JD Vance’s Silicon Valley connections run deep. So do Trump’s

As Donald Trump hesitated about who to pick as his 2024 running mate, Elon Musk – the world's richest person – reached out privately to reassure the former president that JD Vance was his man.

That is according to the The New York Times, which reported on Tuesday how Musk, alongside Silicon Valley investors such as David Sacks and Peter Thiel, had pressed Trump to choose their old ally as his potential vice president.

Their influence illustrates the extent of Vance's links to a very specific clique of conservative tech leaders – and raises interesting questions about how, and for whom, he would govern.

«Blessed be our Holy Saint Peter, who exorcises the demons that haunt our lands,» said pro-Trump space entrepreneur Delian Asparouhov on Twitter/X following the decision – alongside a picture of his investing partner Thiel depicted as an Orthodox saint.

Musk, Sacks, and Thiel are all prominent members of the so-called “PayPal Mafia”, who worked together at the pioneering online payments company back in the late Nineties and early Noughties. More importantly, they’re all key figures in a rising network of pro-Trump techies who are channelling tens of millions of dollars towards Republican campaigns.

While Musk's rightward turn is relatively recent, Sacks and Thiel have been at this a while. In the Nineties, they wrote a book called The Diversity Myth that criticised multiculturalism and downplayed rape (though both men have since apologised for the latter comments).

In 2009, Thiel famously declared that he «no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible», because government benefits and the enfranchising of women had created a massive constituency who would always vote against capitalism and economic