JD Vance Calls Out Billionaire Mentor Peter Thiel: ‘He Needs to Get Off the Sidelines’

(AP Photo/Paul Vernon)

GOP vice presidential nominee and Senator JD Vance (R-OH) called out his billionaire mentor Peter Thiel in an interview with the Financial Times, arguing that Thiel “needs to get off the sidelines” and donate to the Republican ticket before it’s too late.

Thiel poured millions of dollars into Vance and Blake Masters’s 2022 campaigns for U.S. Senate, but has sat out this election cycle so far after declaring that he wouldn’t give “any money to Republican politicians in 2024” last year.

But Thiel did leave the door open, musing that “there’s always a chance” he could change his mind, and Vance is hoping that he might be ready to do just that.

“I’m going to keep on talking to Peter and persuading him that — you know he’s obviously been exhausted by politics a little bit — but he’s going to be really exhausted by politics if we lose and if Kamala Harris is president,” Vance told the Times. “He [Thiel] is fundamentally a conservative guy, and I think that he needs to get off the sidelines and support the ticket.”

Thiel and Vance met back in 2011 after the former spoke at Yale Law School. The future vice presidential nominee went on to work at a venture capital firm co-founded by Thiel as well as to found his own venture capital firm backed by Thiel.

Vance’s rather stern entreaty to his mentor comes as Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris’s campaign continues to raise and spend enormous amounts of money in order to defeat Vance and his running mate, former President Donald Trump.

According to AdImpact, Harris has outspent Trump on digital advertising by more than $50 million in the last month, although the Trump-Vance team has spent more in several swing states, including Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina. Harris, on the other hand, has advantages in Wisconsin and Michigan.