Thiel was one of many whose financial ties to the dead financier should be probed, a prominent senator believes.
The Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues to plague the Trump administration, and on Wednesday, a prominent Democratic senator called for Congress to investigate the financial ties between the dead sex criminal and a host of financial organizations and people, including tech billionaire Peter Thiel.
Much of the debate about the “Epstein files” has centered around what records the Justice Department may have on his illicit sex crimes but, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), the more important files may actually be at the Commerce Department, where evidence of the dead financier’s financial activities seem to connect him to a wide variety of wealthy and influential people and institutions.
One of those people, according to Wyden, is Thiel, whose venture capital firm is reported to have previously taken a large amount of money from the dead financier. In June, the New York Times reported that in 2015 and 2016, not long before his death, Epstein invested some $40 million with a company that Thiel had co-founded, Valar Ventures. Like many of Thiel’s other companies, Valar takes its name from J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythos.
The news that Thiel’s company enjoyed a not insignificant relationship with Epstein was interesting, given that, in public, Thiel has tended to speak about Epstein in fairly abstract terms. While Thiel has admitted that he met Epstein a few times, he has always given the impression that he didn’t know him very well. Last year, Thiel went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and spent a significant amount of time talking about Epstein, albeit mostly to emphasize the dead financier’s ties to a number of prominent, left-leaning tech executives—such as Microsoft mogul Bill Gates and LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman.
