Blake Masters

Blake Masters (born August 18, 1986) is an American venture capitalist and author who served as chief operating officer of Thiel Capital and president of the Thiel Foundation from 2018 to 2022, and who coauthored Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future with Peter Thiel in 2014. Masters was the 2022 Republican nominee for U.S. Senate from Arizona, losing the general election to the incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly after winning the Republican primary with the financial backing of a Thiel-funded super PAC. His career is the second documented instance, alongside JD Vance, of a Thiel-network operative placed into electoral politics through direct capital deployment.¹²³

Stanford, Zero to One, and the Thiel Apprenticeship

Masters met Thiel at Stanford Law School, where Masters was a student and Thiel was teaching an undergraduate course on startups in the computer science department. Masters took detailed notes on the course lectures and published them online in 2012, where they circulated widely in the Silicon Valley founder community. The notes formed the basis of Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, published by Crown in 2014 with Thiel and Masters listed as coauthors. The book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list and became the canonical text of the Founders Fund investment thesis.¹²

The book's central arguments are that competition is for losers, that durable value comes from building monopolies around proprietary technology, and that the conventional venture-capital preference for incremental consumer-internet deals was a mistake. These arguments were drawn directly from Thiel's lectures, and Masters's role was the editorial and organizational work of converting them into a published book. The coauthorship placed Masters inside the Thiel orbit at the level of intellectual production, and the book's success made Masters a public figure in the venture and startup world before he had run a company of his own.²

Thiel Capital, the Thiel Foundation, and the Fellowship

Masters joined Thiel's firm Thiel Capital as chief operating officer and served as president of the Thiel Foundation, the vehicle that runs the Thiel Fellowship program. The dual role placed him in operational control of the two principal non-investment arms of the Thiel network: the firm's strategic and administrative functions (Thiel Capital), and the recruitment-and-mentorship program that identifies and capitalizes young founders outside the university pipeline (the Thiel Foundation and the Fellowship).¹⁴

The Fellowship presidency is the recruitment-layer position. Masters ran the program that selects the cohort of approximately twenty-to-thirty fellows per year, each receiving 250,000 dollars over two years on the skip-or-stop-out-of-college condition, and his tenure overlapped with the cohort that included some of the program's most prominent alumni. The Fellowship functions as the earliest-stage recruitment layer of the Thiel network, and the president of the Foundation is the operative who staffs it.⁴

The 2022 Arizona Senate Campaign

Masters announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat from Arizona in July 2021, seeking the Republican nomination to challenge the incumbent Democrat Mark Kelly. The campaign was backed from the outset by Thiel, who donated to the Saving Arizona PAC, a super PAC formed to support Masters's primary campaign. The Thiel super PAC spending in the Arizona race ran alongside the larger Thiel deployment in the Ohio race that elected JD Vance, and the two campaigns were treated in contemporaneous reporting as a coordinated Thiel political project.³⁵

Masters won the August 2022 Republican primary, defeating the establishment-backed candidate Jim Lamon and several other contenders. The general election campaign against Mark Kelly was marked by Masters's shift toward the center on several positions he had taken during the primary, including his earlier endorsement of a federal personhood abortion ban and his expressed openness to privatizing Social Security. Kelly won the November 2022 general election by approximately five percentage points. Masters conceded and subsequently took a role in the private sector, including a board position at PSQ Holdings, the public-company successor to the conservative marketplace platform PublicSq.¹³

The Vance-Masters Parallel and the Recruitment Pattern

The Masters and Vance campaigns together were the Thiel network's electoral deployment in the 2022 cycle. Thiel spent approximately fifteen million dollars on the Protect Ohio Values super PAC supporting Vance in Ohio and an additional fifteen million dollars on the Saving Arizona PAC super PAC supporting Masters in Arizona, for a total 2022-cycle deployment of approximately thirty-two million dollars. CNBC reported the combined figure in November 2022. Both candidates came from inside the Thiel commercial orbit: Vance from Mithril Capital and Narya Capital, Masters from Thiel Capital and the Thiel Foundation. The Vance campaign produced a sitting senator who became vice president in 2025; the Masters campaign lost the November 2022 general election to Mark Kelly by approximately five percentage points.⁵⁶⁷

The Saving Arizona PAC was funded almost entirely by Thiel, with additional contributions from the cryptocurrency billionaires Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who joined the effort in June 2022 per Forbes reporting. Thiel added a reported 1.5 million dollars in July 2022 as the primary approached, and the PAC resumed general-election spending in September 2022 after a period in which Thiel was reported to be hesitant about continued funding. The Federal Election Commission raised questions about the PAC's disclosure of its spending, documented in the Arizona Mirror reporting on the FEC inquiry. The Winklevoss cofunding extended the documented donor network beyond Thiel himself into the broader crypto-and-tech-billionaire cohort that overlaps with the PayPal Mafia and Thiel-network commercial orbit.⁶⁷⁸

The pattern of the deployment, with a single donor capitalizing ideologically aligned operatives placed into Senate primaries, is documented across the Protect Ohio Values and Saving Arizona PAC Federal Election Commission filings and in the contemporaneous Politico and OpenSecrets reporting. The two campaigns ran in parallel under the same Thiel strategy: identify operatives inside the commercial orbit, capitalize their primaries through a dedicated super PAC, and convert the commercial-network relationship into an elected-office relationship. Vance won the Senate seat and then the vice presidency, while Masters won his primary but lost the general election in a competitive state.⁵⁶