Peter Thiel Speaks at Republican National Convention, Donates $1.25M to Trump

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies and a longtime Stanford friend of Kevin Warsh, spoke at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland on July 21, 2016, becoming the first prominent Silicon Valley billionaire to formally endorse Donald Trump. Thiel donated $1.25 million to Trump campaign efforts and served as a California delegate to the convention. His speech marked the formal alignment of a faction of the tech industry with the populist-nationalist wing of the Republican Party, a shift that would reshape both Silicon Valley and the GOP over the following decade.