Peter Thiel–Backed Firm Defies Jeff Sessions with New Weed Investments
A private equity firm backed by Peter Thiel announced Thursday morning that it has closed $100 million in new funding for weed-related ventures, blowing smoke in the face of Donald Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions.
In a further dig at Sessions, who earlier this month embarked on a long-threatened cannabis crackdown, the firm announced it is also donating $5 million worth of shares “to help communities harmed by cannabis prohibition.”
The move sets two of the president’s earliest campaign allies on a collision course, exposing yet another rift in the freewheeling, ideologically incoherent movement that is Trump-ism.
On January 4, Sessions, who once said “good people don't smoke marijuana,” reversed the Obama-era Justice Department policy that had tolerated state experiments with legalization, paving the way for a possible return of federal enforcement of criminal marijuana prohibition.
Thiel, who remains Trump’s most prominent booster in Silicon Valley—even if Trump is, as Michael Wolff claims, a sometimes lousy friend—couldn’t have been pleased with the federal efforts to police pot. Back in 2015, Thiel’s venture-capital firm, Founders Fund, began backing Privateer Holdings, which bills itself as “the world’s leading private equity firm investing exclusively in legal cannabis.” The move led the Guardian to dub Thiel “marijuana’s first big investor.”
As pioneers in the commercial pot game, Privateer’s ventures include both foreign and domestic holdings. Among them are Marley Natural—“The official Bob Marley Cannabis brand”—and Goodship, which produces an astonishing array of edibles that the company promises are “made of love.” And also of weed.
The firm’s co-founder Brendan Kennedy said that Trump's shock election dampened the enthusiasm of investors for several months but that their appetite for weed investments has since returned (with marijuana, that tends to happen). He pointed out that the president—who has sent mixed messages on weed—signaled support for states' rights on the issue during the campaign.
And while Sessions’s crackdown may influence how Privateer invests in the near term, Kennedy expressed skepticism that the marginalized attorney general has the power to turn back the tide of legalization. “The toothpaste is out of the tube and it's awfully difficult to put it back in,” he said.
Kennedy declined to disclose the identities of the investors in this latest funding round. Ian Prior, a spokesman for the Justice Department, declined to comment. A representative for Thiel did not immediately respond to questions about the announcement.
During Trump’s campaign, both Sessions, a reactionary conservative, and Thiel, a radical techno-libertarian, saw the salesman candidate as a vehicle for realizing their two wildly different visions for the country.
But the reality of Trump’s first year in office has lived up to neither of their visions, nor those of the other varied, often conflicting, constituencies—from the alt-right to the Kremlin to steelworkers and coal miners—that had fancied Trump their savior.
Thiel, who spoke at the RNC and took an active role in staffing discussions during the transition, has mostly stayed out of the Washington conversation in recent months. And Trump has fallen bitterly out of love with Sessions, humiliating him with critical tweets while openly mulling his firing.
Meanwhile, weed is just one of many fault lines in Trump’s fractious coalition.
Case in point: A president who won his campaign with a series of jeremiads against “globalist” elites is currently traipsing around the Alps with half the West Wing on a swing through Davos. Or, as Sessions and the other anti-globalists on team Trump might call it, Donald and Jared’s bogus adventure.
Ben Schreckinger is a GQ correspondent in Washington, D.C.
