The post mentioned in the first paragraph – also named Someone Is An Idiot – didn’t survive the blog reshuffling, but this one pretty much covers everything. And since that title was better than The Hate Watching Phase, which was the original title of this post, I decided to reuse it.
Welcome to the Hate Watching Phase. It’s that time when you realize that a once good show has taken a nosedive quality-wise, but you still can’t stop watching. I’ve been there with Lost and Game of Thrones. I kept complaining, pointing out all the stupid plot developments, plot holes, and nonsensical character behaviour, and yet, I just couldn’t ignore it. At one point, I did stop watching… only to then go to online forums and read other people’s rants about them. This is supposed to be followed by the peaceful and quiet Indifference Phase. Right now, thanks to that recent Peter Thiel mess, I’m stuck in the Hate Watch Phase and eagerly awaiting the move to the Indifference Phase. Yes, I know the Thiel Freak Show isn’t an actual TV show, but since the reason I started writing about him was the entertainment value, it’s pretty much the same thing. I wrote a post about the whole defenestrated sugar baby mess as it was unfolding, but the post became a repetitive mess of complaints about the stupidity of everyone involved and multiple updates. And that’s why I’ve decided to write a brand new post where I get to complain about all the little things that are still driving me crazy about the story of Peter Thiel, Billionaire Ho: the stupidity! The incompetence! The euphemisms! Who the fuck owned that 13 million dollar house? The secondhand embarrassment! And above all, the timeline from HELL!
PARTY ANIMAL
Let me start by saying that I’ve never wanted to know details of Peter Thiel’s sex life – I didn’t even need to know he had one. However, I can’t unsee The Contrarian, the news about that party in 2011 (which I didn’t know about until reading The Contrarian), and the Jeff Thomas trilogy (The Intercept, Daily Mail, Puck News). And I got questions. Namely, the shocking lack of visual evidence. More than a decade of sex parties and no photos or videos? Not only that, but the gossip from guests is insanely limited and the number of sources is just pitiful. This is what Max Chafkin wrote about Thiel’s past partying in The Contrarian (2021) in Chapter 14: Backup Plans:
“In addition to the constant networking, Thiel was partying. These weren’t the desperate soirĂ©es filled with anxious aspiring entrepreneurs; they were ragers, with bartenders wearing “assless chaps” and drugs and sex out in the open, according to two sources familiar with the affairs. It wasn’t clear how much Thiel, who was still dating Danzeisen, really partook in the bacchanals. He tended to show up with an entourage of attractive young men, before disappearing into some back room.”
First, I love that Chafkin wrote that no one knows whether Thiel took part in the orgies and then followed it by writing that he disappeared with a bunch of hot young guys to somewhere private. How sneaky. Also, shouldn’t those 2 sources know that? Didn’t the guests gossip about their host among themselves? And if said guests weren’t aspiring entrepreneurs, who were they? How were they being invited? More importantly, were they being sworn to secrecy? Did they have to sign NDAs in their own blood? Were their phones being confiscated? I guess all those articles about Bryan Singer’s parties spoiled me. All this is made funnier (and dumb) by the fact that Thiel was throwing these parties in New York. The same New York where he didn’t want to meet to discuss the Hulk Hogan lawsuit for fear of bumping into Nick Denton. Given that Gawker basically copied the original New York Daily News article (which also had 2 sources that had been to the party, though these ones said nothing about a hot guy entourage) without adding any new gossip, I don’t think there was any need to worry. In fact, I couldn’t find any Gawker article about Thiel’s parties or his sugar babies. I’ve written this before, but it bears repeating: Nick Denton deserves his very own Shame Nun for this. Come on, do you really expect me to believe that not a single person took pictures or even made a little secret video? (To be clear, I don’t want to see it, but I’d like to know it exists somewhere) And only 2 sources at a time? Was there a buddy system?
PETER THIEL ORGY INVITATION
The full extent of Chafkin’s incompetence was exposed along with Thiel’s hoeness by The Intercept less than 2 years after the publication of The Contrarian. How embarrassing. Turns out that, unlike Chafkin, The Intercept had successfully located a Thiel sugar baby, thirtysomething Jeff Thomas, with a little help from some dedicated activists trying to expose Thiel’s clichĂ©d hypocrisy. Even better (in terms of views), Thomas had tragically fallen/been pushed/jumped off the window of his Miami flat a couple of weeks ago, which led to the article being published and added a new layer of (possible) scandal to the whole situation – could Peter Thiel have had his traitorous former sugar baby killed? The Intercept also answered some of those questions I asked in the previous paragraph regarding the parties. So, who are the guests? Random (presumably hot) university students. How are they being invited? By Thiel himself through his personal Facebook account and WhatsApp. Are they being sworn to secrecy? Apparently not. Oh, and how does Thiel woo complete strangers into attending his orgies? Well, he starts by inflicting his views on the US in general (apparently 90 percent of it sucks) and then (yes, this is the actual exchange published by The Intercept):
“Hot guys at a pool sounds like pretty idyllic gay activity to me” (Random (Presumably Hot) University Student)
“Well, it doesn’t stay idyllic too long, but always lots of fun” (Peter Thiel’s Account)
“Yeah, we know how to have some no holds barred gay fun” (Peter Thiel’s Account)
I feel like I should apologize for all the times I complained about bad dialogue because people don’t talk like that in real life. The reason Thiel’s replies are separated is because the second reply was sent later. You know, like when you think of a better one after hitting send. Billionaire hoes, they’re just like us. Was this the first time ever that he tried to flirt? “Hey random person, did you now that most of America sucks? Also, would you like to come to my orgy?”. He’s like a parody of himself. Seriously, it reads like a comedic skit or what ChatGPT would write based on the prompt “Peter Thiel orgy invitation”. And are we sure he really is gay? Because between the conspicuous hot guy entourage, gay orgies featuring every clichĂ© imaginable which he didn’t seem to actually join, and the promise of “no holds barred gay fun”, it looks like someone is trying a little too hard… Sadly, we never find out whether the Random (Presumably Hot) University Student went to the party, which frankly was a major oversight by The Intercept. Also, how can he be this stupid? How? And if he’s going around messaging random people, why are there no screenshots all over social media? I’m very disappointed in you, Gen Z! Not that Millennials did any better, but given how nowadays everyone seems obsessed with documenting every second of their lives, I was expecting several Tik Tok videos worth of receipts by now. Shockingly, this wasn’t the only example of Thiel’s questionable reasoning present in the article. He was co-hosting those parties with his sugar baby at the 13 million dollar house he’d gifted him, where he frequently hanged out while Thomas’s friends were there, and apparently he also invited said friends over to his house. Did he forget that lots of people hate him and that the public loves a good sex scandal, especially ones involving hypocritical, Bible-quoting, married conservatives? The mix of unintentional hilarity and secondhand embarrassment reached new heights when Thomas took credit for Thiel’s lack of support for Trump during the 2020 presidential elections because self-made billionaire and techno-libertarian-fascist philosopher Peter Thiel needed his sugar baby influencer who’s young enough to be his son to show him the error of his misguided Trump-supporting ways. Good thing none of the confidants who were snitching to Buzzfeed in 2017 about his complaints about Trump’s competence (or, more accurately, lack of it) heard about this or Thiel could’ve been embarrassed in real time. I’m sure his MAGA buddies who might’ve been upset about his abandonment of their leader at a time when Trump needed him the most are glad to finally know whose fault it was. Sadly, Thomas said nothing about Thiel’s reaction to the attack on the Capitol. He did complain at length about the effects this toxic relationship and the experience of getting expensive gifts from a horny billionaire had on his mental health. Thankfully, Thiel is a very understanding sugar daddy and they parted on friendly terms. So friendly, in fact, that Thomas was invited to Thiel and his husband’s New Year’s Eve party at their home in Florida to where Thomas also went in search of a fresh start. What a funny coincidence. Either Thiel has the most understanding husband in the world, or he has an ironclad prenup.
NONE TOO BRIGHT
By the way, I found it refreshingly honest that The Intercept admitted the cooperation with the activists. However, it also raised some questions, namely what the fuck was Thomas thinking? Would it really be worth it to upset a vindictive billionaire who’s best known for his relentless, ultimately victorious efforts to destroy the gossip news outlet who had outed him? What did he think would happen? Would people really be sympathetic to an adult over thirty who willingly entered into a transactional relationship with an older, wealthy man who gave him everything he wanted and respected his decision to end said relationship? Yes, people would be focusing mostly on Thiel, but I really doubt they’d have positive feelings about Thomas. And even if he’d been an anonymous source, Thiel would know who he was. He wouldn’t need to kill him – just a few discreet conversations with the right people would be enough to make Thomas persona non grata for anyone hoping to get anywhere Thiel or his friends’ money, and that would eventually trickle down all the way to those other young men looking for their own sugar daddies. Thomas would essentially become a pariah. Of course, this would depend on both Thiel and Thomas’s intellectual abilities, which frankly don’t seem that impressive. However, Thiel would surely have people around him who could come up with an effective strategy to ruin his former sugar baby’s life without laying a hand on him. As for Thomas, did none of his friends realize how insanely stupid it would be to babble about Thiel’s sex life to his enemies? Was there a stupidity epidemic going around along with Covid?
CLASH OF THE TIMELINES I
Now, this is something that I didn’t notice at the time, but there are zero specific dates in The Intercept article. Even when writing about when Thomas met Thiel, we get 2015 or 2016 at Coachella, where Thiel threw one of those parties people insist in not filming or photographing. You’d think that someone who values his privacy as much as Thiel allegedly values his wouldn’t throw a party at such a public location as a famous music festival – clearly, you’d be wrong. The beginning of the Thiel/Thomas arrangement (expensive house + car in exchange for sex) (come on, we all know that’s what this was) was “in the early stages of the pandemic”, and Thomas blamed the Covid restrictions for agreeing to becoming a billionaire’s sugar baby, but again, no specific dates. What does this mean? the Wuhan outbreak in December 2019? The first US cases in January 2020? When the CDC first talked about the possibility of lockdowns in February? Or March, when the Trump Administration declared a nationwide emergency and the first shutdowns occurred? This lack of dates makes me feel a little bit sorry for how much I’ve complained about Chafkin’s incompetence. After all, it’s possible that Thiel wasn’t co-hosting parties filled with “no holds barred gay fun” in 2019 or early 2020. Still, this is what was happening then according to the Chafkin Timeline (Chapter 19: To the Mat):
“Thiel spent 2019 and early 2020 mostly lying low, appearing in public only a couple of times and always before friendly audiences. He met regularly with prominent conservatives, but always at home, where he could avoid being seen and didn’t have to perform.”
The reason for Thiel’s behaviour was domestic bliss, which included becoming a dad and deciding that trousers were optional. Judging by The Intercept article, he eventually got tired of all that domesticity (possibly even before the year was over) and got himself a sugar baby to whom he gave an expensive house near his own home and presumably left his husband with their crying baby while he went to hang out with the 20 years younger male model and his friends. The Chafkin Timeline clashes with the Thomas Timeline some more thanks to Chafkin having written that, when Covid got out of control, Thiel left Los Angeles for Hawaii (Chapter 20: Back to the Future). Did he take his sugar baby/political adviser with him, his husband and their firstborn? Or did he leave Thomas behind to fend for himself among all the rabid toilet paper hoarders?
THE DAILY MAIL JOINS THE FUN
The timeline got wonkier with the Daily Mail’s own Jeff Thomas-related exclusive published around 13 days after the The Intercept article. Turns out that that New Year’s Eve party didn’t go as smoothly as The Intercept had led us to believe. Quite the opposite in fact… which makes absolutely no sense. Why wouldn’t The Intercept know that Thiel’s husband had made a scene after seeing Thomas and had had security kick him out? Or was it a different New Year’s Eve party? Why the hell did The Intercept not specify any dates, FFS? How many alternate timelines are there? Anyway, in the Daily Mail Timeline, not only was Thomas kicked out, but he started his arrangement with Thiel in late 2019. Finally, some dates! Sure, there are still no months, much less days, but it’s better than “in the early stages of the pandemic”. The Daily Mail also made Chafkin look even more incompetent by revealing a previous Thiel lover, Francesco Lugli, whom he’d been seeing right up until he decided to get married to his age appropriate long-term partner. To be fair to Chafkin, I couldn’t find any Gawker articles mentioning Lugli (who, judging from a photo accompanying the article, had been with Thiel as far back as 2014) (though that photo doesn’t look like it’s from a casual event) either, so he’s not alone in his incompetence. But seriously, Shame Nun him! Also, I’d like a refund. According to the Daily Mail, everyone in elite gay circles in Los Angeles and Miami knew about Thiel and Thomas. And they told the Daily Mail? Presumably, this article was followed by all the prospective sugar daddies of Florida asking Thiel for that party’s guest list to see who all the little snitches could’ve been and make sure they won’t get within a fifty-mile radius of their exclusive gay parties. Or maybe they should ask the husband? Because, according to the Daily Mail, it was Thiel’s husband who approved and/or made the list. So, does this mean he was the one who invited all those young men? Maybe Thiel isn’t the only one with a sugar baby… But hey, at least this time there was some photographic evidence. Of a bunch of likely drunk, dressed guys taking selfies in Thiel’s backyard and docked yacht with Thiel himself nowhere in sight. It was as I looked at those photos that I realized that there are no other photos of Thomas in the vicinity of Thiel. So, in the midst of all the mindnumbing stupidity Thiel was smart enough to not let him take even a single joint selfie? Impressive. I mean, he still exhibited the intellectual acuity of a brain damaged amoeba throughout the whole thing, but it’s nevertheless a little impressive that he managed that much.
EUPHEMISMS AND THE FOREBODING DOG
I guess this is a good spot as any to complain about the ridiculous euphemistic ways that both The Intercept and the Daily Mail used to refer to what’s basically a standard sugar daddy/sugar baby arrangement. So, we get: “romantic kept partner”, “romantic relationship”, “romance”. Yeah, no. Not when Thomas never said what he liked about Thiel apart from his ability to put him “up in a $13 million dollar mansion tucked in the Hollywood Hills, gifted him with lavish European trips, a $300,000 sports car, and access to the most coveted parties in town”. And the orgies, right? Wrong? How the hell did the Daily Mail forget about the orgies? So, there are 3 timelines? Anyway, the Daily Mail got a little coy while describing the Thiel/Thomas arrangement – “The stunning model provided physical intimacy and in exchange Thiel furnished Thomas with financial support and financial stability” – but at least mentioned the elephant in the room: Peter Thiel was basically paying for sex with a much younger man. And they provided plenty of photos of Thomas in various states of undress to help all the weirdos get a better mental image of what might’ve been going on between the two. Oh, look, the Daily Mail also got more excerpts of Thomas’s conversations with those activists! How helpful of them, especially since the previous 4 articles on Thomas’s death published by the Daily Mail had made no mention of his widely known connection to Thiel. Naturally, unlike the more serious The Intercept, the Daily Mail got some spicier quotes: ‘So did Peter want me to be his boyfriend? Yes, you know. I think he fantasized about being like me versus maybe Matt sometimes. But, I think we can all love multiple people,’ he said. Love?! Seriously? We’re all adults here, FFS. Also, didn’t The Intercept say that Thomas said that Thiel didn’t want him as his boyfriend? Did Thomas change his mind between the conversations with the activists and the interview with the journalist? The Daily Mail Timeline is a mess! And what’s with the weird phrasing? “Being like me”? This sounds like Silence of the Lambs. Does Thiel have a collection of skin suits made of the hides of former sugar babies hidden somewhere which he occasionally wears to make himself feel pretty? In these new excerpts, we find out that Thomas, who you may recall railed against the emotional toll of being kept, was expecting to get a monthly allowance in perpetuity from Thiel… Guess he wasn’t Palantir material like Lugli. Outside of these quotes, the Daily Mail mentioned an NDA Thomas had signed which, if true, would make Thiel look slightly (very slightly) smarter and Thomas even dumber. What possible excuse could he have to breach it? And why didn’t The Intercept mention it? Was there no NDA in their timeline?
The dialogue continued to be abysmal, but I take comfort in knowing that no one got paid for it. So, after the “no holds barred gay fun” exchange, there was the foreboding dog: “I said, ‘Do you like dogs?’ He said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t trust you.’”. Sadly, there was no follow up on the Thiel/dog situation – did he eventually warm up to Thomas’s French Bulldog or does he still hate dogs? Did Thomas have to hide his pup every time Thiel went to his place? Well, at least his animosity towards canines doesn’t appear to be of a murderous nature. LOL, just kidding! We all know Peter Thiel eats puppies. Frankly, I don’t appreciate Thomas’s dogcentric views. So what if Thiel doesn’t like dogs – maybe he prefers tropical fishes (like piranhas), or reptiles (he moved to Florida so he could have an alligator pit where he throws whoever displeases him, didn’t he?). Maybe he has a pet iguana that he dresses up with a little poncho and sombrero but he never shows it to anyone because he’s worried people will think he’s weird and culturally insensitive.
CLASH OF THE TIMELINES II
The Daily Mail shattered the timeline by doing what the The Intercept didn’t: provide dates and quote excerpts that clashed with parts of the Chafkin Timeline that you wouldn’t expect him to have gotten wrong. So, according to this article, the arrangement started in late 2019, which, when combined to the “early stages of the pandemic” from the previous one would mean December? But that doesn’t match with Thomas’s claims that he only became a sugar baby because of the pandemic restrictions, which, in the US, started in March 2020. Unless the Daily Mail and The Intercept have vastly differing notions of what consisted the start of the arrangement even though they’re basically using the same source? Only the The Intercept journalist tweeted a link to the Daily Mail article and said it matched with what he knew about the situation, even though he didn’t mention any confrontation at the New Year’s Eve party. In fact, all he had to say about Thomas’s interaction with Thiel after the end of their arrangement was this: “he and Thiel stayed in touch. Thomas attended a New Year’s Eve party at Thiel’s Venetian Island compound on Biscayne Bay”. Meanwhile, in their timeline, the Daily Mail is freaking out about Thomas having been thrown out of that party and subsequently cut off from Thiel’s money some more which made him depressed and may or may not have contributed to his death. Also, in the The Intercept article, Thomas linked his arrangement with Thiel to the Covid restrictions, which doesn’t fit the Daily Mail Timeline, which says it started in late 2019, so more than 3 months before Trump declared Covid a nationwide emergency and the first shutdowns occurred. Was Thomas a psychic? And why no mention of an NDA or the European trips? This is starting to remind me of when 20th Century Fox tried to convince everyone that X-Men: First Class totally fit in with the original trilogy. Anyway, it got crazier when the Daily Mail followed an excerpt of Thomas’s conversations with the activists stating that during his and Thiel’s first “intimate lunch” at Thiel’s place in late 2019, he had learned more about his and his husband’s relationship with another excerpt in which Thomas declared: “I was actually shocked when they announced they were having kids together”. Wait, what? According to the Chafkin Timeline, Thiel’s first kid had already been born by then. Why would he announce that he was going to have children? He already had one. Worse, Chafkin linked Thiel’s behaviour during meetings with fellow conservatives to that feeling of domestic bliss which included the recent birth of his and his husband’s first child. One of those meetings in which Thiel decided to forgo trousers had Matt Gaetz as a guest and after some googling, I found references to a meeting in the Summer of 2019 (it was also about this time that I realized that maybe I was taking this a little too far and should probably stop while I still had my sanity more or less intact). I have no idea when exactly Thiel’s first child was born, but it had to have been before that late 2019 lunch. Also, apparently he and his husband had started talking about having children after they got married in October 2017. Unless Chafkin got all that wrong, too. So, 2 Shame Nuns?
The timelines get even messier when you wonder exactly when Thiel was engaging in all those fun gay activities with Thomas. According to the The Intercept Timeline, Thomas accepted the house + car because of the pandemic restrictions, so that should’ve been March or at most February 2020, and the arrangement apparently ended in November 2022. They couldn’t have been hosting wild parties with random people during the pandemic, could they? If it was closer to 2022 and up until the end of the arrangement, then it coincided with Thiel’s funding of Blake Masters and J. D. Vance’s campaigns, which would have been a whole other level of stupid. And didn’t Thiel move to Florida in 2021? Was he flying all the way across America so he could have some “no holds barred gay fun” with his sugar baby and random (presumably hot) university students while leaving his husband and children alone in their new home?
The Daily Mail Timeline apparently didn’t feature orgies (nor random (presumably hot) university students), but instead had “lavish European trips” and “the most coveted parties in town”. Again, when was Thiel taking Thomas to Europe? And how did Thomas manage to not take a single compromising selfie (or how did the activists manage to not get it from him) during said trips? Since Thiel was taking him/getting him invitations for cool parties it’s not as if he valued discretion. Also, was his husband okay with absolutely everyone (except Max Chafkin) knowing that Thiel had a sugar baby? Even open relationships have limits.
I’ve already gone through the Chafkin Timeline, but let’s do a little recap, shall we? So, Thiel and his husband had started talking about having children after they got married in 2017. Thiel was reclusive and not very social during 2019 – early 2020. He was enjoying a new trousers-free life of domestic bliss with his husband and firstborn. By October 2019 he was probably already a dad. He left for Hawaii in 2020 when Covid started wreaking havoc in the US and stayed there while everything went to hell, mostly ignoring the sinking ship that was the Trump Administration. By Spring 2021, Thiel had already had another baby, had moved to Florida with his family to be closer to his MAGA overlords, and was planning the Masters and Vance candidacies. See? No Thomas. The Chafkin Timeline also doesn’t mention Francesco Lugli.
INTERMISSION
Official news outlets weren’t the only ones who went after Thiel. Suddenly Twitter was ablaze with gossip and even nastier accusations (I hope no one died of an excess of schadenfreude at seeing Republican MAGA donor Thiel accused of being a groomer trying to turn straight guys gay along with his buddy Keith Rabois, that somehow Max Chafkin, Gawker, The Intercept, the Daily Mail, and the activists all missed. Silicon Valley nemesis Shanley Kane went from calling Thiel “a very shy person, a very paranoid individual” whose “friends actually do a lot of the talk for him” in a blog post from March 2023 to calling him a “gay psychopath” preying on young men because of the Random (Presumably Hot) University Student’s testimony, and who actively created an enclave of white gay Venture Capitalists (hopefully, they won’t team up with the Hollywood Gay Mafia or we’ll all be doomed) (shit, was that why Thiel moved to Los Angeles?). After the Ric Burton thread I linked above, Thiel became the leader of a “sexual predation ring” and Silicon Valley was overrun with “white gay sexual predators”. Wow, things escalated quickly. Kane seemed to have calmed down by June and went back to unfavourably comparing Thiel’s crude schemes to the sophisticated dealings of the far superior Marc Andreessen. Oh, but there was also MURDER! People tried to link Thomas’s death to the Silicon Valley Bank’s troubles and one bold Twitter person exhorted the The Intercept journalist to keep investigating Thiel because apparently this hadn’t been the first time that one of his sugar babies had died under suspicious circumstances. And he decided to reveal that through a public Twitter account without adding any useful details? What’s this? Suicide by billionaire ho? And how the fuck could Max Chafkin, Gawker, The Intercept, the Daily Mail, and the activist researchers have ALL possibly not noticed white gay sex ring conspiracies and serial sugar baby murder? It’s like the more people involved, the greater the opportunities for displays of incompetence… or maybe we shouldn’t believe random people on Twitter. I just don’t know.
But what about anonymous gossip boards? How reliable are they? Well, I have no idea because I’m not getting paid to investigate Peter Thiel’s hoeness. All I can do is read stuff and relay it to my readers (or, in this case, The Void because I doubt any outsiders will ever read this) with a dash of snark. Datalounge seemed like a good place to start because everyone seems to hate Thiel over there. It was also easier to check the threads for new information than routinely canvassing the internet looking for new stories on the subject (not that I should’ve worried because no one else seemed eager to join the circus). These anonymous posters were surprisingly knowledgeable, namely about the art of digging up tweets all the way back from 2020. This was pretty impressive because we had trouble digging up our own tweets about Junji Ito from earlier this year. Did they spend years bookmarking tweets about Thiel and then waited until a negative story about him came out (no, not the book warning everyone about his plans for world domination, something bigger, like a dissatisfied sugar baby and accusations of gasp! partying) to deploy them? And why were so many of those tweets from election years? Do these seasonal tweeters spend the the rest of the time hiding in caves, away from inquisitive journalists looking for dirt on their bĂȘte noire? These resourceful anonymous posters also revealed some previous Thiel sugar babies supported by… a couple of anonymous replies in yet another anonymous gossip board. And they had some photographic evidence in the shape of screenshots of Instagram posts by Lugli and other hot younger guys supposedly taken at Thiel’s Hollywood Hills place (I say supposedly because I have no idea if that was really his house and, again, Thiel wasn’t caught on camera). But wait, does this mean that there was evidence floating around on social media and Max Chafkin didn’t notice it? It’s Instagram, FFS. And did Thiel really think it was a good idea to let his younger… guests be so obvious when Gawker was still around? It’s inconceivable that anyone could be this stupid and yet, here we are. When one of the threads (I counted at least 3), https://www.datalounge.com/thread/32742475-theil’s-model-nye—it-goes-haywire-, was suddenly deleted, dataloungers claimed that it was because it named names (it didn’t). Somehow, on one of the still active threads someone posted a link to a 2016 article in Spanish about an underwear model who had also fallen off a window in Miami. This would mean that Peter Thiel travelled to Miami in the same year he was under great scrutiny for supporting Trump and bankrupting Gawker to hang out at his sugar baby’s place, defenestrated him, and then 5 years later moved to Florida and 2 years after that, defenestrated another sugar baby in Miami? Seriously? Oddly, all those diligent little anonymous posters suddenly disappeared when someone posted a link to another article about the Thomas drama that bashed the activists and their tactics. That anonymous poster, who I’m sure has nothing whatsoever to do with Thiel, was also kind enough to copy the paywalled article so that anyone who didn’t feel like signing up for Puck News could read it. How nice and disinterested of him.
THE TRAGEDY OF JEFF THOMAS
The trilogy came to a close with a Puck News article that skillfully turned the narrative surrounding Thomas’s untimely death on its head and pointed an accusatory finger at the activists and their methods. According to Puck News, thirtysomething Thomas was as a poor naive little thing, who just needed someone to talk to about his sugar baby woes: “He had complex emotions about Thiel – he seemed to enjoy living in a $13 million home and driving a fancy car, both of which Thiel provided, but he had also felt “kept” by him”. Oh, my God, just STOP! Those weren’t “complex emotions about Thiel”, those were “complex emotions” about Thiel’s money. At absolutely no point in these excerpts of Thomas’s recordings did he mention anything personal that he liked about Thiel. Not a single thing. He didn’t even say what their relationship was like in the years between their first encounter – 2015 – and when the arrangement started – late 2019. Why the need for all these bullshit euphemisms? We all know what this was, FFS. Seeing Puck News trying to wave away the offer of a (fake) book deal, which would no doubt have required him to spill more dirt on Theil, or the fact that Thomas asked the activists to book him a massage and facial before his first attempted meeting with the The Intercept journalist, to which he didn’t show up (my headcanon: he wanted to hear Thiel’s counter-offer first) was just embarrassing. I understand the strategy, but it was always going to be difficult to make Thomas look like some kind of martyr after the previous 2 articles. Also, it’s funny that he didn’t go to that first meeting after having already told everything to a bunch of people actively trying to take down Thiel. I’m starting to see what brought these two crazy kids together – it was clearly a meeting of the minds. Hilariously, one of the possibilities for the future of this operation against Thiel envisioned by the activists involved Thomas going “on TV and talk uncomfortably about the relationship”. What exactly would he have said? I willingly entered into a transactional relationship with an older married billionaire because of the Covid restrictions and got a 13 million dollar house and a 300 thousand dollar car out of it, but then realized that sex work wasn’t for me (exchanging sex for material goods counts as sex work, right?) (is prostitution legal in California?), which I then explained to my sugar daddy who accepted my decision? The activists didn’t really think this one through, did they? In a way, from a storytelling perspective, it was better for Thomas to have died (not for Thomas, obviously) before all this came out. That way everyone focused on the tragedy and he became an innocent lamb used by powerful men (which men would depend on whose side the audience is on).
I must say I was shocked that apparently Thiel was very understanding and forgiving and didn’t try to kill Thomas or anything after he was told what happened. Really? Peter Thiel was fine with finding out his latest sugar baby had spilled all kinds of intimate details to his enemies and their journalist buddy? The same Peter Thiel who ended Gawker for merely having revealed his sexual orientation? Are we sure Thomas didn’t make everything up? By the way, he also shared his regret for having trusted those mean activists with several of his friends and his family. So much for that NDA, which by the way, Puck News didn’t mention. The activists were lucky that not a single one of those people took to social media to denounce them for exploiting Thomas’s death for their benefit. Well, his stepfather was informative enough to tell The Intercept that he knew all about Thomas and Thiel’s relationship, but that was it. In addition to all these revelations by Thomas’s friends, Puck News also got Thiel to finally comment on the matter: “I never thought I would say this, but it’s made me more sympathetic to Anita Hill”. Was this part of a carefully thought out PR strategy or did he come up with it all on his own? The activists may be scum, but it’s not as if they made stuff up to ruin his reputation and credibility. According to these articles, Thiel is a hypocrite who enjoyed partying with his sugar baby and slid into strangers’ DMs to invite them for some “no holds barred gay fun”, thus going against everything he and his MAGA buddies preach. If none of this were true, surely he would’ve either remained silent or denied everything. He didn’t even bother to deny the previous affair with Lugli. The only thing his side denied was the New Year’s Eve confrontation between him and his husband. A friend of his (and since this article featured a commentary by Thiel, I’m guessing that was a real friend) (unless the “friend” was Steve Bannon who’s still salty he stopped supporting Trump) even said he “remains very “distraught” over Thomas’s death”. Not just upset or mildly distraught – very distraught. I’m sure his husband was delighted to read that. It really must be one hell of a prenup. In a final bid to garner sympathy for Thiel, Puck News revealed that he had realized that “he may have been naive about life as a mega-donor”. How is this individual capable of making even the simplest day-to-day decisions? How?
CLASH OF THE TIMELINES III
This time, there wasn’t much more clashing. Puck News said that the first meeting of Thomas and Thiel happened in 2015, which makes one wonder why The Intercept gave 2016 as an option, too. In the Puck News Timeline, there was no New Year’s Eve confrontation, which contradicts the Daily Mail, nor was there any mention of an NDA Also in this timeline, the The Intercept article included “Thomas’s take on Thiel’s politics, his description of his personal life”. Whose personal life? Thiel’s? There was nothing other than the existence of the sugar daddy/sugar baby arrangement. And while The Intercept made a big deal about poor Thomas wanting to leave this toxic relationship, in the Puck News Timeline, around the time he was contacted by the activists, Thomas “experimented with serious drugs, partied multiple nights a week all around the globe, and feasted on the vanity of social media”. I’m guessing he was doing all that sans Thiel because surely neither The Intercept nor the Daily Mail would’ve passed the opportunity to mention Thiel’s possible drug use. By the way, thanks to the pandemic, all I could think of while reading this was how he was collecting all kinds of germs to pass along to his immortality-obsessed sugar daddy, who would then bestow them upon his husband and young children. Of course, the Thomas story itself obliterates Max Chafkin’s take on Thiel’s life, but I don’t think there’s any need to go over that again.
WHO THE HELL OWNED THE DAMNED HOUSE?
In The Intercept, we learned that Thomas had lived in a 13 million dollar house thanks to Thiel. A friend’s claim that the billionaire owned the house was corrected: “Thiel does not own the property”. Thomas said that the house might help him jumpstart a career in real estate, that he’d been thinking of “flipping homes”, and he’d hoped that it “could be maybe one of my first in my portfolio”. That made me think that Thiel had given the house to him. How else would he be able to flip it and use it to start a career in real estate? Besides, the article made it clear that the house wasn’t Thiel’s. The Daily Mail wrote that “Thiel put Thomas up in a $13 million dollar mansion”. That’s more ambiguous. Finally, Puck News said “Thomas, who first met Thiel at Coachella in 2015, lived near the hotel at a $13 million place in the Hills that Thiel had underwritten”. Wait, what? He underwrote it? How does this fit with what Thomas told The Intercept/the activists? Does it mean he helped Thomas get a loan to buy the house? So, after all the talk about Thiel’s expensive gifts turns out he didn’t buy Thomas a 13 million dollar house? Things got more complicated thanks to the friend of Thomas’s who said the house belonged to Thiel, who told The Intercept that “in November he had to leave that house”. So, he hadn’t bought it? Does this mean he was renting it? Did whoever own the property want some guarantees of Thomas’s ability to pay rent thus Thiel needing to underwrite it? But in that case how would Thomas be able to flip it? Why is everyone so averse to details? And what the hell was Thiel thinking? Wasn’t there anyone who could’ve told him how to support his sugar baby without leaving a paper trail? In fact, shouldn’t he have known how to do that by the time he made the arrangement with Thomas?
ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
The activists, The Intercept, and the Daily Mail may have done what Chafkin and Gawker couldn’t in exposing Thiel’s hoeness, but I see a lot of room for improvement. Since apparently they couldn’t get Thomas to cough up a single photo with Thiel (I don’t mean any intimate stuff, just a pic of them standing next to each other), why not use the lack of photos to hint at how Thiel’s desire for secrecy might’ve restricted Thomas’s own personal life? Of course, that would’ve undermined the partying claims and the testimonies of his friends, but since Puck News got away with turning Thomas into a total victim, why not go for it? The Daily Mail shouldn’t have been the only one to mention the existence of an NDA. As for those infamous parties, why the hell was no description given of what went down there? What did Thiel do? Stood awkwardly in the middle of the room like a deer in the headlights? Complained about those evil Stanford Multiculturalists some more? Got [censured because we don’t want this flagged as adult content] in a back room? How can The Intercept and the Daily Mail have failed to reveal every single sordid detail of what he considers “no holds barred gay fun”? Worse, the Daily Mail didn’t even mention them! This was a major fail. I’m also surprised at how, apart from that oddly phrased, Silence of the Lambs-sounding quote, there were no potentially humiliating intimate details about Thiel anywhere. Surely Thomas said something they could’ve used to embarrass him… or denounce his deviancy. Maybe a sex dungeon or some Nazi role-playing? At least reveal what exactly Thiel told Thomas about his relationship with his husband that made him shocked to find out they had decided to start a family (which, according to the Chafkin Timeline, already existed by then).
And why not add a little intrigue? Anyone who knows anything about history knows no one likes seeing newcomers invading their turf. So, how did Thiel’s inner circle react to Thomas having enough influence over him to make him question his support for Trump? Were they jealous? Did they plot to push Thiel’s meddling sugar baby away? Or were they already used to seeing their friend acting like an idiot over his latest acquisition? Thomas possibly clashing with Thiel’s friends would’ve added some much needed drama. Really, only one confrontation between Thiel and his husband over him? One?! How about raising the stakes? If that annoyingly unspecified house underwriting business involved Thiel helping Thomas getting a loan, that would’ve made him dependent on his sugar daddy, and leaving him could mean being stuck with a debt he couldn’t possibly pay. That would’ve made his reluctance in ending the arrangement a lot easier to sympathize with. They really should’ve tried harder to make Thomas not look like a greedy idiot. Maybe explaining what happened between late 2019 and when the Covid restrictions that made him accept the 13 million dollar house + 300 thousand dollar car started would’ve helped. If he wasn’t enjoying any material gains from the start, then he must’ve been getting something else from the connection to Thiel, no?
Depending on when all that partying was taking place, a lot more could’ve been done with it using Covid. I’m guessing it didn’t happen during the pandemic, as The Intercept or the Daily Mail would’ve made a bigger deal about Thiel’s carelessness. But if Chafkin was right about Thiel leaving Los Angeles when things got bad, what happened to Thomas? Why not have him complain about being abandoned in such a difficult time? That would have been better than bitching about a lifelong allowance. In 2021, Covid was still around, and even if Thiel didn’t really care about it (or pretended not to care), Thomas and a group of activists trying to take him down probably would. Yet, there was no mention of the risks. What no one mentioned either was how this related to Thiel’s home life. Think about it, in late 2019, only a couple of months after becoming a dad, he got himself a sugar baby and ditched his husband and baby to party with random guys? Cold, really cold. And if it happened in 2021, it would’ve overlapped again with a new baby and this time with the added bonus of a still ongoing pandemic and the news that Thiel and his family had moved to the other side of the country. How frequently did he fly back to California to party with his sugar baby and random (presumably hot) university students? Think of the ozone layer!
The closer it gets to 2022, the more Thiel’s partying would overlap with Masters and Vance’s campaigns, making it an even bigger example of his hypocrisy and shamelessness. If this were the case and I had been the one in charge of this little operation, I would’ve made sure to list the dates of Thiel’s parties alongside any speeches extolling conservative values made by Masters and Vance and any other candidate Thiel had shown any support for, no matter how small. The Daily Mail was more interested in a good, old-fashioned sex scandal, but why didn’t The Intercept and the political activists do that? Instead we got “in the early stages of the pandemic” vagueness for the start of the Thiel/Thomas arrangement and nothing for the “no holds barred gay fun” invite. Dates are your friends, people!
Perhaps the most surprising thing in all of this was that despite all this talk of parties filled with young men in the Hollywood Hills there were zero mentions of Bryan Singer. Not even a little joke! Doesn’t he also have a place there? If so, I’m guessing their houses are so far apart that even the Daily Mail figured they wouldn’t get away with it.
COLLUSION?
At a time when people can be so mean to each other, especially online, it’s heartwarming to see how everyone collectively decided to be nice and not make fun of Max Chafkin for missing Thiel’s sugar daddy-ing. Even the Daily Mail refrained from taking shots at him. In fact, it appears that everyone has collectively decided to pretend that The Contrarian itself never existed though it was published only less than 2 years ago. What a failure… or was it?
When you think about it, under the guise of a warning, Chafkin’s book solidified Thiel’s undeserved reputation as an evil genius. In fact, not only did it try to pass some of his failures as the first step in other, more complex plans, but it also gave him credit for the devious actions of all the other Silicon Valley players associated with him, like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. And while there was that brief mention of Thiel’s hoeness, partly based on an article that had been out there since 2011, Chafkin made it sound like a thing of the past and ignored the existence of Lugli and the other younger men who allegedly had been hanging out at his Hollywood Hills mansion, thus covering for Thiel’s more recent partying. After the 2017 wedding, it’s all about how Thiel had settled into domestic bliss and had softened after becoming a dad. An evil, scheming villain with a soft spot for his baby girls? People love that shit. I’m starting to think that Chafkin and Thiel were in cahoots and The Contrarian was in fact a PSYOP to make Thiel look like a powerful, astute player holding the fate of the United States and maybe even the whole world in his hands rather than the bumbling idiot he was exposed as by the Jeff Thomas saga! Nice try, but there’s no way an evil genius would invite random people to an orgy using his own Facebook account.
PETER THIEL, NORMIE FRAUD?
In the end, it’s impossible to take Thiel seriously anymore. What made him stand out wasn’t so much his successful investments as his weird, philosophical, seemingly never-ending essays peppered with apocalyptic biblical quotes. He was original, uncommon, weird, intelligent. That someone as accomplished as Thiel has to spend or promise to spend that much money (a lifelong allowance?! No one is that good) to get laid is pretty pathetic, but also painfully ordinary. The sex parties, as scandalous as they are, are also terribly unoriginal. To paraphrase, we were promised a real-life supervilliain using a complicated network of plans within plans and strategically placed minions to make his vision of a libertarian, techno-fascist, literal Kingdom of Heaven come true, but instead we got just another rich, hypocritical conservative with the thinking abilities of a headless chicken. Given Thiel’s idiotic behaviour with his sugar baby and the parties, he’s got no right to mock the NSA and their love of big data. Even from a business perspective this feels stupid. A very expensive house and a very expensive car and the promise of a perpetual allowance? There better have been some weird kink involved. And don’t forget that despite everything he got from his sugar daddy Thomas still talked to the enemy! That looks like a really bad investment to me. Thiel needing Thomas to explain to him how Trump was bad for the LGBTQIA+ community is just embarrassing and now every time I read/hear something he said, I’ll be wondering if he thought of it himself or if one of his sugar babies told him that. I bet he didn’t even come up with the iPhone/grandma joke from the Stanford speech on his own! The revelation of Thiel’s astounding stupidity really raises doubts about his supposedly great intellect. His essays and speeches may be entertaining, but if we were to remove all the style, including unnecessary metaphors and quotes, what’s left is probably not all that. It’s no different from those movies/TV shows/books trying to mask a very simple, done-to-death story with impressive visuals/literary flourishes. After all, The Diversity Myth was pretty standard stuff. Maybe it’s even worse than that, maybe he writes in very clear, intelligible bullet points and then gives them to someone else who purposefully overcomplicates his very simple ideas and adds the biblical and philosophical stuff! Frankly, if anyone came out and said just that not only would I not be surprised, but would probably believe it.
The activists wanted to embarrass and expose Thiel. Well, mission accomplished. There’s a limit to how much secondhand embarrassment I can take, and Thiel has clearly surpassed it.
OVER 8400 WORDS?!
By the way, I can’t believe how long it took me to write this crap. Seriously, I thought it would never end!
By Danforth