JD Vance's Rise to Power is Being Bankrolled by the Elite

Vance has a financial backer for future races, and Peter Thiel has an ally in the White House.

Image based on Robert Caro’s The Power Broker

This article is Part Two in a series called ‘Profiles in Corruption,’ in which we shine a light on the personal financial interests of people close to the president.

In March 2025, Vice President JD Vance delivered the keynote address at a defense technology conference hosted by Andreessen Horowitz in Washington, D.C. He walked onstage to a standing ovation. He addressed the investors in the room by their first names. “You have an administration that’s working with you,” Vance told them.

Among the companies in that room: Palantir, the data surveillance firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, the man who bankrolled Vance’s entire political career. Thiel has been Vance’s mentor since law school, his employer in venture capital, his single largest donor in his Senate race, and the person who brokered Vance’s introduction to Donald Trump. Vance’s path from Yale to the vice presidency runs directly through Thiel.

It’s a relationship that has benefited both men enormously—and it’s only deepening. Since Trump and Vance took office, Palantir’s federal contracts have nearly doubled, from $541 million in 2024 to over $970 million in 2025. And as Vance has risen, Thiel has gained not just revenue but structural influence over how the federal government operates.

This is how it happened.

The Vance-Thiel relationship began at Yale. As a law student, Vance heard Thiel, the PayPal co-founder who would go on to co-found Palantir, speak about technological stagnation and the decline of American elites. Vance later wrote that listening to Thiel was “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School.”

A few years later, Vance joined Mithril Capital, a Thiel-backed venture capital firm. When Vance later launched his own firm, Narya Capital, Thiel reportedly joined as an investor and provided at least 15 percent of the initial capital.

But in 2016, as Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy was making him a political figure—the man who could explain Trump’s America to coastal elites—he was also an outspoken Trump critic. Vance told NPR in August 2016 he couldn’t “stomach“ Trump. He called himself “a Never Trump guy” on Charlie Rose in October 2016. And, he wrote in The Atlantic that “Trump is cultural heroin.” He had even privately called Trump “America’s Hitler.”

Then Vance decided to run for Senate. To win the Ohio Republican primary in 2022, Vance needed to convince voters that he had come around on Trump. A Trump endorsement of Vance would be enormously helpful. In early 2021, Thiel facilitated a meeting between Vance, Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. in Mar-a-Lago. According to the New York Times, that meeting went well.

Thiel subsequently poured $15 million into a super PAC supporting Vance’s 2022 Ohio Senate campaign—at the time the largest contribution to a single Senate candidate in American history. Trump endorsed Vance. Vance won.

Two years later, when Trump was selecting a running mate, the New York Times reported that Thiel made calls privately encouraging Trump to choose Vance. Trump did. Trump and Vance were elected and the author-turned-venture capitalist was now a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Vance’s defenders will say he simply changed his mind about Trump. Politicians evolve. But Thiel enabled that evolution at every step—the funding, the network, the introduction to Trump, the record-breaking donation, and the behind-the-scenes lobbying for the VP slot. Vance wasn’t just a politician with a powerful patron. He was a conduit: his VC background positioned him well to be a direct line between some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful financial interests and the highest levels of the United States government.

Which brings us back to that standing ovation.

The contracts Palantir has won since Trump and Vance took office aren’t just larger than before. They represent a qualitative shift in the company’s role in the federal government.

In July 2025, the Army consolidated 75 separate contracts into a single 10-year agreement with Palantir worth up to $10 billion—not a series of one-off projects, but a structural commitment to build the service’s data and AI infrastructure around one company’s platform. The Treasury Department awarded Palantir a contract to build a unified data layer across the IRS. ICE paid $30 million for a system called “ImmigrationOS,” designed to track self-deportations and prioritize targets for arrest. And Wired, CNN, and the New York Times have all reported that the administration is working with Palantir to build a centralized database consolidating information from across federal agencies—tax records, immigration records, and more.

Palantir is no longer a contractor the government hires for discrete projects. It’s becoming the infrastructure the government runs on. And the man who co-founded it—who still serves as its chairman, who holds a founder voting share that guarantees him near-majority control—has been the single most important patron of the vice president’s career.

Consider what each man has gotten from the relationship. Since Inauguration Day, Palantir’s stock has roughly doubled, and Thiel’s personal net worth has grown by billions. His company’s federal contracts are expanding from individual deals into the structural backbone of entire agencies, with a $10 billion ceiling on the Army agreement alone. He has an ally in the White House and a network of former Palantir employees installed across the administration. And as Palantir’s coffers grow, so does a potential war chest for Vance to tap if he runs for president.

Vance, for his part, got a Senate seat, the vice presidency, and positioning as the heir apparent to the MAGA movement—all of it built on a foundation laid by Thiel. Vance could reshape the Republican Party—and maybe even the presidency—to suit both their interests for years to come.

The evidence assembled here doesn’t paint Vance as a man of long-held convictions, refined over time. It paints a man whose convictions are for sale. He was against Trump until he needed Trump’s endorsement. He leaned into his working class roots until it was more useful to network alongside billionaires. He said it would not be in the interest of the United States to go to war with Iran; now he’s speaking publicly in support of Trump’s war of choice. The man who wrote in the New York Times that “Mr. Trump is unfit for our nation’s highest office” is now Trump’s right-hand man in that office.

There is no reason to believe the Vance-Thiel relationship won’t continue into the post-Trump era. That should give anyone pause. Not because we know what Vance truly believes. But because by now, we have every reason to believe he’ll do whatever he needs to do to accrue power, and that Thiel will be there to fund it.

Home of the Brave is a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization that exists to show Americans the real-world consequences of this administration’s policies and to highlight what bravery looks like in defense of American democracy.