Last week, a variety of women accused Donald Trump of a litany of vile acts across many years. He chose to defend himself by saying his accusers were too unattractive to sexually assault, at which point venture capitalist Peter Thiel decided to write a $1.25 million check to Trump’s presidential campaign — among the strongest ways possible to say I condone this person’s actions. This is, to use a non-loaded word, deplorable. But to some of Thiel’s colleagues in Silicon Valley, it’s political “diversity” in action. Thiel’s fresh embrace of Trump has been particularly awkward for Sam Altman and Paul Graham, both founders of successful tech firms and both now associated with Y Combinator (Graham is YC’s co-founder), the most prestigious startup incubator in the Valley and perhaps the world; Thiel is a “part-time partner” at Y Combinator. Until now, the incubator’s reputation has been sterling. To be selected by YC is to obtain cachet, recognition, and $120,000. Part of the draw is access to wealthy startup luminaries, who impart their expertise and values in the hope that their mentees will themselves become wealthy. One of these mentors is Thiel, who joined Y Combinator last year with great fanfare — “Peter is one of the two people (along with [Paul Graham]) who has taught me the most about how to invest in startups,” gushed Altman, YC’s young leader.



Photo: Joe Corrigan/Getty Images



Together this week, Altman and Graham have presented a unified front against the many people who are both aghast at Thiel’s support of Trump and dismayed that he’s in a position to impart values on young people at YC and reap the reputational benefits that mentorship provides him. For all his eccentricities and fringe beliefs — Together this week, Altman and Graham have presented a unified front against the many people who are both aghast at Thiel’s support of Trump and dismayed that he’s in a position to impart values on young people at YC and reap the reputational benefits that mentorship provides him. For all his eccentricities and fringe beliefs — seasteading libertarianism , and a reportedly keen interest in receiving the blood of younger men — Thiel remains very much a member of the Silicon Valley mainstream, serving on the board at Facebook, as chairman of government contractor Palantir, and as an executive at three venture capital funds, all of which he was involved in creating. His enduring ability to forge and exploit valuable relationships in the Valley is due in no small part to his softer ties to groups like Y Combinator. (As a disclosure, I must add that Thiel destroyed the company through which I first covered these relationships as a journalist, Gawker Media, by covertly funding lawsuits . Those suits continue to affect people I know personally, who face financial ruin, and two more cases, brought by the lawyer Thiel used against Gawker, continue against me.) What possible justification is there, critics are asking, for Y Combinator to retain as a partner a person who not only served as a delegate and Republic National Convention speaker for a presidential candidate associated with white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, and fascism, but who is willing to donate over a million bucks to that candidate at his nadir? What kind of message does that send to, say, the women and racial minorities who are already so often ignored in Silicon Valley? Why not replace Thiel with someone who at the very least is a political conservative but refrains from funding the campaign of a man who said he’d be dating his daughter if they weren’t related and encouraged the beating of protestors at his rallies? It’s easy to understand their criticism — and anger:

Fuck you, Peter Thiel. I swear on my mother's grave I'll never take money from you or your fund. https://t.co/3S5qXdIkLx — laura i. gómez (@laura) October 16, 2016

Hey @peterthiel, nice @nytimes piece about your $1.5 million donation to Trump. Is that to fund more of these stickers? pic.twitter.com/FxYjwGD2RO — Chris Sacca (@sacca) October 16, 2016

How you know Facebook isn't serious about diversity and inclusion: Peter Thiel is still on their board. — Catherine Bracy (@cbracy) October 16, 2016

Let no person who claims to give a damn about diversity and inclusion in one breath even begin to support & apologize for Thiel in another. — EricaJoy (@EricaJoy) October 16, 2016

Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit who was effectively ousted by the site’s users because she’s an Asian American woman (and wanted to delete communities like the expressly racist “CoonTown” subreddit), published a post on Monday severing ties between her new inclusion-advocacy organization and Y Combinator: We saw an opportunity to work with YC companies interested in building vibrant and diverse organizations, and we actively invited YC as a contributor to our VC Include program to gain access to its nearly 1,000 companies and CEOs, who are greatly admired and emulated. But Thiel’s actions are in direct conflict with our values at Project Include. Because of his continued connection to YC, we are compelled to break off our relationship with YC. We hope this situation changes, and that we are both willing to move forward together in the future. Today it is clear to us that our values are not aligned. In spite of all this, Altman and Graham have insisted that it would be unfair, un-American, and irresponsible to end their relationship with Thiel. Their arguments are a wild ride of attempted reasoning: 1. YC will not fire someone because of their political views:

1) I am voting against Trump because I believe the principles he stands for represent an unacceptable threat to America. — Sam Altman (@sama) October 17, 2016

3) Thiel is a high profile supporter of Trump. I disagree with this. YC is not going to fire someone for supporting a major party nominee. — Sam Altman (@sama) October 17, 2016

2. Trump is a figure comparable to Hitler, Altman still believes, presenting an existential threat to the United States:

To make my own views on Trump clear, here is my post from early this summer. I feel even more strongly now. https://t.co/6sPpIUZduT — Sam Altman (@sama) October 16, 2016

3. Thiel is worth keeping around because of the “diversity of opinion” he offers:

6) Diversity of opinion is painful but critical to the health of a democratic society. We can't start purging people for political support. — Sam Altman (@sama) October 17, 2016

@esacrosa cutting off viewpoints is what got us to a candidate that supports open racism and and abuse of women in the first place. — Sam Altman (@sama) October 17, 2016

4. Peter Thiel barely works for YC, so who cares, anyway?

@dhh @paulg he is not a partner. he is what we call a part-time partner, which shares a word but is legally totally different. no votes, etc — Sam Altman (@sama) October 16, 2016

In a blog post published Monday, Altman repeated his belief that Trump represents a catastrophic threat to the national fabric (“Trump shows little respect for the Constitution, the Republic, or for human decency, and I fear for national security if he becomes our president”) and his assertion that Thiel’s role at YC is minimal (“Peter is a part-time partner at YC, meaning he spends a small fraction of his time advising YC companies, does not have a vote in how YC is run, and in his case waives the equity part-time partners normally get”). It’s not hard to see how all of the above is contradictory. Altman is adamant that he can’t “fire” Thiel because that would be “unprecedented,” but then concedes that “Donald Trump represents an unprecedented threat to America.” And from his description of Thiel’s “part-time partnership,” ending the relationship would be in no way comparable to firing an employee. Altman attempts to hold as true simultaneously the arguments that Trump’s beliefs are horrendous and unacceptable and that Thiel, who necessarily believes that these very same things are good and fine, represents valuable “diversity of opinion.” This is akin to arguing that having Pamela Geller in your office every other Thursday would be a boon — just imagine being able to pop in and get her take on the global Islamist conspiracy! What a unique perspective!



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But where Altman’s rhetoric veers furthest off track is when he floats the notion that dissolving the YC-Thiel connection would be the start of “[purging] people for supporting the wrong political candidate.” Altman is absolutely right that Trump is unprecedented as a nominee, but it’s not because he’s a political figure; Trump is an ideological figure with very few actual political views. His popularity is due almost entirely to his cultivation of American hate. To endorse Trump is, then, to endorse this hatred — not a political affiliation at all. Perhaps the most self-damning sentence in Altman’s post comes in a parenthetical toward the end, when he admits that “of course, if Peter said some of the things Trump says himself, he would no longer be part of Y Combinator.” But where Altman’s rhetoric veers furthest off track is when he floats the notion that dissolving the YC-Thiel connection would be the start of “[purging] people for supporting the wrong political candidate.” Altman is absolutely right that Trump is unprecedented as a nominee, but it’s not because he’s a political figure; Trump is an ideological figure with very few actual political views. His popularity is due almost entirely to his cultivation of American hate. To endorse Trump is, then, to endorse this hatred — not a political affiliation at all. Perhaps the most self-damning sentence in Altman’s post comes in a parenthetical toward the end, when he admits that “of course, if Peter said some of the things Trump says himself, he would no longer be part of Y Combinator.” Reached by phone, Altman immediately came across as thoughtful and troubled by the situation, but defended his inaction: The “members of our community … that have said anything to me have said, ‘I really hate Trump and I think it would be really crazy if YC fired Peter over this.’” He said that even though he considers Trump “a monster,” he doesn’t think Thiel should be punished for his support: “I am not willing to believe the 43 percent of the electorate that supports Trump supports the awful things about him,” and, quoting Nietzsche, he added, “I don’t want to become a monster” by ending Thiel’s admittedly minor relationship with YC. Still, Altman says he understands why so many people are upset by his decision so far to keep an in-house Trump surrogate: “I would definitely feel uncomfortable talking to this guy because of his support of Trump if I were a Latina woman, I think that’s totally reasonable.” But despite realizing the ugliness of the dilemma, Altman still seems to consider it one that can’t be resolved and maintains that Thiel is entitled to the protections of any ordinary, full-time employee: “I don’t think you lose your right to fairness if you’re a billionaire.” (One cynical explanation for all this reluctance comes courtesy of Altman’s recent New Yorker profile, wherein he describes his disaster-preparation hobby and his fear of a global viral outbreak: “If the pandemic does come, Altman’s backup plan is to fly with his friend Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, to Thiel’s house in New Zealand.”) Paul Graham too has chimed in with his personal brand of TED Talk aphorism and false equivalency:

@dhh How would you feel if companies run by Republicans did the same and fired employees who were big Hillary supporters? — Paul Graham (@paulg) October 16, 2016

Sorry about the image, but this is too important to rewrite to fit in 140 characters: pic.twitter.com/hxDiilriwE — Paul Graham (@paulg) October 18, 2016

Few have done more than Sam Altman to defeat Trump. — Paul Graham (@paulg) October 18, 2016

This should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Graham’s recent history, filled with confusion about how culture and society operate when they’re not inside a conference room signing a venture capital fundraising agreement. When the New York Times infamously quoted Graham saying he could be tricked into funding any startup founded by someone who “looks like Mark Zuckerberg,” he defended his very unintentionally revealing remark by saying that it had merely been a joke about, uh, pattern recognition? His point is still unclear: “Could anyone be so naive as to think that resembling Zuck would be enough to make a founder succeed?” Graham asked in a self-posted apologia. “And is it plausible that we, of all people, who’d interviewed thousands of founders, would think such a thing?” Yes! Graham had to blog about the taste of his own foot again in 2014, when in an interview with The Information he said hiring women at technology firms was difficult because they don’t think like men (“We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years”). His explanation this time was that we, the public, were only upset with this answer because we weren’t dealing with the same subset of data that Graham was referencing: The mystery was cleared up when I got a copy of the raw transcript. Big chunks of the original conversation have been edited out, including a word from within that sentence that completely changes its meaning. What I actually said was: “We can’t make these women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years.” I.e. I’m not making a statement about women in general. I’m talking about a specific subset of them. So which women am I saying haven’t been hacking for the past 10 years? This will seem anticlimactic, but the ones who aren’t programmers. (Emphasis added.) Graham did not return a request for comment. Mark Zuckerberg too subscribes, somehow, to the notion that Trump support is just another form of valuable diversity, according to a photo of a post in an employee-only Facebook forum that appears to have been taken from someone’s computer screen: