Are You With Elon Musk or Peter Thiel?
Whose side are you on: Elon Musk’s or Peter Thiel’s? This question isn’t just about personalities--it’s a dividing line shaping the future of conservative politics. Over the next four years, as the conservative political realignment develops, this divide will come into sharper focus. While the public face of conservatism parades a unified “big-tent” after the recent election success, beneath the surface, tensions are rising and the facade of harmony won’t last much longer. Those who are paying attention can sense it: the music is about to stop.
On one side of this movement, you have Elon Musk, who champions dismantling the administrative state. His vision focuses on cutting government spending, reducing the deficit, and eliminating bureaucratic inefficiencies. To underscore his ideas, Musk often shares videos of Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman, leveraging their arguments to articulate his political vision.
Marc Andreessen has been making rounds on the web after his Joe Rogan podcast, where he explains how this bureaucratic sludge is wielded as power against American citizens—particularly how several cases of debanking have inadvertently (or intentionally) stifled American progress in cryptocurrency adoption and acceleration. The obvious message of his being that this unjust debanking is a violation of American civil ideals.
On the other side of this divide is a quieter but increasingly influential group of self-proclaimed "National Conservatives," backed behind the scenes by Peter Thiel. Thiel’s influence is far-reaching, most notably seen in his financial and political support of J.D. Vance, who has become a recognizable face front and center in this movement. Game of Thrones headcanons aside, it is hard to ignore the correlations between some of these "National Conservative" alliances taking hold in the Republican Party—and conservative politics in general—with Thiel being a major player in this rise.
To understand the roots of this growing political discord, we must go back to the early 2000s and Peter Thiel’s now-infamous memo, "The Straussian Moment." In this provocative essay, Thiel critiques not only the Enlightenment but also the foundational belief in progress through the marriage of Classical Liberalism and technology. For Thiel, this union has fallen short--failing to deliver the transformative promises it once foreshadowed. His argument laid the groundwork for a deeper skepticism of liberal principles, one that continues to echo in today’s ideological battles. s has failed to deliver on its promises.
So, what does Thiel propose? At the core of his vision is the belief that politics are "irreducibly adversarial." Drawing on the ideas of Carl Schmitt (I invite you to look him up), Thiel argues that humanity is fundamentally divided by profound questions, such as the nature of God and man and that politics is the battlefield where these divisions play out. “Humans are forced to choose between friends and enemies," he writes, framing politics as a stark, combative arena. This rhetoric mirrors the National Conservative playbook, which advocates wielding the state to "reward friends and punish enemies." Similarly, J.D. Vance has embraced this approach urging conservatives to "seize the administrative state" and use it "for [their] own purposes" rather than dismantling it.
While a full exploration of the philosophic underpinnings of Thiel’s movement is beyond the scope of this discussion, what's clear is that these ideas highlight an irreconcilable divide between the Musk and Thiel camps.
The techno-optimist, Classical Liberal faction within the conservative movement envisions a future driven by freedom and innovation. They believe in free speech, free markets, and free people. Their goal is to dismantle the bureaucratic state and focus on going to Mars, building super-intelligences, and catalyzing the mass adoption of decentralized technologies like cryptocurrencies.
In stark contrast, the Thiel camp views this political framework and its goals as a mirage. They argue that deeper political and philosophical questions about God and human nature are paramount. For them, the Enlightenment and its promises have been a temporary distraction from the necessity of wielding political power to pursue these "deeper" questions. They advocate using the state to "reward friends and punish enemies," much like premodern societies grappling with existential questions through force.
These two visions are fundamentally at odds. The Musk camp seeks to reduce the role of the state to empower individual innovation and progress, while the Thiel camp wants to harness the power of the state to enforce a specific moral and ideological agenda. One champions the dismantling of oppressive structures to liberate human potential; the other seeks to control and direct society through that same authority.
As the conservative movement stands at this crossroads, the growing tension between these factions cannot be ignored. The facade of unity may soon crumble as these opposing philosophies vie for dominance. That stupid Lord of The Rings meme is literally where we find ourselves. El(r)on tells the Red Tribe to cast the administrative state into the fire. To destroy it. The response from the Thiel camp, embodied by JD Vance? A resounding, “No.”