jebmo’s posthaven

“Lunch?” one of my co-workers at The New York Times asked me via chat.

“No thanks,” I replied. “I’m not eating lunch today. I was invited to a dinner at Peter Thiel’s house tonight. Saving my appetite for the glorious meal.”

This conversation occurred a number of years ago when I was invited to Thiel’s for a “salon,” an event in which people—generally people in Thiel’s tax bracket, that is—would opine about all matters technology. That part of the invite, however, was less important to me. Instead, I was more interested in the food. As a co-founder of PayPal, an early Facebook investor, a successful venture capitalist, and the co-founder of Palantir, the big-data start-up, Thiel, I assumed, would be presiding over some sort of gluttonous feast. I presumed that chefs had been at work for days glazing carrots with a thyme-honey citrus sauce, preparing succulent Thomas Keller–esque chicken. (Come to think of it, Keller was likely even there, cooking the fowl himself.) For dessert, I envisioned a pâtissier whipping up handmade dark-chocolate sweets. As a journalist with a Prius, this was going to be a treat. In anticipation of the feast, I chose to forgo my breakfast and lunch that day.

After I filed my last piece of the day, I made my way to Thiel’s home, and as I bounded up the steps I imagined what might greet me in this palace. The furniture, I thought, must be impeccably designed; there would be bespoke pieces, masterful craftsmanship, and opulent dinnerware. And the food—ah the food!—was probably almost ready. My belly ached with excitement as I reached the top of the steps.

Knock, knock, knock.

The door swung open and I was greeted by a trio of fledgling, effervescent assistants. “Can I take your coat,” one asked. Oh yes, I said with a smile, here you go. “Can I get you a drink?” another queried politely. Oh yes, I curtsied, that would be lovely. So this is how the other .001 percent live, I thought. “We have some food for you to snack on,” another told me, pointing me toward a dining room to the left. And there, in the middle of a disproportionately small dining table, was one large bowl filled with edamame and a plate with some sushi that looked like it had been picked up from a local Stop & Shop. Marissa Mayer, then still a top executive at Google, was standing with a tiny little plate in her hand and a bewildered look on her face. She greeted me, then fingered a couple pieces of sushi on her plate before scampering into the other room.

The living room was filled with about 30 people, all of whom sat in a circle, picking at their sparsely decorated plates. At the top of the circle (yes, in Silicon Valley, circles have tops) Thiel sat, drinking a glass of champagne like King Joffrey on the Iron Throne (that is, if the Iron Throne were a La-Z-Boy). Everyone present was asked to introduce themselves. Most people began with, “I’m the C.E.O. of . . .,” before naming their company and then continuing with, “. . . and I graduated magna cum laude” from Harvard, Stanford, or whatever. Then the discussion began, with Thiel at the center of the conclave.

I was expecting to be served that glorious billionaire’s feast, or at least be told that dinner was being prepared in another room. But after an hour, we were still sitting there. I can’t reveal what we talked about. Not because it was privileged or off the record, but rather because I was so hungry that my brain could hardly retain the information.

Finally, about two hours in, I couldn’t take it anymore. I slipped into the bathroom and texted a friend who had spent time with Thiel and asked what the hell was going on. Does the man eat at midnight or something? Did I miss a memo? The friend wrote back with a couple of LOLs before explaining that Thiel is often on some sort of weird diet and he didn’t really eat all that much, anyway.

As I hobbled back into the living room and returned to my seat, debating whether I should try to steal the last piece of toro from Mayer’s plate (she wasn’t a C.E.O. yet), I was struck by a profound epiphany about Silicon Valley: Thiel, in many ways, sums up the entire mentality of the tech industry. He doesn’t necessarily care what other people want; if Thiel is on a weird and special diet, then we should all be on a weird and special diet. If Thiel thinks that people shouldn’t go to college because it’s a waste of time, as he’s said innumerable times before—regardless of the way such a decision could affect people’s lives in the future—then we are all fools for not dropping out. (Thiel, for what it is worth, has a B.A. and law degree from Stanford.)

If Thiel thinks people who wear suits are “bad at sales and worse at tech,” then you better change your sartorial choices. Go buy a hoodie; look the part. And if Thiel wants to disrupt how Washington works, he will become a delegate for Donald Trump. If he thinks that a blog called Gawker shouldn’t exist, then he will try to eradicate it. (Thiel did not return my request to comment for this article.)

I’m not telling this story to defend Gawker. I personally feel that citing the First Amendment to justify outing someone as gay (as Gawker did to Thiel, in 2007), or publishing a sex tape as “news” (as the site billed its Hulk Hogan scoop), is heinous. But the First Amendment in our country says the press has certain rights. That’s the law. As citizens, we have to abide by it.

But reality doesn’t seem to be the case for some of the elite in Silicon Valley. They play by their own rules. There is, of course, a positive side to all of this. These so-called disruptors have given us the iPhone and Uber and PayPal. But there is also a darker side, too—and we’re really starting to see those forces at work now. For a long time, technology pundits have wondered what will happen to the relatively young, very rich, Silicon Valley elite after they leave the companies that they created, and that made them wildly and incomprehensibly rich. What does Mark Zuckerberg, who is just 32, do after Facebook? Where does Travis Kalanick, 39, go after he’s done at Uber? What about all the young V.C.s in their 30s and 40s worth hundreds of millions?

These aren’t the kind of people who simply retire on a beach and sip Soylent through a thin straw. So the assumption has long been that these people would eventually take their money and run for office, trying to change the world through due process. But our system of government, after all, was intended to be laborious, inefficient, and filled with checks and balances. And the tech elite, who have changed society more over the past decade than all the lawmakers put together (ever, perhaps), aren’t the patient type. Using the technologies we all adore, Silicon Valley simply zig-zags around the system with unwrinkled ease.

What I didn’t realize after that dinner, but I do see now, is that the actions of these tech elite are only going to become more brazen as they morph society into the world they believe we should live in. Who do you think is going to create the laws on Mars? The U.S. government, or Elon Musk and his old co-worker and buddy from PayPal, Peter Thiel?

Like most people in Silicon Valley, Thiel dislikes the way the system works. That’s fine, but trying to change it through the path that he has chosen illustrates that, like hosting a dinner party where there is no dinner, he may not be all that concerned with the comforts of those around him. If he were more circumspect, perhaps, he might realize the larger ramifications. Should he succeed in destroying Gawker, Thiel won’t simply have silenced a site that he doesn’t like. He will have triumphantly instructed other thin-skinned, mega-wealthy people on how to silence journalists that write negatively about them. In the era of Donald Trump, there are few more chilling lessons.

If the present can tell us anything about the future, we are on our way to living in a world that is straight out of the pages of an Ayn Rand novel. It is a world where those who have the money, power, and (scariest of all) the technology, can act in a way that personifies Rand’s famous admonition, “The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”

The salon at Thiel’s house lasted three hours. Neither the dinner I envisioned, nor anything close to it, was ever served. But as the conversation came to a close, one of the assistants informed us that some chocolates were being placed out in the dining room for people to nibble on on the way out.

As I called an Uber, I grabbed a handful of the chocolates and stuffed them in my mouth, “Take me to In-N-Out Burger,” I slurred, with a mouth full of sweets, to the Uber driver. As we pulled up to the burger joint 10 minutes later, I thanked him and said, “Take some advice from me, if you ever get invited to Peter Thiel’s house for dinner, make sure you eat first.”