(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Billionaire Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, was notably one of the first tech moguls to support President Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. He later bankrolled Vice President JD Vance’s run for U.S. Senate, and Vance has called Thiel his “mentor.”
Before he did any of that, Thiel received millions of dollars from the late pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, according to a new report from the New York Times.
“In 2015 and 2016, Mr. Epstein put $40 million into two funds managed by Valar Ventures, a New York firm that was co-founded by Mr. Thiel. Today that investment is worth nearly $170 million,” the Times reported Wednesday, citing a confidential financial analysis of Epstein’s estate.
NYT reported in January that Epstein's estate was worth $145 million.
Today, NYT reported that Epstein's estate is worth $170 million.
The Epstein estate only paid roughly $165 million to 135 victims.
The executors of Epstein’s will initially projected that his estate would… pic.twitter.com/de7xtB0ZlJ
— Ken Silva (@JD_Cashless) June 4, 2025
“The investment in Valar, which specializes in providing start-up capital to financial services tech companies, is the largest asset still held by Mr. Epstein’s estate.”
Another Thiel-started venture firm, Mithril Capital, hired Vance in 2015 as a partner, and he wrote his book, Hillbilly Elegy, while working there. Vance called Thiel his “pretty good mentor” while promoting the book in 2016.
As far as Epstein’s estate goes, the executors of Epstein’s will initially projected that it would shrink to less than $40 million from its original $600 million once all the payments to his victims were made.
However, the Times revealed in January that the estate remade nearly all of the $165 million it paid to 135 Epstein victims. That’s because the Internal Revenue Service provided Epstein’s estate with a $111.6 million tax refund last fall. The Times reported in January the total assets of Epstein’s estate were valued at $145 million, and that figure has apparently grown to $170 million over the last roughly six months.
Adding insult to injury for the victims, none of the tax return will go to the victims. Instead, it will likely go to the estate’s coexecutors, Richard Kahn and Darren Indyke, along with other beneficiaries chosen by Epstein before his death—most of whose identities remain largely shrouded in secrecy, according to the Times.
Meanwhile, the firm Thiel co-founded, Palantir, has reportedly received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Trump took office.
Palantir, a data analytics company, is reportedly implementing a product called “Foundry” into numerous federal agencies, which will allow them to more effectively spy on Americans and others. Republicans raised concerns about the expanding domestic surveillance state over the last four years, but largely went silent once Trump took office.
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
