[exogeny]

Like anything else with Thiel, it's a viewed formed by a socially-maladjusted twerp who was picked on and now wants to rule the world. He's found a lot of useful lieutenants in that quest, mostly because they, like him, resent the fact that no amount of power or money or yes-men surrounding them will quiet their inner insecurities.

The truly insidious calculation they all eventually got to is that in Trump you have someone that is somehow even more insecure and craven than them and can be straight bought and sold to the highest bidder. They give Trump the superficial credibility of having ostensibly smart people behind him, and Trump gives them the benefits of being adjacent to his non-stop corruption and self-dealing machine.