The End is Nigh For Founders Fund
If you’re going to have a foreign-funded military industrial complex it had better work.
Last year we wrote a piece talking about how there needs to be a full counterintelligence sweep of Founders Fund, the venture capital firm headed by Peter Thiel.
Thiel, you’ll recall, I exposed as working very closely with the Russians when I outed him as a confidential informant for the FBI. I had done so to protect Thiel from the spies lurking around him.
One of the Russian compromised players that Thiel had interacted with was Christian Angermayer who was recently forced to leave the UK by the new Labour government.
The world turns. Some listen to Uncle Chuck, some don’t. Some steal from him, some reward him immensely. And on and on it goes. Sweep, sweep, sweep.
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Today we learned about all the conflicts of interests, which are undoubtedly going to come up when the fund fails. Recent coverage makes it seem likely that Trae Stephens will be the scapegoat of that eventuality — that is, if the LPs are serious about exacting accountability.
Isn’t it interesting how Founders Fund’s LPs are schools from the Confederacy — Duke, UNC & Vanderbilt — and from Arab governments like UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? What exactly is Sanabil and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority getting for its investment in Founders Fund?
How sure are we that that the Arab money isn’t actually Russian money, the sort of Russian money that’s been swimming all over Thiel for some time now? Oh! We’re not sure at all?
Yeah, if you’re going to have a foreign-funded military industrial complex it had better work.
The recent reports about Stephens’ company, Anduril, is that it’s failing the test of Ukraine, failing along U.S. border, and failing overseas.
You wonder, though, if perhaps it was meant to fail.
Recent reports about a Russian assassination plot against Rhinemetall’s CEO makes me wonder.
Why aren’t the Russians trying to kill Trae Stephens? After all, Anduril has allegedly partnered with the German tank manufacturing company. Could it be because Stephens already works for the Russians? If his technology doesn’t work in Ukraine, maybe it’s not supposed to work at all.
There are extremely dark thoughts, the sort of thoughts that might make the son of a carny from rural Ohio more than a little nervous. But they need to be asked all the same, especially in the aftermath of the NATO summit.
“Stephens didn’t seem destined to become a tech insider,” the Information writes. “His mother worked as a substitute teacher and librarian, while his father built and maintained roller coasters at Kings Island, an amusement part on the outskirts of Cincinnati.”
Noble stuff — I come from similarly humble origins myself — but is this the sort of stuff of advanced defense companies? I think not.
Did Peter Thiel set up Trae Stephens to be the fall guy? Nowhere do I see Stephens considering the obvious: that Thiel, obsessed with sacrifice and Rene Girard, might be scapegoating him!
Perhaps he’s too Midwestern to see that, or perhaps he’s too dumb. If he’s too dumb, you’re still left the question of who played him.
Of all the details in the piece, this ominous one stands out.
“If [Trae’s] message was to do good and create something worthwhile for the world, Thiel’s message was that we ask God for forgiveness; we don’t ask for justice,” said Lux’s Zuberi, who attended both events.
And then there’s this detail about Stephens, who we are told has become a “spiritual messiah to Peter himself,” but who nevertheless owns a mansion — “which friends describe as a ‘bunker’ fortified to protect its inhabitants during war or famine” — in remote Placitas, New Mexico (population: 5,041)
What’s with all these guys building bunkers anyway? Are they playing to Fallout all of us? You know, the video game turned Amazon series where the rich simply leave us all behind in their bunkers — and even hasten Armageddon because, hey, they won’t have to live with it.
Of course it does you no good to build the bunker—and let in the traitor. And the traitor is always much closer than he would appear. Just ask Judas.
Stephens makes mention of The Lord of the Rings. (The tech weirdos, most of them Chinese, Israeli, and Russian traitors, love stealing from the Anglo tradition because they aren’t particular inventive. Never you mind that Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were British spies and gentlemen committed to defending the Empire in the First World War.)
“Are our tech pursuits and ambition awakening a Balrog — or are they a call to participation in humanity’s redemption?” Stephens asked.
In asking the question Stephens misses the point.
The Balrog is the beast that Gandalf battles, memorably saving his friends, “You Shall Not Pass!” he declares in an act of martyrdom.
In real life Thiel once told me that maybe there is no Gandalf, as memorably autobiographical a point as Thiel ever made to me. After all, he doesn’t want the responsibility of sacrificing himself for others. That would require genuine charity.
Still that Gandalf quip is probably true, up to a point. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t hobbits, committed as we are to one another and doing the right thing.
But it would require listening, Trae and Peter! It would require not stealing ideas I gave you. It would require not cartelizing the defense tech ecosystem.
It would, in other words, require being a servant and not a “spiritual messiah.”
Spare us the heresy, gents, before all you’ve built with foreign cash comes to an end.
You could even ask your friend Reid Hoffman about that effort to do the right thing.
At a recent confab in Sun Valley Peter Thiel sarcastically thanked Reid Hoffman for funding lawsuits against Trump because they had turned him into “a martyr,” increasing his chances of re-election.
From the stage, Hoffman shot back with his own sarcastic quip: “Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.”
Sarcasm is the protest of the weak, fellas. Powerful players don’t preen on stage. They get the job done.
Alas, Peter did not really understand what Reid Hoffman’s decision to introduce him to Jeffrey Epstein was really about.
Or how Hoffman, stung by Epstein and the CIA, is rising to the occasion despite his compromise.
Hoffman was educated in Vermont. Of course Hoffman’s paternal great-great-great-grandfather was Theophilus Adam Wylie, a Christian Presbyterian minister and co-founder of the University of Indiana.
“The older I get, the more I realize you're not really that unique, it's all inherited,” Wylie once said.
Indeed.
Now that’s a lesson for the Silicon Valley holy rollers to take to heart.
Which reports of Anduril?