Thiel-Backed Candidates Struggle to Connect With Donors Not Named Peter Thiel
Blake Masters and JD Vance won their primaries thanks largely to huge donations from the tech venture capitalist. They’ve since fallen way behind in fundraising.
Candidates Masters (left) and Vance.
Photographers: Brandon Bell/Getty Images (Masters); Drew Angerer/Getty Images (Vance)On the surface, Blake Masters and JD Vance would seem to have an important advantage as they head into the final weeks of their Senate races. Both have deep ties to Silicon Valley’s richest and wealthiest investors and years of experience raising huge sums of money to fund technology companies.
Masters spent nearly a decade working closely with the venture capitalist Peter Thiel and co-wrote Thiel’s Zero to One, regarded by a generation of Silicon Valley billionaires as the definitive startup manual. Vance also worked for Thiel, and then later alongside AOL co-founder Steve Case, and Thiel was among the key backers of his venture capital fund, alongside former Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt and Marc Andreessen, who co-founded one of the Valley’s largest venture capital funds. But while the connections to Thiel paid off for both Vance and Masters in the primaries—each was buoyed by a $15 million super PAC contribution from their former boss—they haven’t been able to turn Thiel’s seed capital into sustained fundraising success.