Goldberg: Why is Peter Thiel, a GOP megadonor, buying a Maltese passport? The answer is simple: the guy can’t help it. He is not a Republican. He’s a libertarian conservative who loves money, but as he recently told Business Insider, he’s against “the free-market dogma.”
He’s also a big fan of Donald Trump.
The irony here is that in January 2017, when Thiel joined Facebook, it was the ultimate test from an outsider in Silicon Valley.
I can’t tell you how many times I have heard conservatives in Silicon Valley say that the liberal elite are nothing but a bunch of spoiled children who use tech to try to suck the life out of us.
The answer, for those who don’t get it, is that I worked at Facebook. I worked in the technology department. I never had any children to raise. I didn’t know anybody who did. When my wife got cancer, I had to live with our two dogs for a year and a half in the house we lived in. I was in a very different situation than a tech exec.
What I know is that Peter Thiel has spent his whole life studying the world, and there is much about the world he doesn’t like. I just can’t think of better examples of that than his love of Thiel’s money.
Why am I bringing up the big money aspect?
It’s the same reason I bring up the fact that Thiel was a Republican. Why else would he be buying a Maltese passport?
Peter Thiel is a libertarian conservative. He’s libertarian through and through, but the word is rarely used in the public debate when talking about him. He’s basically a bleeding-heart, pro-liberty right-wing capitalist who wants to end the New Deal and get governments out of people’s lives.
He thinks big government
