and the F.B.I., be involved in that? (Palantir’s C.E.O., Alex Karp, sat in at the Trump tech meeting.) Thiel was a founder, and whose clients include the N.S.A., the C.I.A. Will Palantir, the data-mining company of which Mr. I note that several Silicon Valley companies have pre-emptively said they will not help build a Muslim registry for the Trump administration. One of my friends has a theory that the rest of the country tolerates Silicon Valley because people there just don’t have that much sex. At the same time, I worry there’s a part of Silicon Valley that is hyper-politically correct about sex. Thiel says: “On the one hand, the tape was clearly offensive and inappropriate. Talking about how the Billy Bush tape was not so shocking if you’ve worked on the Wall Street trading floor, Mr. ‘If Trump wins, I will eat my sock.’ ‘I will eat my shoe.’ ‘I will eat my shoe, and then I will walk barefoot to Mexico to emigrate and leave the country.’ But this year, it was this competition for who could be more anti-Trump. of a big company, you tend to be somewhat apolitical or politically pretty bland. I think the bigger tech companies all wanted to get a little bit off the ledge that they had gotten on. “At the end, everybody was worried they would be the only person not to show up. “I think, early on, everybody was worried that they would be the only person to show up,” Mr. I ask if he had to twist arms to lure some of the anti-Trump tech titans, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. “I was thinking, ‘I hope this doesn’t look too weird on TV,’” he says.

I note that he looked uneasy being petted in front of his peers.

Thiel’s hand so affectionately that body language experts went into a frenzy. At the recent meeting of tech executives at Trump Tower - orchestrated by Mr.

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