‘Founder as Victim, Founder as God’: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and the two bodies of the entrepreneur

Abstract

Silicon Valley’s tech moguls have increasing political ambitions, as spectacularly illustrated by Peter Thiel’s and Elon Musk’s involvements in the US 2022 midterm elections and 2024 presidential election. Considering these businessmen’s ability to turn their fortune into political influence, it is important to grasp how they understand their political role. This article does so, first, by focusing on Musk and Thiel’s theory of the ‘founder,’ who they imagine as the enlightened future leader of a redeemed social order, and who they pretend to incarnate. The second part of the article analyses how these narratives about the triumphant founder are pervaded by latent paranoia and anxiety: the godly founder is fantasized as an object of intense hatred, perpetually threatened. Drawing on Freud and Lacan’s psychoanalytical concepts, I demonstrate that the two facets of the founder, as god and victim, are intrinsically connected. Considering them together helps to highlight the fragilities of the founder model and denaturalize the central place it has been given in neoliberal cultures.