four years before this moment, a warning circulated quietly among Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures. In a late-night email sent in January 2020, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel cautioned Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg and Marc Andreessen that rising millennial support for socialism was not cultural rebellion, but a predictable response to economic reality. The message resurfaced this week after being shared by investor Chamath Palihapitiya, sparking debate over whether the tech elite saw this shift coming and failed to act.
In the email, Peter Thiel argued that dismissing young voters as entitled or brainwashed was both incorrect and strategically dangerous. Referencing data that nearly 70 percent of millennials identified as pro-socialist, he urged his peers to understand the material causes driving the sentiment. The issue, he wrote, was not ideology but arithmetic.
“When one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and find it hard to start accumulating real estate. And if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.”