INTRODUCTION It may seem hard to remember, but there was a time when the world seemed ready to put Silicon Valley in charge of everything. This was 2016--the "Age of Unicorns," as business magazines called it, referring to tech companies that were growing so quickly, and had become so valuable, that they seemed almost mythical. Jeff Bezos had saved one of America''s great newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg was romancing San Francisco politicos, who''d just named a hospital after him, and transportation activists were showing up in major cities to protest in favor of the disruptions brought on by Uber. President Barack Obama, his term winding down, was musing about relocating to California and becoming a tech investor as his next act. Venture capital, he told to reporters that spring, sounded like it could be "very satisfying." But even as the zeitgeist--all the way up to ambitions of the leader of the free world--celebrated the promise and potential of Silicon Valley, one of Silicon Valley''s pioneers had already turned his attention well beyond it. Over the prior two decades, Peter Thiel had accumulated billions of dollars in wealth, backing some of the biggest and most successful tech companies, including Facebook, PayPal, and SpaceX. He''d built a network that gave him access to the best entrepreneurs and the wealthiest investors in the world, and he was idolized by a generation of aspiring startup founders.

But Thiel wanted more than sway in Silicon Valley--he wanted real power, political power. He was about to be handed an opportunity to seize it. It came in the form of what appeared at first to be a minor scandal at Facebook, where Thiel had been an early investor. That May, the tech blog Gizmodo published a report claiming that the opinions of conservatives were being systematically suppressed by the social network. A small team of editors working on a new feature called Trending Topics said they''d been instructed to include stories from mainstream outlets such as CNN and The New York Times, but to leave out stories from right-wing media as well as those about fringe topics popular among conservatives, such as the unverified claim that the IRS had been targeting Tea Partyaffiliated nonprofits. The scoop was modest--Trending Topics had nothing to do with the regular news feed, which was curated by algorithm and was full of right- wing content--but it enraged conservatives, who saw it as proof that Facebook was biased in a broader way. The Drudge Report , which had been among the banned outlets, led with a giant and unflattering pic- ture of Zuckerberg''s deputy Sheryl Sandberg, the author of the book Lean In . not leaning in .

leaning left! the headline screamed. facebook under fire was the Fox News chyron. Facebook denied the allegations, but Zuckerberg sensed that this was a crisis to be managed, and he turned to Thiel to help him. On Wednesday, May 18, a group of sixteen prominent right-wing media personalities were summoned to Menlo Park for a meeting. They included talk show hosts Tucker Carlson, Glenn Beck, and Dana Perino; the presidents of the Tea Party Patriots, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation; and a handful of others. Officially, they were there to see Zuckerberg and Sandberg, but Thiel was the reason many of them had made the trip. At forty-eight, he was more than a decade older than the Facebook founder, but the two men had much in common. Like Zuckerberg, Thiel was ruthlessly competitive and awkward in social situations.

They''d been close--Thiel had been Zuckerberg''s mentor and his patron, the first out- side investor in his company and the first person in authority to grasp that Zuckerberg actually knew what he was doing. Years earlier, Thiel had seen in the Facebook founder--an abrasive, socially inept young man whose chief business qualification at the time was that he''d hacked together a way to rate the attractiveness of his female classmates at Harvard--something huge. After investing in Facebook, Thiel had set up Zuckerberg with absolute control over it, helping to transform the kid with the words "I''m CEO . Bitch" on his business cards into the fairly polished capitalist he would become. The relationship had made both men spectacularly rich, and though Thiel no longer owned much Facebook stock, he remained on the company''s board and was still very much invested in its influence. Zuckerberg and Thiel had drifted apart over the previous few years, as Thiel had become more entrenched in the world of conservative politics and Zuckerberg had embraced the spirit of the Obama era, starting a lobbying group aimed at promoting business-friendly immigration reform and pledging billions to the causes of "advancing human potential and promoting equality." But even as he cultivated Obama and others on the left, Zuckerberg had continued to rely on Thiel as a liaison to the American right. Thiel, according to Zuckerberg''s allies, was the company''s conservative conscience.

"Mark wants to have a balance at Facebook between left and right," said a former Facebook executive. "He doesn''t think he can have a healthy debate if everyone''s a bleeding-heart Democrat." Zuckerberg''s critics saw Thiel''s influence on the company as more profound--and more pernicious. He was, in this view, the puppet master: pushing a younger, ideologically uncertain founder toward an alliance with an ex- tremist wing of the Republican party. As the group of conservative leaders arrived at Facebook''s sprawling Frank Gehrydesigned headquarters, Thiel and Zuckerberg were a study in shifting generational attitudes toward the concept of business casual. The Facebook founder wore his usual uniform, a gray T-shirt and jeans. Thiel wore a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of hempsoled shoes. As usual, he carried himself as if braced for a collision--his shoulders hunched forward, his head tucked ever so slightly.

The group sat down at a large table, and Zuckerberg and Sandberg led them through a dense, technical presentation designed to explain that Facebook''s software, not editors, selected the vast majority of articles that appeared on Facebook. Zuckerberg asked if there were any questions-- which the pundits took as an invitation to light into Facebook, the company''s left-leaning employees, and the general sense that Silicon Valley favored liberal causes. "They were letting him have it," recalled Glenn Beck, the talk radio personality and former Fox News host known for his histrionic conspiracy theories and goofy on-camera antics. "He deserved some of it." Beck was one of a handful of the attendees whom Thiel had been quietly cultivating. After he''d left Fox News under tense circumstances--rumor had it that Wendi Deng, Rupert Murdoch''s wife, had demanded his ouster amid his show''s conspiratorial turn during the Obama administration--it was Thiel who''d convinced him to focus on streaming videos and podcasts. "You just have to decide if you are in the future or are you in the past," Thiel had told him. Beck was fond of Thiel and, in the meeting, assumed the role of Zuckerberg''s defender.

"You''ve got thirty people who have spent decades defending freedom of speech," he said, addressing Zuckerberg and gesturing to his colleagues. "And you have this platform that has given hundreds of millions of people the freedom of speech." Zuckerberg seemed moved by Beck''s show of empathy. "We built Facebook to be a platform for all ideas," he wrote on his Facebook page after the group departed. "Our community''s success depends on every- one feeling comfortable sharing anything they want." The message to employees, and the outside world, was clear: Facebook intended to allow supporters of Donald Trump, who was by then the de facto Republican nominee, to say more or less whatever they wanted on its platform. Over the next several months, misinformation on Facebook--much of it in Trump''s favor--outperformed real news. The most popular election headline on Facebook during that period, according to one study, was pope francis shocks the world, endorses donald trump for president, which, of course, never happened.

Another claimed falsely that Wikileaks emails revealed that Hillary Clinton had sold weapons to Islamic State terrorists. Zuckerberg would eventually apologize--sort of. "We didn''t take a broad enough view of our responsibility, and that was a big mistake," he''d later tell Congress when called to answer questions about the ways that Facebook had been used to manipulate the election campaign. But in the moment, the company denied that it was helping to spread misinformation, while downplaying the extent of the Russian government''s involvement. Two months after the meeting in Menlo Park, Thiel formally endorsed Trump, becoming the star of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Then, in mid-October, just days after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about sexual assault, Thiel donated $1 million to Trump''s campaign. The move helped turn a tide of negative press and added to the coffers of a campaign that would buy a barrage of targeted Facebook advertisements as part of a voter suppression strategy designed to discourage potential Clinton supporters. After the election, Thiel was feted by Trump''s inner circle and given an office in Trump Tower, along with the latitude to install his allies in the new administration.

"He was something unique," recalled Steve Bannon, who became CEO of the campaign in August. He praised Thiel for bringing intellectual credibility an.