Why It's Time For Reid Hoffman To Fire Dmitri Mehlhorn
Billionaires need to be more careful about their advisors
I want to like billionaire Reid Hoffman so badly but it’s so hard when he has such bad advisors.
The world makes a lot of sense when you consider that the Thiel-Hoffman exchange at Sun Valley was a pantomime. Musk hates Hoffman, but why?
Well, Hoffman and Thiel have clearly both turned Fed; Musk has not. Musk, whose grandfather served in British military intelligence, is Tory to the core and seemingly to the end. Musk resents that Thiel and Hoffman have a way out—and Musk doesn’t.
The Thiel-Hoffman exchange is a way of not letting on about their heel turn to the foreign actors in the Valley.
Here’s the exchange as recounted by the very Israeli Dyan Byers:
Peter Thiel sarcastically thanked Reid Hoffman for funding lawsuits against Trump because they had turned him into '“a martyr,” including 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.”
And the recent news about Dmitri Mehlhorn’s political email — he called the shooting ‘staged” and probably from Putin — kind of proves the point. This is a weird game: if you say the shooting is staged, you lose. If you say unity is good, you win.
And so Ben Smith is punishing Mehlhorn for losing the game by having one of Smith’s reporters quote him:
Mehlhorn, who co-founded a fund called “Investing in US” with Hoffman, made clear his impulse was toward the false flag theory. “I know I am prone to bias on this, but this is a classic Putin play and given the facts seems more plausible. Look at the actual shot. Look at the staging. Look at how ready Trump is to rally; this pampered baby shit his pants when an eagle lunged at his food. Look at how quickly Trump protects himself at the expense of others, but showed few of those lifelong instincts in this moment. And consider how often Putin and his allies run this play.”
He continued: “I know it feels yucky to discuss such a possibility. But in this case, the odds are so high, and the stakes so consequential, we must as[k] the question.”
Mehlhorn wrote that he was disappointed that journalists were not already raising the possibility of a fake shooting. “Ask the question, people. If it proves wrong, we should respond appropriately to a non-staged act of political violence, as outlined above. But your credibility and our entire system of truth and justice depends on being certain of the answer.”
Now I’m not a Ben Smith fan — I have rightly called him a traitor because of his behavior in the very Russian-Israeli disinformation Fusion GPS dossier — and I highly recommend Arthur Bloom’s work on him.
Smith does, however, have a point about Mehlhorn, who is seemingly also being leveraged by the Biden Administration to provide money to the anti-Trump resistance.
We did the analysis about Melhhorn awhile back. This is what we wrote in a piece “Spies, Frauds, and Hit Men: The Indispensable Epstein, the Compromised Hoffman, the Maniacal Mehlhorn” way back on May 9, 2023:
Having his consigliere — Dmitri Melhhorn — fund a defamation lawsuit against former President Donald Trump.
"We had no prior knowledge that our funding would go to support her in particular. Yet, without philanthropic support to defray legal costs, Ms. Carroll might have become one of thousands of people who has been outgunned in court" by Trump, Mehlhorn explained.
Mehlhorn’s power comes from his role representing the interests of a monopolist who absolutely doesn’t want to have a conversation about wealth inequality in America.
As Mehlhorn doles out Reid Hoffman’s money you’d be right in wondering who the hell is this guy? And why is he allowed to set the national agenda? Oh it’s because he’s friends with a rich guy.
You can listen to Ryan Grim of the Intercept interview Mehlhorn who seemingly sees Donald Trump as a “fascist.” “I became quite alarmed” when Trump came into office. “I realized I could not do anything else other than get him to not win another election… I had so much fear about what a second Trump term would do.”
Yes, that’s quite neurotic. “We’ve been active in anti-fascist politics ever since,” says Mehlhorn. He’s not just “professionally anti-fascist” he’s also a “committed libertarian.” OK, whatever.
In Mehlhorn’s telling, Trump isn’t the “symptom” of larger macroeconomic policies but “the disease.”
Is Mehlhorn telling the truth? And how extreme was Trump in 2016? He supported national health care and breaking up the tech monopolies.
No, Mehlhorn is a handmaiden for foreign intelligence assets and protecting monopoly power.
Mehlhorn is of East German-Russian Jewish heritage and worked with Israeli intelligence cut outs like Democratic Majority for Israel to defeat progressive candidates in the 2022 primaries. The founder of DMFI is none other than Mark Mellman who has consulted on anti-Iran and anti-Palestinian messaging.
Mellman and Mehlhorn have worked quite closely together. Mellman is a strategic advisor to Yair Lapid. He even worked on naming Yair Lapid’s political party. I happen to support Yair Lapid’s efforts to overthrow Netanyahu but I do have grave concerns about working with people funded and backed by foreign governments.
The way this works is that you focus the public’s attention on something — sex! defamation! — but never look at the mob money.
In funding Christine Blaisey Ford — a clearly fake whistleblower designed to distract us— Hoffman has allowed himself to be the left-wing Israeli answer to Thiel’s right-wing Netanyahu approach. He shouldn’t be used in that way.
In much the same way as Thiel had to get rid of the compromised players from his orbit, so, too, now does Hoffman.
Whether that be the Mormon-compromised players around Thiel (Jeff Giesea) or Musk (Jared Birchall), it’s clear that the yes men around billionaires are oftentimes the problem because they don’t really work for their patron. They work for a larger network. They are more precisely called ambassadors.
Giesea red-teamed the intelligence community in a January 6th dry run while Birchall manages a lot of the hot Mormon cash in Musk’s network. Giesea is close to Jack Murphy, aka Jack Goldman, who is a part of the Likud criminal element.
We got a bit of a taste for that in the new John Carreyou New York Times piece where Carreyou detailed the weird sexual practices and conflicts of interest with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt, Tory that he is, is pretending to be useful with drones that don’t quite work.
You’d be forgiven if you thought the whole thing smacked of a Russian play targeting our American-adjacent oligarchs.
Like Hoffman, Schmidt still deserves our protection—and some education. That’ll only happen when Hoffman ditches his earlier advisors and builds a more patriotically-minded team.
Patriot that I am, I’ll give him that education for free if he signs up for this free Substack.
There is a way back for a lot of these billionaires.
After Biden is reelected we will need their help on a whole host of issues.
Or they need to step aside, turn their assets into foundations, and stop pretending to be useful.