With the choice of JD Vance as Trump’s running mate for president, his connections to Peter Thiel have been remarked upon a lot lately, such as in recent podcasts by John Ganz and Paris Marx.
The billionaire cryptocurrency proponent Balaji Srinivasan was on a list for Trump to pick to run the FDA back in 2017, and favoured by Peter Thiel. Like many other cabinet picks in the Trump administration, he would’ve been someone appointed to lead an agency they were against. Another person who wanted to see Srinivasan run the FDA was the Dilbert Guy. If you haven’t heard that this cartoonist is off the rails, Behind the Bastards had a 2-part podcast episode about him.
Balaji Srinivasan has some peculiar world-building ideas. Gil Duran reported that Srinivasan’s book “outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories.” Now they reportedly want to “transform” Solano County California into its own dystopian plutocrat nation-state. This guy had also claimed back in late 2020 that broken trust in the pandemic that supposedly led to anti-mask sentiments could be solved with blockchain.
There’s no question that many of these Silicon Valley tycoons have an interest in public health issues — but not apparently on the side of the humans.