For Immediate Release
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Contact: Hannah Goss, hgoss@azdem.org
BOUGHT AND PAID FOR: Masters Caught Running for Senate to be Thiel’s Mouthpiece
“Masters’ Candidacy Is Almost Inseparable From Its Billionaire Backer”
PHOENIX — A Big Tech billionaire and his Big Tech lackey walk into a U.S. Senate race…
New Daily Beast reporting sums up the “epic back-scratching fest” between Senate primary candidate Blake Masters and the man behind the curtain (and funding) of his campaign — Peter Thiel.
For decades, Masters has been riding Thiel’s coattails, latching onto the Big Tech billionaire to move from Stanford Law to a lucrative book deal to Thiel Capital and Thiel Foundation, and now, if all goes according to plan, to the U.S. Senate.
“Nothing can break their ‘inextricable connection.’ In exchange for Thiel’s $10 million super PAC backing, attendance at fundraising dinners, and proximity to Donald Trump, Masters is shamelessly using his campaign to promote Thiel’s businesses and represent his boss’s interests,” said ADP spokesperson Hannah Goss. “If elected, Arizonans can expect Masters to work for his Big Tech boss instead of Arizonans.”
See below for key highlights:
“This further underscores how Masters’ candidacy is almost inseparable from its billionaire backer […] I’m struggling to think of another example of a politician who would owe so much of their success to a single person,” he concluded.
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Masters, 34, has never sought political office and hails from the West Coast world of tech capital investment. Almost all of his adult life has been tied in some way to Thiel, a billionaire Facebook investor and former board member Masters met while studying at Stanford Law School.
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(Thiel has reportedly brought Masters and Vance to meet Trump, though the ex-president still hasn’t coughed up an endorsement in either of their races.)
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In the meantime, Masters repeatedly used the platform of his candidacy to shill for his own financial interests, as well as those of his then-boss—a pattern that has extended to campaign fundraising.
Those interests have included major Thiel-backed corporations. The two largest, Palantir and Anduril, do billions of dollars of business with the federal government. Masters plugged both of them in a New York Post interview kicking off his candidacy last July.
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