This week, your freakshow will not go down to the dirty tent but uphill, to a carbon fiber cage designed on the principles of Japanese minimalism. Here, female ushers, mute and sleek, pad around in black bearing trays of sushi. The creature on display in the corner is a little shy, very rich and extremely dangerous in the litigious sense. So we’ll just stand at the door and try not to disturb him too much, while he concentrates on ways to use his money to transform America into a 21st Century model of medieval autocracy.
Peter Thiel, billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, is one of the more politically active members of the so-called Pay pal Mafia, the dozen or so men who got filthy rich off some of the major apps. Now he’s using some of his pelf to help American women adjust to their new handmaiden status.
In the publishing world, Thiel is regarded as particularly terrifying for having destroyed an entire media company in a fit of spite because it outed him as gay. He covertly financed a lawsuit (not his own) that bankrupted Gawker Media.
Thiel is now fully out of the closet, having proclaimed his sexual orientation to the MAGA rabble at Trump’s Cleveland nominating convention in 2016, to, it must be said, tepid applause. He is married to a man with whom he shares some children.
One fascinating facet of his freakishness is the disconnect between his private life and his support for the political movement that just engineered the legalization of discrimination against gay people. Of course, unlike most gay Americans, Thiel’s fortune ensures he has a legion of minions to pick up takeout from enterprises that now can legally refuse to serve him.
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