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“It’s Good to Be Wealthy”: Joe Lonsdale, Silicon Valley Apostate

Over the years, the Peter Thiel disciple and Palantir co-founder has emerged as one of the most effective, iconoclastic, and sometimes abrasive defenders of the ultra-rich. And unlike Thiel, as one person who knows them both well put it, Lonsdale has “almost no filter.”

Joe Lonsdale at TechCrunch in 2013
Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch
Theodore Schleifer
September 14, 2021

In private and in public, I’ve long known Joe Lonsdale to be one of Silicon Valley’s most unapologetic voices. Probably most famous for co-founding Palantir with his longtime mentor, Peter Thiel, Lonsdale displays little inhibition at a time, and in an industry, when the gap between what people say publicly and what they profess privately often couldn’t be wider. For better or worse, Lonsdale provides an unvarnished expression of the venture capitalist id—and occasional fodder for its liberal caricature.