Greetings, and thanks for making time for Puck during an absolutely insane week of news.

Today, I’m offering up something a little different: A look inside the Rockbridge Network, a powerful Republican fundraising community with ties to Peter Thiel and Rebekah Mercer that I think augurs a new era in political giving for the American right. For subscribers, I’ve got a bunch of exclusive details—on their most recent summit, their plans for 2024, etcetera—that I hope will demystify the stealthy donor network.

But first, a few notes on the 2024 money race, and an update on the S.B.F. trial…

• Larry Ellison’s exclusive comments on Tim Scott (sorta): There’s been plenty of alarmed chatter in Scott world, and a mood of “somber realism,” following the Monday announcement that his super PAC has canceled its upcoming television ads because they weren’t cutting into Trump’s lead. A few Scott donors told me they had the same question that I did: Has there been a change in Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison’s patronage of the South Carolina senator? “I think they booked TV time ahead of actually having the money,” one texted. “Why else would they be canceling ad time?”

  Maybe. I reported this summer that Ellison had made an eight-figure commitment to the super PAC just after the June 30 deadline, but I was careful not to say whether the money had been wired or merely pledged. Did Ellison get cold feet? And what did he make of the decision to pull Scott’s ads? I actually reached Ellison, believe it or not, on Monday afternoon. “Do you have any thoughts on the wisdom of this decision?,” I emailed him with a link to the news. “What decision?” he wrote back. He didn’t answer me when I explained it a bit more explicitly. Oh well.

• Think twice about Nishad Singh’s testimony: FTX executive Nishad Singh’s Signal messages to Sam Bankman-Fried’s political aides on a thread called “Donation Processing” were the talk of my own Signal threads this week with people tied to the S.B.F. machine. Exhibits from the Department of Justice pulled back what the feds characterized as a straw-donor scheme, in which FTX executive Ryan Salame seemed to be processing donations on Singh’s behalf. “My role was to click a button,” Singh testified. The sausage-making looks awful, but here’s the thing: That is not a straw-donor scheme. Tons of mega-donors have staff who process donations on their behalf … do you think George Soros is sitting there pressing refresh on the ActBlue website? The crime, of course, is that the money wasn’t really Nishad’s—it was a loan from Alameda. But otherwise, Singh was signing off on the donation, which is all that matters. As one person close to all of this texted me: “There’s no essay requirement before making a contribution.”

• G.O.P. donor speed dating: It’s Q3 campaign filing report season, and a couple big names caught my attention, such as Laurene Powell Jobs giving a whopping $930,000 to Joe Biden’s joint fundraising committee. But the most surprising action has been on the Republican side. Not surprisingly, I suppose, a lot of crypto money flowed to Vivek Ramaswamy during his late summer boomlet, including from Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who also maxed-out to Nikki Haley; in addition to the Winklevii, PayPal Mafia member Keith Rabois maxed out to her, too.

  The trend toward greater donor promiscuity (or confusion, depending on your point of view) doesn’t appear to be helping Ron DeSantis, whose fundraising hauls continue to underwhelm. Indeed, DeSantis mega-donor Liz Uihlein, one of the biggest Republican donors in the country, who has hosted DeSantis for fundraising events this year, recently cut a max-out check to Vivek and a second to… Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The summit, which was attended by some 150 donors and guests, including Rebekah Mercer and Steve Wynn, and featured a live longhorn steer in the ballroom, was the latest get-together of the Rockbridge Network, a secretive donor alliance that has quickly become one of the most puzzled-over groups among G.O.P. insiders.

Rockbridge, which Vance co-founded in 2019 with Chris Buskirk, the publisher of the pro-Trump journal American Greatness, started small, hosting get-togethers at restaurants where they worked to convince donors to back polling projects or investigative journalism. At the time, Vance was a bestselling author dabbling in venture capital; Buskirk had made some money in insurance and was an early apostle for Trumpism. The two friends came to share the view that Republican donors lacked a quantifiable strategy for social change and were too focused on short-term wins.

But over the past few years, Vance and Buskirk—both close allies of Peter Thiel—have leveraged their combined Rolodexes to transform Rockbridge into a membership-based conference business, one that allies hope will eventually be a conservative version of the Allen & Co. conference in Sun Valley, with the addition of a well-funded advocacy arm. Rockbridge might not topple the Republican establishment, but the group reflects the ongoing shift within the G.O.P. donor universe from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.

Twice a year, Rockbridge invites its membership—heavy on people who have made money in tech—to fly out to their confabs. The network claims to have about 125 members, each of whom commits to spending at least $100,000 per year on Rockbridge-recommended programs. The world of Rockbridge won’t talk numbers, but at a minimum, that would be at least $12.5 million in annual grantmaking and political advocacy firepower—a fledgling effort, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

Rockbridge has indisputably emerged as a node in the power corridor of Silicon Valley politics and the so-called New Right. Among the speakers at previous Rockbridge confabs, whose names have never been made public, were Tucker Carlson, who keynoted the group’s post-election summit in Austin last year; David Sacks, the tech entrepreneur-turned-podcast star who headlined a session at the Nashville get-together this spring, coinciding with the R.N.C. donor retreat; and most recently Wynn, the billionaire Trump homie who regaled the crowd at the Dallas Ritz-Carlton with war stories from his time building modern Las Vegas. In a real coup, Trump himself appeared at a spring 2022 event, held in part at Mar-a-Lago.

The constellation is definitively right-wing, heavy on supporters of Trump (and a few Ramaswamy and DeSantis fans), although Rockbridge is not participating or weighing in on the Republican presidential primary. Unlike the American Opportunity Alliance, the group rarely invites candidates to their get-togethers. Nevertheless, its members account for some of the country’s biggest donors—the type of rainmakers who, with the stroke of a pen, can make or break political campaigns. Vance, who remains close to the organization even after becoming a senator, has spoken at nearly every “member meeting” including the event in Dallas this month, where he reiterated his belief that Trump would be the nominee.

“In defense of Rockbridge, no one’s doing it better than they are,” said one Republican who has attended their events. “But I think the aspiration of, ‘We’re going to take all this energy of Trump taking over the Republican Party and convert it back into the alt-Koch network that reflects the nature of the party,’ I think is just a wildly more difficult task.”

Indeed, in my private conversation with people connected to rival donor networks, many have been dismissive of Rockbridge, describing the network as a J.V. team (or worse, an “ideas conference”) in a world of heavy-hitters. “Yawn,” one person told me this year when I asked for their view. “It doesn’t strike me as anything more than a dinner party group,” said another last year.

Naturally, Rockbridge allies wouldn’t divulge all of their plans for 2024—but their ambitions have gotten more focused since 2021, when their brochure leaked to Times. The group abandoned a planned “Rockbridge Transition Project” meant to help the eventual 2024 Republican nominee staff his or her administration, along with its “lawfare and strategic litigation” portfolio. Both ended up feeling duplicative to Rockbridge leaders. (Dueling transition projects are currently underway at The Heritage Foundation and the America First Policy Institute, for instance.) Rockbridge still does some funding of conservative media.

The network’s current efforts seem to focus on funneling money to grassroots organizations in battleground states, primarily those doing unsexy work, like voter registration, and trying to organize potential subgroups in the Republican coalition; for example, I’m told one priority is organizing people who possess hunting or fishing licenses but aren’t involved in politics. This kind of political moneyball is hardly new, but Rockbridge donors argue that the “boring but important” stuff is actually underfunded. “What they’re trying to do is largely the sorts of things they believe that a competent political party would be doing,” said one supporter.

That’s where the money comes in. Is there enough? How much Rockbridge actually controls is a subject of much debate among the well-heeled G.O.P. class. To be sure, in the world of donor-advising, that is always hard to pin down: Rockbridge, which is organized as an LLC, effectively guides the flow of money but doesn’t sit on any cash itself. Allies assert it is responsible for moving tens of millions of dollars since its founding; I believe that, based on my reporting, but it is essentially unverifiable, and people involved have declined to fork over receipts. Nevertheless, the group wants to embark on its next, less-stealthy phase, and recently hired a professional fundraiser—who previously raised money for Vance’s Senate bid—to serve as its development director.

Clearly, they’ve roped in a few big fish among the 125 members: Buskirk is personal friends with Thiel, and Thiel has appeared at one Rockbridge event, but it was years ago and he hasn’t attended the most recent ones, sources have told me; some Rockbridge and Thiel sources argue that his ties to the group have been exaggerated. (Thiel is funding zero political work these days, anyway.) Rebekah Mercer, once the hottest thing in G.O.P. big-money politics during the Bannon era, is very close with Omeed Malik, a Wall Street financier and a former Democrat who has evangelized Rockbridge to his network of anti-woke friends in finance; Mercer came to the most recent session in Dallas.

To wit, the firm is leading the first round of funding in Carlson’s latest media venture, a move announced on Tuesday. (Neil Patel, Carlson’s business partner, who Malik backed at The Daily Caller, was at the most recent Rockbridge confab, I’m told.) And there are more deals in the pipeline that will seek to capitalize on what the pair call E.I.G.—that’s “Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Growth”—or the anti-E.S.G. economy.

In any case, Buskirk, Vance, Malik, and even Carlson seem to be tapping into something fundamental: In this post-Adelson world order, the most influential players in the G.O.P fundraising universe are increasingly younger, more tech-based, and entrepreneurial. I’ve reported here how the locus of power in Democratic donor-politics is shifting away from Wall Street and toward Silicon Valley; the same trend, over the last two or three years, has begun to bubble up in Republican donor politics too, as more and more tech leaders swallow the redpill, in this post-Covid, and maybe post-Trump era.

Indeed, Rockbridge allies insist that part of what makes them different is that this is a much younger coalition of donors than the Club for Growth or the Koch network, or whatever old fogeys are still hanging around the American Enterprise Institute. “You could think of it as sort of an aspirational coalition for the right that mixes the Thiel-adjacent, American dynamism, new space-tech, national security infrastructure, and innovation in that space with Republican politics, which is a lot cooler by every measure than the traditional Republican events and coalitions which are obviously not cool by definition,” said one attendee, describing the scene. “I heard multiple people say this is the most fun conference they go to.”

Another person told me the median Rockbridge attendee is probably in their upper 40s, with plenty of people in their 20s and 30s. That’s a meaningful generational distinction from the Fox News crowd. Having been to a few Koch summits in my day, I don’t think I saw anyone there—attendees or speakers—without gray hair.