I was excited when I first heard that Peter Thiel was going to be a speaker at the Republican National Convention.  While everyone naturally focuses on what Trump and Pence will have to say, Thiel, often labeled an “eccentric billionaire,” could help rebrand the Trump-era GOP.

Like Trump, Thiel is flamboyant and loves shaking things up.  Andrew Styles of Heat Street:

Thiel, who is also a Trump delegate to the convention, is an interesting choice. In some ways, Thiel’s support for Trump makes a lot of sense. Both are billionaires who like to disrupt the sh*t out of the status quo. Both are skeptical of “democracy,” and love to sue people who say mean things about them.

Thiel recently disclosed that he had financially backed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker.  That same publication had previously outed Thiel as gay.  The left can’t understand how a homosexual can be drawn to the small government party that includes a libertarian wing.  That may be because it is so threatening to the Democratic coalition.

Thiel is a legendary investor in Silicon Valley.  He co-founded PayPal, cashed out, made a series of smart investments in early stage ventures that paid off big – most notably Facebook, whose board he sits on today.  (Facebook hastened to clarify that Thiel is appearing not as a representative of Facebook, but as a private individual.)

Thiel founded and is the largest investor in a company called Palantir Technologies that works with “big data” and mainly sells its services to government intelligence agencies.  Thiel launched it with support from the CIA’s venture capital arm.  The company called off a planned $400 million round of financing in order to avoid disclosure requirements.

As of last year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp was not enthusiastic about taking his company public. Given his company’s private relationships with government agencies and large corporations, he said in Aug. 2013 that an IPO would make “running a company like ours very difficult.”

“Any business company would IPO [at our size],” said Karp at the time.

Thiel is well known for the Thiel Fellowship, which offers $100,000 to college students with venture ideas if they agree to drop out of college and pursue the venture.  At the launch of the program:

Thiel said his new Thiel Fellowship, is aimed at fostering the next generation of tech visionaries, and specifically is aimed at spurring the "most brilliant and promising young people" to not wait on their ideas. Thiel specifically said that that some of the "world's most transformational technologies" came from people who had quit school early, because they had ideas that couldn't wait until graduation, and that he was looking to encourage students to not stick around college but instead to launch their ventures immediately. Thiel said the foundation will start its fellowships beginning in 2011.

I have no idea what Thiel will say, and his speaking slot has not been finalized.  But I assume it will be a reasonably prominent time.  I hope he expounds on the possibilities of the new era ahead, and how the existing institutions are defending themselves instead of leading us to greatness (again).  In the tech worldview, the limitations of bureaucratic government agencies are understood.  But for various reasons, tech has been a stronghold of the left. Thiel can help change that.  And he can help portray Trump and the GOP as the future-oriented political force, and Hillary and the Dems as fighters for the establishment and status quo.