Episode Transcript
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Morgan Sung: Guys, I think we need to talk about the broligarchy.
News Anchor 1 We’re seeing a rise in what I guess we’ll call the broligarchy.
News Anchor 2 The broligarchs really have an explicit political agenda.
News Anchor 3 How do you survive the broligarchy?
Morgan Sung: You may have heard this word more and more often in the past few months as rich, well-connected tech bros gain power and influence in the current presidential administration. Think of the tech CEOs at inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, all lined up and ready to get cozy with the White House. They may be some of the most public-facing broligarchs, but there are a lot of highly influential tech dudes working behind the scenes. And today, we’re gonna look into a specific subset of these guys who are all deeply embedded or invested in the federal government. And they all seem to know each other.
So imagine a cork board with a bunch of photos on it, and I’ve got some red string in my hands. Let’s see how they’re all connected. Ready? So at the top of the board, there’s Elon Musk. Maybe you’ve heard of him. He’s the billionaire Tesla CEO who bought Twitter and turned it into X. He’s also leading the charge at the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, the organization slashing government agencies left and right.
Okay, let’s connect that to this guy on the right. There’s David Sachs, venture capitalist, famed angel investor, and recently appointed White House AI and Crypto Czar. And then a little lower, there’s Ken Howery, another billionaire VC and the former ambassador to Sweden during Trump’s first term. He’s the current pick for ambassador to Denmark. So if Trump actually tries to colonize Greenland, Ken Howery will be involved. Keeping track of those strings? Good, because here’s another one on the other side of the board, Jacob Helberg, a tech advisor married to tech investor, Keith Rabois. Jacob Helberg is a nominee for undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment.
And at the center of all of this is Peter Thiel, the elusive billionaire, tech titan, and big time Republican donor. He’s the one who introduced JD Vance to Trump in 2021. And through his Silicon Valley connections, he brought a whole bunch of other people into the White House orbit. So what do all of the guys in this web we’ve created have in common? And how are they using their proximity to the president to shape US policy?
This group’s ties to Silicon Valley are widely known, but what’s less public is that some of them have roots in an especially oppressive political regime. That’s what we’re getting into on the show today. Let’s dive in.
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
Okay, so let’s get back to this cork board. Musk, Sacks, Howery, Helberg, Thiel, what’s the red thread connecting all of them? Well, they were involved in PayPal during its earliest years before the company went public and made everyone very rich. Or in Jacob Helberg’s case, married to a former PayPal executive who became very rich. This group is so well connected and so influential within Silicon Valley, that they’re known by this one nickname.
News Anchor 4: the PayPal Mafia
News Anchor 5: Who are the PayPal Mafia?
News Anchor 6: The PayPal Mafia has laid the foundation for a new era of power.
Morgan Sung: Let me get my big red Sharpie out. Within the PayPal mafia, there’s another subset of this group that we’re gonna draw a circle around today. And we’ll talk about that in a minute. But first, you know how this goes. We start with a new tab. What is the PayPal Mafia?
Countdown Announcer: Three, two, one, happy 2000!
Morgan Sung: It’s the year 2000.
AOL: You’ve got mail.
Morgan Sung: X.com, the online bank service, not the shell of Twitter, has just merged with a software company, Confinity. Elon Musk co-founded X.Com, and Peter Thiel co-founded Confinity. This merged company is rebranded as PayPal. It’s a game changer, and the company’s secure online payment system becomes a massive success. Two years later, PayPal goes public. Then, eBay buys the company for $1.5 billion, giving everyone with a stake in PayPal a pretty hefty chunk of money.
Now, a lot of PayPal’s co-founders, executives, engineers, and other employees leave the company very quickly after eBay’s acquisition, but they keep in touch. They stay close. And in the years following, PayPal alumni, those co-founders, executives, engineers, and other employers, they go off and start other companies — YouTube, Tesla, LinkedIn, Yelp, and so many more. They also start investing in each other’s companies, attending each others’ parties, advising each other, sitting on each others’ boards, and co-founding more companies with each other. They become super influential within Silicon Valley. If you wanted to get your foot in the door in the tech industry, you needed to get good with the PayPal mafia.
The name comes from a 2007 Fortune magazine feature that literally called them the PayPal Mafia in the headline. The cover photo features 13 of them, all men, of course, cosplaying as seedy New Jersey mobsters. They’re dressed in track suits, leather jackets, or big boxy sports coats with the shoulder pads. They’ve got the chunky gold chains, of, course, and their hair is slicked back, and they’re surrounded by poker chips and glasses of whiskey. A few of them are puffing on cigars. It’s a scene straight out of The Sopranos.
Tony Soprano: It’s a stereotype, and it’s offensive. There is no mafia.
Morgan Sung: Today, this photo shoot might be considered an offensive caricature of Italian-American gangsters, but it’s 2007. It was a direct reference to the biggest show on TV at the time. And the godfather of the PayPal Mafia, front and center of the photo shoot is Peter Thiel.
Morgan Sung: After PayPal, he co-founded Palantir Technologies, a big data company that has major contracts with the Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence agencies. And then he co-founded Founders Fund, this massive venture capital fund that was a super early investor in SpaceX and Facebook. He’s known as the godfather because he’s so well connected within both Silicon Valley and the U.S. government. And because he’s used his network to invest in companies and in people. Remember, he’s the one who put JD Vance on the map. He funded Vance’s Ohio Senate campaign and then orchestrated his first meeting with Trump. Thiel has been such a prominent figure within the tech industry that there’s a whole character, Peter Gregory, based off of him in the HBO show, Silicon Valley.
Richard Hendricks: Well, that is before I just give up and go back to college.
Peter Gregory: Do not do that. Go work at Burger King. Go into the woods and forage for nuts and berries. Do not go back to college.
Morgan Sung: Now, Thiel’s actual beliefs are all over the place. Like his TV counterpart, he has said that university education holds back innovation. In the 90s, he and David Sacks co-authored a book about how multiculturalism and political correctness were ruining academia. And he’s also been really into building offshore, independent, libertarian islands where tech innovation can happen outside of any government oversight. But he’s got influence and some of his ideology seems to be spreading among the power players of the tech industry. Politically speaking, he’s endorsed and funded Republican candidates since the early 2000s and has been described as techno-libertarian, but his comments and writing veer toward what a lot of critics say is just fascist. His biographer, Max Chafkin, said that Thiel is, quote, “hostile to the idea of democracy.”
Anyway, Thiel has been one of Trump’s earliest political supporters. He backed Trump in 2016, and although he declined to fund the 2024 campaign, he also hosted an inauguration party back in January with a ton of Silicon Valley insiders.
Many other members of the PayPal mafia up on my corkboard either haven’t been visibly involved in politics or have supported Democrats. Reid Hoffman, who was PayPal’s chief operating officer before he co-founded LinkedIn, was a major Democratic donor in 2024. And Elon Musk and David Sacks both endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016.
But today, Musk and Sacks are both known to be very conservative, bordering on extremist. They’re also core members of the PayPal Mafia in this red circle we’ve drawn. But why are these three guys grouped together like this? There’s a lesser-known commonality linking them together. They have roots in apartheid-era South Africa.
Well, that’s a new tab. PayPal Mafia and apartheid.
During a speech on President Trump’s second inauguration day, Elon Musk did a gesture that looked a lot like a Nazi salute.
Elon Musk: Thank you. My heart goes out to you.
Morgan Sung: And then he turned around and did it again.
Elon Musk: This is what victory feels like. Yeah!
Morgan Sung: It was that Inauguration Day incident that piqued journalist Chris McGreal’s curiosity about Elon Musk and his upbringing. It turns out that Musk, along with several other members of the PayPal mafia, spent at least some of their formative years in South Africa, a place Chris knew well.
Chris McGreal: South Africa’s apartheid system had, you know, roots close links to fascism in Europe. So people started to ask, well, is there a connection? And that’s what we went to look at.
Morgan Sung: So Chris has been a foreign correspondent for The Guardian for decades, covering Africa, the Middle East, and Central America. And a little over 30 years ago, he was actually based in Johannesburg, covering the last years of South African apartheid.
Chris McGreal: So apartheid was a system that essentially came to being in 1948. There’d always been racial discrimination, but the system that’s introduced in 1948 is a very rigid system of segregation.
Morgan Sung: Under the system, all South Africans were registered and assigned to one of four racial groups — white, Asian, Native, which meant Black, or Colored, which lumped everyone who was mixed race into one group.
Chris McGreal: They were only allowed to marry or have sex with people of their same race. And they introduced legislation. It was called job reservation, which meant that the best jobs and the best land and the best everything were reserved for white people. This was a very rigid system of segregation that went far beyond what had existed, say, in the southern United States. And in some ways, it had its roots in fascism in 1930s Europe.
Morgan Sung: When Elon Musk was born in Pretoria in 1971, the Prime Minister of South Africa was a man named John Vorster. In the 1930s, Vorster had been part of a South African fascist militia that was wildly anti-Semitic and openly pro-Nazi.
Chris McGreal: Vorster famously said that the system that they were promoting in South Africa was called Christian nationalism. And he said, in Germany, they call it Nazism, in Italy, they called it fascism. We call it Christian nationalism, but it’s essentially all the same thing.
Morgan Sung: So that sets the stage for the kind of political environment that these core members of the PayPal mafia grew up in. Let’s take a closer look. There’s David Sacks, the White House AI and Crypto Czar.
Chris McGreal: So he was born in Cape Town, but at a relatively young age, five years old, I think, his family moves to Tennessee where he grows up. So he’s less directly affected by apartheid on the frontline at the coalface of apartheid. But you know he grew up in a white diaspora, white South African diaspora family, and remained very closely tied to South Africa. So you would have had those influences, but they wouldn’t have been quite so direct.
Morgan Sung: And then Peter Thiel, PayPal Mafia godfather and kingmaker of Silicon Valley. And Chris noted that the area where Thiel spent his adolescence was openly supportive of the Nazis.
Chris McGreal: Peter Thiel’s father was in the mining business. They initially moved to Johannesburg. The white population was mostly of German descent. And even in the 1970s and 80s, there was still open support for the Nazis. They still celebrated Hitler’s birthday every May. You could go into gift shops and buy swastika flags. I found a New York Times article from 1975 where the reporter describes driving into a gas station and being met by an attendant who gives a Nazi salute and says Hitler died. That’s in the 70s when Thiel’s at school in that city.
Morgan Sung: And lastly, Elon Musk. We know who he is by now.
Chris McGreal: Musk’s father was a mine owner. He grew up in incredible wealth, even by the standards of white South Africa, which would have meant that he was surrounded by black servants and he certainly wouldn’t have wanted for anything that he needed. Musk, again, is perhaps the most interesting case.
Morgan Sung: Chris says that because Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, was actually deeply involved in a movement in Canada called Technocracy Incorporated. They pushed for abolishing democracy in favor of letting technical and scientific experts run the government. Under Haldeman’s leadership, the organization became increasingly fascist. And during World War II, the Canadian government banned the organization and arrested Haldemen for his opposition to the country’s fight against Hitler. Yes, you heard that correctly. Haldeman opposed the country’s fight against Hitler.
Chris McGreal: We get apartheid in South Africa in 1948, and Joshua Haldeman likes the look of that. He thinks that that’s a that looks like a good system. So in 1950, he moves to South Africa where he can go on essentially living the fascist dream.
Morgan Sung: So Haldeman, Musk’s grandfather, moves to South Africa. Not because he has any ties to the country, but because he likes the idea of apartheid.
Chris McGreal: Now, the grandfather dies when Musk himself is very young, but the ideas live on inside that branch of the family. And Musk’s father, Errol, has described his kind of parents-in-law as openly neo-Nazi. So one of the things you’ll notice Musk ends up going to a high school called Pretoria Boys High, which under South Africa’s laws is racially segregated.
One of the complications of South Africa is that the white population isn’t homogenous. You’ve got the Afrikaners and they’re the people who were descended from the Dutch, and they are the people, who essentially ran the country politically. They were the people behind the National Party and apartheid. The other half of the population, white population, was English speakers, descendants of British colonists. These two white groups are actually in conflict quite a lot.
Pretoria of Boys High was mostly English speakers. So inside that school, there were actually quite a lot of people who were resistant to apartheid and the Afrikaners and the National Party.
Morgan Sung: Those classmates who went on to resist apartheid include Edwin Cameron, who became a Supreme Court Justice under the post-apartheid system, and Peter Hain, who led the anti-apartheid movement in Britain.
Chris McGreal: So those kind of people were in that school with Musk. But we don’t see any evidence, or we’ve never heard any evidence that he took a stand on apartheid. One of the things you can safely say about South Africa at that time, it’s no matter what your background and education, if you were white, you were growing up in immense privilege, surrounded by people who were treated as second, third and fourth class citizens compared to you by law.
In the end, you still imbue some of that system, some of the racism, some with that privilege, even if you don’t recognize it at the time. I think that that’s probably true of Musk in particular. Perhaps some of the other men we’ve talked about less because they left South Africa at a younger age, but it’s hard to imagine that Musk wasn’t influenced by that in this way.
Morgan Sung: Like Chris said, others who grew up in the same environment, in the same place of privilege during apartheid, actually went on to espouse very different ideas and actively work against racism. So there isn’t always a direct line between someone’s upbringing and their politics as an adult.
However, there are some connections here between these men’s backgrounds, their current anti-DEI stances, and the policies that they’re trying to influence both in the U.S. and abroad. And President Trump seems to be on that same wavelength, especially around U.S. policy toward South Africa. But that is a new tab after a quick break.
Okay, so we just learned about how some core members of the PayPal mafia were all born in South Africa during this horrifically oppressive time called apartheid. So what does all this have to do with Trump’s fixation on South Africa? And that is a new tab. Trump, South Africa, and Elon Musk.
News Anchor 7: There’s an escalating dispute between President Trump and South Africa over a new land policy that he says discriminates against the country’s white minority.
Morgan Sung: Since getting back into the Oval Office, Trump has been paying a lot of attention to South Africa. First, he signed an executive order stopping all aid to South African and offering refugee status to white South Africans. And then he’s been posting about it over and over again on Truth Social, the right-leaning Twitter clone that he owns. So what’s this all about?
Chris McGreal: It’s about several things. One has nothing to do with the subject at hand, which is that South Africa took Israel to the International Court of Justice over what has been described as the genocide in Gaza. And there are a lot of people who have been very angered in the US and in Washington by that and have been pressing Trump to punish South Africa for that. So that’s one part of it.
But a second part is, what’s happening in South Africa fits the narrative that you hear on the right in this country, particularly amongst white supremacists, about white genocide, about the Great Replacement Theory, all of those things which suggest that the white population of the United States and the white populations around the world is somehow under some kind threat from other races.
News Anchor 8: We begin with the latest on U.S.-South African tensions. Pretoria has pushed back as it continues to face strong allegations of racism from U. S. President Donald Trump and his South African-born ally Elon Musk.
Chris McGreal: You can see Trump first become aware of it in 2018, during his first presidency, when a group of Afrikaners who run an organization called AfriForum, and they’re pressing the idea that in South Africa, white farmers are being murdered for their land. What they’re portraying is that South Africa in the years after apartheid has essentially become a new kind of racist country, that now it’s black people persecuting white and instead of white people persecuting black people.
This, of course, fits very much with a lot of the kind of stuff we hear from Trump and the people around him. And so it paints whites as victims. But AfriForum turned up in America in 2018, pushing this idea that there was this essentially white genocide going on. One of their number appears on Tucker Carlson on Fox News and starts talking about this.
Tucker Carlson South Africa is a diverse country, but the South African government would like to make it much less diverse.
AfriForum Member Basically threatening white farmers that if they do not voluntarily hand over their land to black people, then there would be a violent takeover.
Chris McGreal: And Trump is watching and Trump tweets to his then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
News Anchor 3 In a late night tweet, Trump said he’d asked Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to study South Africa’s land and farm seizures in addition to expropriations and large-scale killing of farmers.
Chris McGreal: When Trump comes back to power in January, it happens to coincide with a new law in South Africa, which is about redistribution of land.
News Anchor 9 frustration over the slow pace of land reform in south africa has been mounting and the new expropriation act aims to accelerate the redistribution of land in the country.
Chris McGreal: 70% of the land in South Africa, the agricultural land, is still in the hands of white people who only account for 7% of population.
Morgan Sung: Remember, during apartheid, black South Africans were subjected to extremely rigid segregation. The 1913 Natives Land Act designated the majority of South Africa as white and forbade the black indigenous population from owning land beyond a tiny amount that was set aside in special reserves. Black South Africans who were already living in those white areas were evicted en masse and had to relocate to poor townships or work as farm laborers. Either way, they were forced into poverty.
The Expropriation Act, signed into South African law this year, sets up a legal framework to redistribute land and address ownership imbalance within the country. The government isn’t just seizing land left and right. There’s a whole process involved that also includes paying landowners a fair price. A lot of the backlash to the new law is over one clause that allows the South African government to take land without compensation, but only in very specific circumstances. Like if the land was abandoned or if the owner isn’t actually using it and is just holding onto it until the property value goes up.
Chris McGreal: This was leapt on by the white right as evidence of essentially a new form of racism that white people were going to lose their land, including Musk. Musk for a while had been pressing the idea that affirmative action laws, that black empowerment laws in South Africa, were somehow a new formal apartheid. The idea of uplifting people who had been persecuted and discriminated against was actually a new form of apartheid. He was trying to turn the system on its head and say that whites are now the victims, which is plainly not the case. They remain economically dominant in South Africa and very much in a place of privilege. But that was the line that Musk was pushing. And it’s clear that Trump has been steered towards a direct confrontation with South Africa. I doubt he would have paid much attention on his own. I doubt he’s got into office this time and suddenly thought, I must go and deal with the South Africa situation.
News Anchor 9: Now in a social media post directly offering South African farmers and their families safe refuge in the U.S. and an expedited pathway to citizenship, erroneously stating that their land and farms were being confiscated.
Morgan Sung: And there’s another link here between Trump’s renewed crusade against South African reparations for black citizens, the actual victims of apartheid, and Musk’s business interests. Specifically, his satellite internet service company, Starlink.
Chris McGreal: Musk has been in dispute with South Africa and government over affirmative action, over black empowerment for a couple of years now, and it seems to be rooted in part in his desire to get Starlink into South Africa.
Morgan Sung: Under South Africa’s Black empowerment initiatives, the country mandates that foreign investors in the telecoms industry have to have at least 30% black ownership in any local operations. Musk has been pushing back on this requirement, claiming that he’s standing up for white people against discrimination. And he has AfriForum lobbying on his behalf within South Africa.
Chris McGreal: I think essentially what we’re seeing here, at least in part, because there are other forces of work at this as well, but in terms of Musk’s thing, I think, you know, he’s trying to pile on the pressure and Trump’s executive order is part of this on South Africa to back down on affirmative action laws on Black empowerment requirements for his businesses.
Morgan Sung: Musk has been on a similar crusade here in the US. He’s been openly critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, and has said that DEI is just another word for racism. And although he isn’t technically a federal employee, he has been the public face of DOGE, which has slashed DEI programs and gutted federal agencies.
In just a few months, they’ve canceled millions of dollars of federal grants for affordable housing programs, health research in marginalized communities, and education programs to help low-income students. DOGE also fired all employees in DEI positions who are disproportionately black, indigenous, or people of color.
Big picture here. I mean, the situation with Elon Musk in South Africa is just one example of how an unelected billionaire can sway policy. How else can you see this group of technocrats, as you said, how else do you see them influence US politics going forward?
Chris McGreal: Well, I think, you know, what we should look at very closely is they want to strip back regulation. They want to step back accountability. They essentially want a totally free market in which they can do what they want. And I think that’s actually where the real influence will lie. Now, as we know, in the American politics, since Citizens United ruling by the Supreme Court, money talks a lot and they’ve got money. So I would imagine that they will be ensuring that the people who get elected to Congress are people sympathetic to that.
Morgan Sung: So we’ve been looking at the PayPal mafia in South Africa, but let’s zoom out a bit and open one last tab. The rise of the broligarchy. Now, the PayPal mafia is not the only tech power group to exist. The broligarchy—and the power that they have—runs deep within American politics beyond the tech industry. Just look at the Citizens United ruling that Chris pointed out. This 2010 Supreme Court case redefined American elections by overhauling campaign finance laws. It struck down the limit on how much a corporation can directly spend on a political campaign, and set the stage for the creation of super PACs.
This ruling is what allowed former New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, a former Republican turned Democrat, to donate nearly $100 million to various Super PACS funding the 2024 Democratic presidential campaign. It’s also directly linked to Elon Musk launching his own Super PAC and spending over a quarter of a billion dollars funding Donald Trump’s campaign. The concept of the American oligarchy is not new. It’s just that now the tech bros are at the forefront.
Chris McGreal: We kind of get hung up on these guys because they’re obviously of the moment, and that’s important. But, you know, it’s worth looking at what’s been happening in the United States over the past 40 years. And it’s an oligarchy has been developing. I mean, we’ve seen some very powerful interests in this country essentially taking control of politics and I think these guys have moved to the fore over the recent years because of the role that technology has come to play and then they may be pushing it in new directions but you know it’s not like they are the original oligarchs in this country these are guys who’ve emerged at the most kind of fundamental time with Trump in power They are, in many ways, you know, like oligarchs everywhere, right? They’re serving their own interests and they are hijacking politics to do it.
Morgan Sung: We’ve been living at the whims of billionaires throughout American history. It’s just that in the past, it wasn’t as obvious.
Chris McGreal: We’ve seen the results of 40 years of deregulation, 40 years of being told that government is bad and big business is good. I mean, it’s clear in the United States that people’s lives are, you know, really quite directly controlled in lots of ways by corporations. American lives have been greatly influenced by this kind of control. The difference I think with, as you say, the broligarchy is that they’re more visible. They’re hungry. In the past, they’ve been hungry for money, and I think now they’re hungry for power.
Morgan Sung: And it’s not just that the PayPal mafia and other members of the broligarchy are rich and powerful. A lot of them have also expressed some pretty fascist white supremacist views. So what does it mean for democracy if this group of broligarchs has this much power? Is there any historic precedent for this dystopia that we’re currently living through?
Okay, that is a separate deep dive. So you’ll have to come back next week when we dig further into the broligarchy. We’re gonna figure out if the rumors are true. Are we really slouching toward techno-fascism? Or are we already in it? And what does techno- fascism even mean? For now, let’s close these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. Our producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Egusa is our Senior Editor. Jen Chien is KQED’s director of podcasts and helps edit the show. Sound design by Maya Cueva. Original music by Chris Egusa, with additional music by APM. Mixing and mastering by Brendan Willard.
Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad and Alana Walker. Katie Sprenger is our Podcast Operations Manager, and Holly Kernan is our Chief Content Officer. Support for this program comes from Birong Hu and supporters of the KQED Studios Fund.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink Dust Silver K84 Wired Mechanical Keyboard with Gateron Red switches.
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