1) He's rich and directly benefits from the tax cuts.

2) The cuts to social services don't affect people in his pay grade.

3) He lives in a gated community and wouldn't be targeted for harm by the sort of people that are now emboldened to say the quiet part out loud.

4) He founded Palantir and wants to secure more government contracts

5) His experience with being outed by Gawker (completely unethical IMO) probably also led to him viewing "the media" as a monolithic force out to get him.

Everyone who has a job directly benefits from the tax cuts.

Untrue, because the tax cuts aren't unilateral cuts and inclide increases,and even the cuts alone don't affect all people with jobs.

The media one is a really interesting point. I did not consider that but makes sense.

The rich pay most of the taxes, therefore they will "benefit" most from tax cuts, if you define "benefit" as "keeping your own money." How can someone who pays no or little income tax get a huge benefit from a tax cut?

Why are you framing your question as though there aren't 10s of millions of Americans who live somewhere between "billionaire" and "poverty level". They are the <$100k household income level that are paying a bigger % of their income on taxes than Thiel ever will.

And unlike Thiel, they don't have access to accountants that can shuttle their cash away into tax shelters or lobbyists who will buy off politicians for peanuts to get them to vote for even more cuts.

I've seen a presentation by Thiel, which i can't search for at the moment, in which he makes a somewhat nuanced argument that globalization is only sometimes good, depending on how much technological innovation is happening in the economy. He observes that outside of computing, technological development has to some degree stalled since the 70s, and concludes that in such an economic environment, unfettered globalization is to be avoided.

No political party in the world supports "unfettered globalization". If that were so, WTO conferences would not drag on for years because countries were deadlocked over relaxing agricultural subsidies.

Wild guess: he fears having more money taken from him in business and personally if the opposition wins (both directly and indirectly via policies). He likely feels the opposition continually asks for more (from those at his level) and mismanages it. One might suspect it's party driven, not Trump in particular.

I'd say tax cuts and a seat at the table. Also Thiel's Palantir thrives if there is more surveillance (though Obama was pretty bullish on surveillance too...).

Other than that, he's fairly libertarian, so he _should_ be for free trade and free immigration rather than protectionism.

Likely because he thinks he has a good chance of winning regardless of whether it is right or wrong, and that being on his side will personally benefit him, so the usual motivation. He's very similar to Trump.

Right but how does this benefit Peter directly? I was trying to think of many ways, both positive and negative. Tax benefits is a simplistic one...a possible negative way maybe crazy but if US innovation goes down because of Trump, possibly New Zealand will prosper as the alternative silicon valley but I don't have enough understanding to say such things.

Thiel is a libertarian. Trump is closer to the libertarians than any other plausible candidate who can win.

He's a libertarian and Trump at least advances things in that direction?

Trump's (by policy at least) an anti-democratic racist right authoritarian.

He's not a libertarian by any stretch, though a right libertarian might tend to agree with his views on what government should not do. (Though if the “libertarian” part means anything, probably have strong disagreements with much of what he deployed government to do.)

lol. On what planet is trump any of that?

He's a left-leaning independent who happens to espouse a few republican type ideals like low taxes to stimulate the economy, and a few democrat type ideals such as legalizing pot and lgbt rights. He could have credibly run for the democrat party's nomination and probably won it, in which case he'd be the darling of the left (and Hillary would still hate him). Remember, everybody on the left, including the last president, said all the same things he said about the immigration issue just a few years ago.

He's not "right" or "racist" in any way, and he got where he is through the democratic process...

I would agree with you he's not a libertarian. I am going to laugh my rear end off when he tells the DEA to take pot off the schedule though.

> lgbt rights

Have you not been watching the news the past 2 years?

> He's a left-leaning independent

Trump is obviously a Republican (whatever he may have had as an affiliation before), and equally-obviously not “left-leaning”, a shown by his actions with control over actual policy (whatever he might have pretended to make favorable connections with various, especially New York, politicians when his only interest in policy was getting favorable treatment for his own personal business interests.)

> He could have credibly run for the democrat party's nomination and probably won it

That's an interesting fantasy, that is only plausible in that (given his ambiguous political positions before the campaign) one might imagine him adopting a completely different persona that didn't back bigoted and right-wing causes and yet was no less inconsistent with his pre-campaign persona. But his campaign persona, and even moreso his policies and appointments in office, have been consistently hard right, and often outright bigoted, from his demonizing immigrants (including currently-legal ones as part of his campaign to curtail currently-legal immigration, especially family-based immigration) to the Muslim ban to his his anti-LGBT policies, to his stance against investigations of police civil rights violations that were ongoing when he took office (which were echoed even louder and given concrete policy substance by his appointee as Attorney-General, who is in lockstep on this issue even if they have not seen eye to eye over Trump's personal legal exposure.)

You know he was a registered democrat once, right?

He's not backed any "bigoted right wing causes." You know there was never a Muslim ban, right? You know that the immigration laws haven't changed, the previous administration simply ignored them. For anyone who believes in the rule of law, the laws are supposed to be enforced -- it's a foundational principle of operating a society. That's why he's continually called for Congress to change the laws if they want things changed.

Police civil rights violations? Are you confused into thinking that local policing in the US is somehow affected by DOJ policies? The DOJ does not often get directly involved in local policing issues -- they've historically only gotten involved in the most egregious of cases.

> You know he was a registered democrat once, right?

Yes, and I addressed that.

> You know there was never a Muslim ban, right?

There is an exclusion policy which Trump himself referred to as that. You can choose whether you think he did that because the polciy is actually bigoted or simply as a technique to appeal to bigots, I suppose.

> You know that the immigration laws haven't changed,

Trump has, in fact, campaigned for changes to them to reduce the scope of legal immigration, particularly to eliminate much currently legal family-based immigration (and even most recently asserted they he can universally abrogate a Constitutional guarantee in order to deny citizenship to children of immigrants.)

> For anyone who believes in the rule of law, the laws are supposed to be enforced

Well, yes, that is why a lot of people are upset about his suggestion that he would revoke birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, by executive order.

> Police civil rights violations? Are you confused into thinking that local policing in the US is somehow affected by DOJ policies?

Are you confused into thinking that the DoJ investigations into misconduct and federal civil rights charges (or, more often, consent decrees entered into to forestall such charges) don't effect local policing, both in the jurisdictions directly involved and others that don't want to end up under a DoJ microscope?

> they've historically only gotten involved in the most egregious of cases.

Yes, and there were some of those currently ongoing at the time of tj transition.

Interesting. I would have taken this for a lazy slur, but that article does seem to be saying basically that democracy is something he wants to escape from. That's a fascinating angle here.

actually i thought this but was too cowardly to say that directly.

On the surface I'm confident he has as much distaste for mainstream liberal media as Trump does.

Other than that, historically he's been pretty conservative hasn't he?

If in doubt, follow the money.

Peter Thiel is rich and has a Randian "fuck you, I got mine" attitude. The GOP's policies disproportionally favor the rich without regard for practically anything else. A Trump presidency means that control is largely in the hands of the GOP. Hence Thiel favors Trump.

It's probably that simple.

A couple I can think of

1. Zero to one talks about the importance of optimism vs pessimism for the future. Compare Obama saying the US needs to get used to sub 2% GDP growth vs Trump saying we can hit 5%. Trump isn't afraid to think big at the very least when it comes to space force and similar big projects

2. Thiel is libertarian and sees Trump as a means to reduce government. Romney got in trouble a few years back for saying a hard truth, that 47% of people don't pay taxes and are never going to vote for less free stuff. At some point it becomes two wolves arguing with a sheep on what's for dinner

3. Personal gain, Thiel has Palantir as well as another company that would use AI to create a "virtual" boarder wall via image recognition

Partly cynically because he knows Trump is an incredibly simple man. He likes people that like him. That's it. That's all it takes to be on Trump's good side, whether you're a Saudi or a white nationalist. He really doesn't discriminate as long as you say nice things about him.

The other reason is that he agrees with at least a decent chunk of Trump's policies. He probably supports lower taxes, reduced regulations, and probably greater isolationism.