponents.
“Trump is locked on a massively winning race. And the Democrats are locked on a massively losing race.” he said. “And that’s why the money doesn’t matter.”
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