Who Does Founders Fund Partner Keith Rabois Really Work For?
Hint: It's Not The U.S. or Us
Among the most frustrating things about our discourse is that we are strongly encouraged to consider the Founders — what I’ve elsewhere called the GenExploiters — to be rock star geniuses.
To ask obvious questions is to be dismissed as a “hater.” You’re supposed to dance along. No wonder HBO’s Silicon Valley fittingly called the company “Pied Piper,” as in the flutist who led the children away from their homes never to be seen again.
As with rock stars, the myth wanes when the music ends — the music in this analogy being the Fed raising interest rates — some of the tech bros are decamping for better tax treatment and permissive governance weather and “innovation” — as if Miami were known for its hidden geniuses.
As these mere mortals come crashing down after cashing in it’s worth probing a little bit about their real histories. Having their number makes it less likely that you’ll be GenExploited.
There’s a hagiography that forms and a propaganda which is actively promoted both by the compromised press (some of whom decamp to go work for the new “new thing”) and by those seeking to ingratiate themselves in, if not the inner circle, then at least the outer rung.
I’ve had one entrepreneur tell me that the way he managed to get investment was “sucking up to the mafia'“ — where else? — but on Twitter.
Still others have suggested there’s a “sex for investment” ecosystem that’s more or less understood among a gay subset of the Valley. And indeed Keith Rabois was credibly accused of sexual harassment at Square which prompted his resignation. There have long been rumors that the predatory behavior has continued despite his marriage to Jacob Helberg, a former Buttigieg aide. (Notwithstanding his professed conservatism Rabois was a financial backer of Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg in 2020.)
Helberg’s the author of a book about China which is Exhibit A of a larger project
Perusing the book now it’s pretty obviously pabulum.
No, this isn’t the meritocracy you were promised but you knew that already if you were paying attention.
The questions you’re not allowed to ask:
What role does organized crime play in the formation and sustenance of tech companies? No, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the Founders — Keith Rabois chief among them — have decamped to one of the most organized crime friendly cities in America — Miami. You can look at the genealogy of the founders and spot the truth. Ask who their mother or father is. Ask who their grandfathers and grandmothers are.
To what extent are our tech investors parasitic off of the real economy and is it necessary for the federal government to step in? Keith Rabois’s OpenDoor was recently hit with a $62 million fine by the FTC for “misleading customer costs.”
Open Door, backed by Founders Fund which is in turn backed by China through KKR, is driving up closing costs on houses. It’s also pretty clear that AirBNB, also backed by China, is driving up rents in major cities.
What do the Founders’ failures say about their motivations and what they were trying to achieve? And what should we really believe? Their hype? Or our own observations? How complicit is the media with the reputation laundering going on?
Did you know, for example, that Keith Rabois was a major investor in a loan sharking business?
Rabois’s Think Cash went through Delaware Bank, but that got shut down, so the company was renamed as Thinkfinance and then went through tribal land.
How often are the Founders actually tied into foreign intelligence — wittingly and unwittingly — and should they have to register under the Foreign Agent Registration Act? Or do we need new policy that would disclose where their money comes from?
To what extent are “investments” merely payoffs from one intelligence service-backed fund to an organized crime syndicate or other intelligence service?
To not ask any of these questions and to promote uncritically the talking points of billionaires is sycophancy or naïveté.
This is cult-level stuff and you have to have a Talmudic attention to detail if you want to know what the real story is. Read carefully and think for yourself as to why have you been subjected to so much pro-PayPal propaganda.
The first book — The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth — was written by my friend Eric Jackson.
The other somewhat canonical book is Peter Thiel’s (and Blake Masters’s) Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
Now there’s The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni.
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Keith Rabois participated in a 2014 public interview with Professor Yoav Shoham at the aptly named, ICON, or Israel Collaboration Network.
He was asked by Laura Lauder, the wife of Gary Lauder, about his Jewishness and Rabois immediately and revealingly turned the conversation to Israel.
“I was very involved in politics in my early life and kind of thought my career would go that way,” Rabois recalled. “I was always a foreign policy interested person and I spent a lot of time studying the Middle East. I grew up watching Nightline every night with Ted Koppel and Ambassador Netanyahu at the time. That’s how I learned foreign policy actually — mostly those Nightline specials.”
In other words, Keith Rabois is a true believing Netanyahu fan boy—something he doesn’t hide in his prolific twittering. Given the racist nature of the Netanyahu government and its attendant ethnic cleaning we really ought to ask why Rabois supports these policies in Israel but signals loudly against them in an allegedly fascist United States.
If indeed there were a fascination with Israel such a love began in his early life, then it most assuredly continued throughout his time as an attorney in D.C. Even as an undergraduate Rabois showed unnatural interest in money in politics.
Rabois doesn’t mention it but he was an investigator for both Whitewater and Chinagate.
Rabois even acted as a quasi-handler for Vice President Dan Quayle, writing speeches and even co-writing Quayle’s book. Just how he went from litigation at Sullivan and Cromwell — the compromised CIA law firm once belonging to the Dulles — to being aide-de-camp to Quayle isn’t readily explained and I’ve searched in vain to find Rabois’s account.
It wasn’t entirely secret that Quayle was very pro-Israel, so much so that there’s even a fairly obscure but probably accurate conspiracy theory that pro-settlement Israeli activists wanted to kill then-President George H. W. Bush. (I’ve asked some of the Bush family about it and they took the plot very seriously as did several members of Congress.)
This plot wasn’t seen as an ideal threat at the time, especially given the notorious conspiracy theory surrounding Lyndon Baines Johnson’s purported Israeli ties ahead of the JFK assassination.
In any event, Rabois ultimately got to Israel, according to a 2021 interview.
Interviewer: It's funny, I spent time in the summer in Tel Aviv. And I have to say it reminded me of Miami more than any other city in the world. It was just like Miami.
So a couple years ago, my husband and I did a trip to Israel and we met with some very senior leaders in government and the military. The interesting thing that came out of that trip a few years ago was how much time people from China were spending in Israel, because they wanted to learn how to bring the innovation DNA to China. Someone described it to me as they were jealous that we have 1.5 million people out-innovating 1.2 billion. And so I think that's a good model to copy. What worked in Tel Aviv, why did it work? How do you apply that appropriately?
I've made that Tel Aviv metaphor before in Twitter fights and the response is usually well, but there's world class tech talent in Israel.
I think a lot of the people who’ve been very successful have written a history about it that involves sourcing key tech talent. But when you look, people have been funding, you know, elite graduates in the military there. So that experience might validate other characteristics like say leadership and personality versus pure technical brilliance.
In fact the reports of Israeli technical innovation are vastly overstated — according to Israelis themselves. I once asked Peter Thiel about all these Israeli investments and he sheepishly admitted that the Israelis pretend “their tech is strong but their marketing is weak but it’s the reverse.” Thiel’s Founders Fund has invested in many Israeli startups.
Tel Aviv has become a sort of staging ground for getting Chinese technology into the American ecosystem so much so that the Carnegie Endowment talks about how the Israeli media has been manipulated by China.
This appears to be a kind of standard psyop to justify Silicon Valley acquiring — that is paying off — Israeli companies. It’s ultimately how you get Israeli spies embedded within the major tech companies.
The geopolitics here couldn’t be clearer. Israel, working with China, wants to embed its technology into the United States so that it has a backdoor.
We see a similar operation at play when we look at Rabois’s involvement with voter.com, something which we shall examine in a subsequent post tackling the ongoing role of foreign governments in our voting infrastructure.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-52696833.amp this always struck me as a very odd death. China’s ambassador to Israel found dead shortly after appointment.
In a message published on the embassy's website just after his appointment as ambassador, Mr Du praised the relations between "the second largest economy in the world and Israel the start-up nation".