Peter Thiel invests heavily in the companies his favorite candidates Blake Masters and JD Vance love to hate

During the campaign trail, GOP Senate candidates JD Vance and Blake Masters lamented the housing crisis, accusing investment firms of turning the United States into a “nation of renters.”

But they may want to be careful what they say. Their biggest and most famous benefactor is heavily invested in the companies both candidates blame for driving up prices – and they both have ties to property investing.

Vance and Masters specifically targeted BlackRock and Blackstone to reclaim homes and drive up prices across the country. Both men also have deep personal and professional relationships with billionaire tech mogul Peter Thiel, who has invested millions of dollars in their candidacies.

But Thiel has also invested heavily in several real estate startups whose business models include buying homes and pushing up prices and rents, including BlackRock-backed Airbnb.

Additionally, Vance himself — who denounced rising house prices in his candidacy speech last July — has run a fund that invests in real estate startups, including an app that lets users speculate. in hot urban markets. And Masters, who worked for Thiel for years, saw his fortunes rise and fall with the man who invested millions in these real estate startups.

Vance and Masters also hail from housing-stricken states — Ohio and Arizona, respectively — and both men have also received campaign donations from executives playing in the game. same investment space they are now denouncing. Among their benefactors? BlackRock and Blackstone.

But it’s no surprise that two men with such similar ideological and professional trajectories deliver such startlingly similar rhetoric on the campaign trail.

In a Twitter thread as of June 2021, Vance criticized BlackRock for “pursuing an investment strategy that will make it harder for young Americans to own homes,” adding that a real estate agent in his hometown of Cincinnati told him that rates market conditions there were making it “almost impossible” for first-time homebuyers.

And at a campaign event in Ohio in April, Vance told a Youngstown crowd that “you can’t have a real country if the most powerful Wall Street corporations in the world turn your citizens into a nation. tenants, and people don’t have a stake in their own country.” Vance also repeatedly pointed to BlackRock and Blackstone’s financial ties to China.

That same month, Masters tweeted a campaign speech, captioned, “BlackRock buying houses, China and Bill Gates buying farmland – not a good future my friends.”

In the speech, Masters called the prices “crazy” and “depressing,” blaming the Chinese or “someone from California” who rushed. (Masters lived in San Francisco for years before running for the Senate.)

Companies like BlackRock, he said, want to create “a generation of tenants.”

“That’s how Wall Street thinks,” Masters added. “That’s how the left thinks.”

Typically, Wall Street is associated with business-friendly Republican politicians and policies. But Masters and Vance define themselves as part of an overseas conservative movement that portrays corporations as antagonists, albeit with varying degrees of success.

While these companies are not entirely to blame for the current accessibility crisis, they certainly contributed.

David Dworkin, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference, explained that national numbers don’t tell the story as well as local numbers.

“Ground zero on this is Atlanta,” Dworkin told The Daily Beast, citing an increase in the share of single-family home purchases by investors, which he said is now nearly 43%.

“Phoenix tops the list,” he said, pegging the same share for the Phoenix-Scottsdale metro area at just under 37%.

“It’s a significant impact,” observed Dworkin. “When we see the market for first-time single-family home buyers shrinking and people moving into rentals, that’s a problem.”

That might not be a problem for Thiel, though.

Both Masters and Vance owe much of their professional and financial success to Thiel.

When Vance graduated from Yale Law, he moved to San Francisco and worked for Thiel’s Mithril Capital. Later, Thiel provided seed money for Vance’s own Ohio-based investment firm, Narya Capital.

Masters is even closer to Thiel, whom he met while studying at Stanford Law. Thiel took him under his wing and the two co-wrote a book based on Thiel’s lectures at Stanford. Masters helped shape investment strategy as COO at Thiel Capital and also led the Thiel Foundation. Masters cited Thiel not just as a mentor, but, during a campaign event in November, as a “best friend – the five best friends, certainly.”

Thiel has invested $15 million each in super PACs supporting Vance and Masters. And until recently, Masters was still in his roles at Thiel Capital and the foundation. (He resigned from Thiel Capital in March, following criticism that he promoted his own businesses during the election campaign.)

During the same period, Thiel made multiple investments in the sphere of real estate startups.

Last August, Thiel’s Founders Fund participated in a $75 million funding round for Bungalow, an online rental-focused residential real estate marketplace. Bungalow, which helps landlords increase their rental income, as Bloomberg reportedplanned to spend the money on expansions in new cities, including Phoenix and Atlanta.

“Bungalow helps landlords achieve higher rental income, in part by recommending light renovations such as inserting walls to create additional bedrooms. Some have even bought new homes specifically to list on Bungalow, its CEO told Bloomberg.

In February, Thiel led a $17.4 million funding round for Ember, a “real estate proptech companyto buy, own and rent a luxury vacation property. One of its “essential pillars” includes buying vacation homes in destination locations.

Another Founders Fund investment, Up&Up, bases its business model solely on rising house prices. In November, Thiel increased his stake in the startup, which uses a profit-sharing model to help tenants take advantage of rising home values ​​while they rent. According Forbes, at the time of the new round, Up&Up had spent $50 million buying properties in two markets—St. Louis, and the market with the most business investment, Atlanta.

The company’s CEO told Forbes that they plan to use Thiel’s money to buy more single-family homes.

Another Thiel venture, Cadre, funds commercial real estate investing and has financial backing from Jared and Josh Kushner. The founder of Cadre said Fortune that the company had to make early sales after its data system revealed rental demand was “driven by crazy spikes in [prices for] single-family homes,” forcing residents to renew leases “instead of switching from renting to buying.”

However, the best known of these investments is Airbnb. Thiel would have poured $150 million into the company in 2012, when it was valued at $2.5 billion. A decade later, the valuation of the startup exceeded $113 billion. To research has suspicions confirmed that Airbnb properties are contributing to higher prices, as well as housing shortage in stressed markets.

And another major Airbnb player is one of the major offenders of Vance and Masters: black rock.

While both candidates have received donations from companies or individuals engaged in real estate investing, Vance’s committees have seen more, about $40,000 so far, according to documents filed by the Federal Election Commission. Masters only received around $15,000. About half of those Vance contributions came from executives at Blackstone, one of the companies Vance hit on the campaign trail for taking money from China.

Maybe it’s because Vance himself only had one eye on real estate investing.

In 2017, Vance took over a new investment fund called Rise of The Rest, a massive project led by AOL co-founder Steve Case that aims to support tech startups in underserved areas beyond the Coastal meccas.

The fund made moves in the real estate sector, including reports that ROTR would target “opportunity zones” – a Trump-era tax incentive that offers capital gains reductions to investors in economically distressed communities.

The jury is still out on whether Opportunity Zones increase the kind of economic activity they promise, or displace residents and further spur gentrification. But the ROTR fund internet wallet does not seem to show such investments. And the phrase “Opportunity Zones” seems absent from his latest pitch book and Annual Report.

However, at least two entities supported by ROTR seem to be focused on real estate offers: the industrial coworking startup loftand Placemark, a sort of long-term Airbnb. The fund also supports an app called Nopewhich aims to democratize real estate investing by allowing anyone to speculate in the markets of the country’s hottest cities.

According to Vance’s financial information, he receives a salary of $125,216 from ROTR.

Neither Vance Campaigns nor Masters responded to a request for comment.