Thiel Was Good For $10 Million, But J.D. Vance's Other Billionaire Backers Were Good For Nothing (May 2022)
www.forbes.com
... Along with Donald Trump's endorsement, Peter Thiel's $10 million contribution is widely credited with boosting Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance to victory Tuesday in the Ohio GOP primary for Senate.
Thiel's donation isn't just extraordinary for its amount of zeroes, however.
Like Thiel, billionaires Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt reportedly invested in Vance's venture-capital fund, Narya, in 2020. Jeff Bezos, Howard Schultz, Meg Whitman and at least 11 other billionaires backed an investment fund Vance managed for Steve Case's Revolution LLC, as did members of the Koch, Pritzker and Walton families, the Columbus Dispatch reported in 2017.
Yet none of that support appears to have carried over to cutting a check for Vance's Senate campaign, according to Forbes' search of Federal Election Commission records.
Other early champions of Vance's also don't appear to have repeated their generosity either. Imagine Entertainment thought highly enough of Vance's memoir to buy its rights, yet director Ron Howard didn't contribute to Vance's run for office. Netflix paid a reported $45 million for the distribution rights to the film, but FEC records show no contributions from CEO Reed Hastings.
In fact, no employee of Imagine Entertainment, Netflix or Vance's publisher, HarperCollins, appears to have donated to Vance's campaign. Likewise for his agent. "Tina Bennett, my wonderful agent, believed in the project even before I did," Vance wrote in the acknowledgements to Hillbilly Elegy. "She encouraged me when I needed it, pushed me when I needed it, and guided me through a publication process that initially scared the hell out of me." If Bennett also believes in Vance's campaign, it was just talk. She didn't walk the walk. ...
