from Salon (in red added by me)
... He has backed or bankrolled a number of far-right Republican candidates, including newly-elected Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio (to the record tune of $15 million) and losing Senate candidate Blake Masters in Arizona. He supported Donald Trump conspicuously in 2016, and then much more quietly, and perhaps hesitantly, in 2020 (and after patching things up with Trump, he brought JD Vance to his home for a meet-up and make-up session)
... Then there was the $500,000 "angel investment" he gave Mark Zuckerberg in 2005. That 10.2% stake in Facebook (also funded by CIA investment firm In-Q-Tel) turned into more than $1 billion in 2012.
After a few successful bets in 2004 on tech-industry bubbles — and a few critical failures — Thiel launched Palatir, a massive data-analytics firm whose first backer was none other than the CIA.
A boon to the burgeoning surveillance state, Palantir helped the Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection track and surveil immigrants using a combination of biometric and non-public databases (no wonder he wrote we have to give up freedoms for security after 9/11 just like all the neocons wanted), wielding an analytical superstructure whose power matched Google's. Palantir's exploits are too numerous to detail here, but went far beyond policing, and included plans for corporate cyberattacks and private espionage offensives, as well as helping another notorious firm, Cambridge Analytica, parse Facebook user data as it drew up the blueprint for Donald Trump's 2016 election victory.
By 2015, Palantir was already worth $20 billion.
Thiel's taste for data-tracking continued. In 2017, he became one of the first outside investors in Clearview AI, the controversial facial recognition software (spying on your protests just like they accuse China of doing) often used by law enforcement agencies to monitor protests...read more here
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