Hey there and welcome to Unlimited Hangout. I'm your host Whitney Webb.

Since Trump's 2024 election win, the rise of a particular click of Silicon Valley CEOs and venture capitalists has been quite obvious, at least for anyone paying attention.

The core of this click are the most prominent members of the so-called PayPal Mafia, whose rise to prominence

in Silicon Valley was inextricably linked to their early executive roles at PayPal, the early

fintech leader that quickly dollarized the internet in the name of creating a new world currency

and consulted with every American three-letter agency they could get a meeting with prior to

their launch.

In a limited hangout's first installment of this series, interrogating the political power of the PayPal Mafia entitled the PayPal Presidency, we examined this group's ambitions for

health care and biotechnology and their efforts to guide and arguably subvert the Make America

Healthy Again or Maha movement toward

policies and therapeutics that they ostensibly opposed during the COVID era.

Today we will be examining the philosophies and political theories that drive the most

prominent members of this so-called mafia, namely Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and how these

are turning into concrete

U.S. policies through the influence of Musk personally, as well as teal protégés like current

Vice President J.D. Vance. Over the last six months, major efforts in media, both mainstream

and allegedly independent, have sought to portray these wealthy billionaires as the quote-unquote counter-elites,

arguing that they represent a major challenge to the elites that had run things prior to the U.S.

2024 election, while these so-called counter-elites led by the PayPal Mafia have sought

to establish themselves as significantly different, at least in cultural terms,

as anti-woke, for example, are their political ambitions and philosophies really functionally

that different from those of the elites they have supposedly deposed? Are Teelen Musk really libertarian

...