From left to right, Vice President Mike Pence, President Donald Trump, and Peter Thiel
The name Peter Thiel means many things to many people.
To Silicon Valley, he’s the co-founder of Paypal-turned -venture capitalist and Facebook board member. To readers of the once-popular website Gawker, he’s the one that funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the site causing it to permanently shut down. To those that were following then President-Elect Trump’s transition team, Thiel was front and center.
People were shocked to find that a Silicon Valley venture capitalist would support a Republican, much less Trump.
I wasn’t.
There’s a misperception that Silicon Valley, which is full of venture capitalist billionaires, leans towards the left politically.
That is incorrect.
One has to understand that egos of venture capitalists are mainly driven by power. I’ve written since 2014, that politics was the next logical and very dangerous step for the VC elites like Thiel. There are others too — Facebook executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, and even Napster & Facebook’s Sean Parker, who stated in 2014 that he wanted to “conquer politics.”
Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg — the latter who was forced to apologize for unethically running psychological testing unknowingly on their users — most recently supported Clinton in the 2016 presidential campaign. Wikileaks’s Podesta emails also implied Zuckerberg was looking for “next steps” in philanthropy, but why approach a political creature like Podesta for that?
Facebook may have been pulling for your candidate this time, but what about the next?
According to Politico’s Mike Allen in 2014, Republican Senator Rand Paul “had private sit-downs with the investor Peter Thiel and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg” at the Allen & Company’s Sun Valley Conference.
Let’s not forget that Thiel is also on Facebook’s board. This isn’t about people having political differences; this is about rich VCs morphing into whatever will gain them the most power.
Deception and manipulation can sometimes be the cornerstone of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, who hope we’ll all keep our billion-dollar blinders on while they play both ends against the middle politically.
My experience has been that venture capitalists can fund startup medical device fraud. The last thing voting taxpaying citizens should want is anyone from venture capital anywhere near politics, much less the FDA.
Think about that. VCs now want to control the FDA to speed up the medical device approval process. They want to make money off of killing us faster with less regulation.
You’ll often hear whines and cries that FDA thwarts startup innovation. That is the biggest lie to come out of Silicon Valley, where innovation is used as a manipulation to evade the law, at our expense. Let me give you some recent examples.
President Trump’s team, including Thiel, floated out some names to replace the current Commissioner of FDA. One name floated was Dr. Scott Gottlieb who also happens to be a General Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), who, by its own assertion, is the world’s largest venture capital firm. NEA has pathologically funded startup medical device fraud that has harmed, killed or defrauded taxpayers from Conceptus (now Bayer’s Essure), Gynecare (now a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary) and Acclarent (also a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary).
Is that who we want to head the FDA?
Let’s look at the industry’s once golden child Theranos. As predicted in 2014, Theranos fits the mold of what I call the Sociopathic Business Model, which is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. It just took awhile for the media to catch up, despite my best efforts. Theranos was FDA cleared (not approved) for one test yet was setting sales quotas off of 249 tests. The company could never make their ROI (8-10 times in 3-5 years) off of one test so 249 other tests were added “make the number.” False projections to give the appearance of hypergrowth for an overvaluation is fraud. I know we’d like to think this is just one extraordinary case, but it is, in fact, the norm in venture capital-funded startups.
Investors need to make their money back quickly and won’t let laws, your health, safety, or even life stand in their way. No, the Peter Thiels, Mark Zuckerbergs, Sheryl Sandbergs, and Sean Parkers are not the people we want in FDA or anywhere near politics.
Silicon Valley can keep its frauds. DC has enough of its own already.
Photo: Drew Angerer, Getty Images
