Dear Silicon Valley: Sorry I'm Not Sorry Your Business Model Died in Ukraine
A few thoughts for the constructs and venture capital in our AUKUS moment
Who is this Christian Angermayer character mentioned in the recent New York Times story about Peter Thiel’s purported Maltese citizenship situation?
Where even is Malta? What even is Malta? Are we allowed to talk about the Maltese connection with the Lockerbie bombing? Or how Malta is really run from Austria?
There’s nothing so “America First” as multiple passports, you can hear them whine. Why you’ve got to hedge your bets, don’t you know? America could fall! We could become “post-American”!
That, at least, is the story that we’re supposed to believe with the recent revelations that German-Kiwi-American billionaire Peter Thiel once sought Maltese citizenship. Oh no! How real is this story, we don’t know. Could it have been the Russians or others leaking on Peter?
How boring a story. It’s almost mad libbed. Besides doesn’t everyone kind of already know that J.D. Vance and Blake Masters will lose their respective Senate races?
As is increasingly typical of the Times there’s no real discussion about what’s really going in Malta now or in Austria or who Christian Angermayer is and who really runs Malta anyway and whether the leaking of that information was a form of Russian attack on Thiel.
This is a shakedown masquerading as a New York Times story. But qui bono?
New York Times reporter Ryan Mac — someone who has never served as a conduit for hacked material from the Emiratis whilst he served at the new media company foreign intelligence launder operation known as BuzzFeed — would never act on behalf of a foreign government, right? Good thing I’m suing Huffington Post (which was gifted to BuzzFeed) all the way to the Supreme Court!
Say, didn’t Peter Thiel and I bankrupt Russian disinformation blog Gawker, funded, of course, by Russia’s richest man, Viktor Vekselberg? Gee, that must have been expensive!
In any event I have been tracking Mr. Angermayer closely. My contention is that the bitcoin and psychics entrepreneur Angermayer is really an emissary of the Chinese and Russians into the German-speaking world. He did, after all, make money on the Wirecard transaction—Wirecard being a sort of international money laundering ring and the attempted takeover of Deutsche Bank. You simply must read this profile from Devon Pendleton of Bloomberg. Ever the networker Angermayer’s friendly — naturally — with such characters as Ric Grenell, Rebekah Mercer, and the Rwandan dictator Paul Kagame. As one does, I suppose.
“I understand politicians better than investors,” he told Bloomberg, though he rejects the idea of ever joining their ranks. “One reason I’m very happy is I’m very honest with myself. I want everybody to like me.”
Uh huh. Angermayer has worked as a go between with the Chinese. This much we know from the press. Has he also worked as one for the Russians? And if so, will his assets be confiscated? They should be.
Angermayer knows that it’s an unstated policy that every petrostate knows it must do one thing and do it well — eliminate the other petrostates before the game is up.
How soon will it end? Hard to say. As a sign of the times Ford eliminated its internal combustion engine team and laid off 3,000 employees.
No, the purveyors of dinosaur juices know their days are up.
You can almost see them thinking: “I know what we can do! We can cause a war in a petrostate! We can make countries care about the politics of a petrostate.”
We can mess about in Libya or Venezuela. We might even start a war there! That’ll increase the price of oil.
*****
There are a lot of stories which venture capital likes to tell about itself.
But let me demystify it for you. Their business model is over even if they don’t yet know it.
What is their business model? Well, the more someone talks to you about “technology” the less they seem to be in tech. After all, there’s a lot of addictive stuff that hides under the umbrella of “technology.”
Every industry has an implicit pact with the public. The tech sector is simple enough: to the extent that you make life better, you get to stick around. We will excuse your eccentricities so long as you improve living standards. But let’s face it: most of you are not improving living standards are you? No, those are falling rather drastically. And life expectancy is even declining in America — unlike in other countries. Sure, a lot of that’s the fentanyl, but the loneliness that television and social media engenders doesn’t help. Nor does pushing that everyone take drugs.
In reality most venture funds are about moving dirty or grey money into American markets whilst they take a vig. It’s nice if the tech they invest in works but it’s not totally necessary. All that matters is that the venture capitalist gets his vig and the firm gets a markup so they can raise another fund. If this sounds like a Ponzi scheme it’s because it is.
In some cases, America’s deep state looks the other way. Think of all the cartel money that was washed in Texas fracking to drive down the cost of natural gas.
In most cases America’s too busy with other things to pay much attention to the threats that venture capitalists gone amok play on the public. Yes, much of venture capital is parasitic off the real economy and the hard work of young people.
But that willful blindness may be beginning to change. Gone, I hope, are the days when people ignored how their money was invested. Rather crazily, in some cases, like when the Oregon Pension Fund backed Pegasus, American pensioners wound up backing weapons that’ll be used against them. Rather amazingly no one is required to due diligence investments from a counterintelligence frame.
Obviously this pensioners-funding-foreign-ops-disguised-as-venture-capital is a bad idea, and apparently Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island is on the case. I donated to him for precisely this reason. When large tax-free endowments invest in venture funds, they can destroy the markets and wind-up funding some truly unsavory deals.
Venture capital has two buckets: bridges and deep state.
“Bridges” exist when there is a trade deficit betwixt America and another country, usually China or the Middle East. America racks up trade deficits and the other country gets our dollars which they then deploy through their approved channels — private equity, real estate, venture capital, or bribing African or Latin American or Midwestern potentates.
Deep state tech companies — think Amazon or Google — seem to do well irrespective of what the interest rates are.
How do geopolitics affect the venture environment?
We got a taste for the international intrigue when we saw Elon Musk’s odd tweets about Russia-Ukraine and China-Taiwan.
China is going through a most difficult time now that their Belt & Road initiative has failed. Turns out that backing a bunch of Third World dictators was a bad idea. Who knew?
Firms like DCVC (Chinese), 8VC (Emirati) or Andreessen Horowitz (Chinese-Eastern European) won’t make it. They are the next shoe to fall now that the Washington Post has begun poking around at Emirati — and therefore Chinese — influence in our DOD.
VC: A History goes into the early history of venture capital and it’s hard not to notice both the mob and U.S. deep state ties that propelled the industry. VC/Tech must be useful to the state or else it must die. That day is now upon us, and the era of wasteful or misspent tech is quickly disappearing.
The raison d’état is what was missing from the business plans. No more! Welcome to the requisitioning, or the dragooning.