Summary
JD Vance is actively working to raise his profile in the Trump administration after being overshadowed by Elon Musk.
During a recent Oval Office meeting, Vance took the lead to criticize Zelensky as “disrespectful,” setting up Trump to criticize Zelensky.
According to New York Times reporter Michael Shear, this confrontational approach is part of Vance’s strategy to avoid being “relegated to the B-team” in what has become “one of the most fast-paced and aggressive administrations in modern history.”
Don’t kid yourself, Thiel and Musk founded PayPal together and despite prior friction they’ve always been on the same team. In fact Musk becoming a full blown fascist has been Musk’s “return to Jesus” moment as far as Thiel is concerned.
Note that Musk was not a PayPal founder, he helped found “X”, a PayPal competitor that wasn’t really doing that well, but managed to merge with PayPal after PayPal was winning the market.
Musk was also the one who about ran PayPal into the ground with incompetence and he was forced out of decision making to save the company.
Don’t know if this changes anything relative to Thiel, but just wanted to highlight that Musk gets credited with PayPal but his history is first losing to them as a competitor and nearly ruining them as a leader, and finally getting a big sum off money for eBay for his failures…
Also, according to recent reports, people hate working with Musk. Each company has people who, if he ever shows up, part of their job is to keep him from interfering with people who are actually working. He’s basically a toddler.
So, the point is that, if it was just their past of working together, you’d actually expect Musk and Thiel to be enemies.
I’m guessing that they do actually get along, though, for the exact same reason that modern day Nazis have to stick together.
Fun fact:
Thiel also called musk a socioopath.
The article:
https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-elon-musk-relationship-contrarian-book-max-chafkin-2021-9?op=1
And don’t forget the rest of the paypal mafia who basically created modern society and its tech disopia :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia