So I started reading and found this interesting, but then the piece, over and over, keeps on saying "Peter Thiel believes this and this.... however Peter Thiel denies this". Then it goes on to talk about some political theory he wrote about but no one can seem to find it, but tells us what they think is in what he wrote.
Sounds like your typical hit piece to me, but who knows. I think I would rather like to know what Peter Thiels says his beliefs are, rather than what some nobody at the NewYorker says they are.
And Thiel says what his beliefs are, across the vast number of interviews he has done (most of which seem to be available on YouTube). If the New Yorker were interested, it's trivial to learn what he thinks by watching them. He opines on a lot of topics, from religion to economics to politics to China to technology to innovation to privacy and so on. He has done challenge interviews, where he faces off against people; he has done frenemy interviews, eg with Reid Hoffman.
There's loads of political content on HN. It would be impossible to avoid even if you wanted to (I don't) since it intersects with all sorts of things.
Not different than a lot of stuff about Free Software, Privacy, censorship, or whatnot, which are also political, opinionated, and not infrequently "hit pieces" to point out something considered objectionable about a person or organisation.
For all the complaining about conservative voices in tech being unwelcome, try being in favor of wealth taxes. I think the Valley has a strong libertarian flavor and Thiel fits in great with that.
I'm not close enough to silicon valley to know, what I do know is the early internet felt very libertarian. I'd say it broadly changed in the past decade and especially so post 2015 say.
If I had to guess, I'd say all the libertarian types are increasingly moving to crypto stuff where they can build and do what they want in a way that's increasingly difficult on the modern web.
It only appeared libertarian, because the early years of the Web was so unregulated, especially compared to the rest of the economy.
The companies that were supposedly representative of that ethos, at that place in time, were nowhere near libertarian, they're all quite left of center without exception. Google was one of those companies in the first ~6-8 years of their existence and yet they were never anything remotely close to libertarian, the founders and early employees didn't hold those beliefs. The idea the early Web was libertarian was projected onto those companies by the media, that's all it was. The Bay Area didn't magically switch from libertarianism to socialism in ten years, it was just a moment of media projection garbage.
Sounds like your typical hit piece to me, but who knows. I think I would rather like to know what Peter Thiels says his beliefs are, rather than what some nobody at the NewYorker says they are.