The Most Opinionated Man in America
This article was featured within the One Story to Read Today publication. Sign up for it here.
Mike Solana has opinions. Here are a couple of of them: Building stuff is nice. The media are unduly harsh on tech firms. Labeling issues as “misinformation” is simply an excuse to stifle speech. Donald Trump is “the best clown in human historical past” (although not solely in a nasty means), the court docket instances in opposition to him are “pretend present trials,” and J. D. Vance could be “a fantastic man within the White House.” The siege of the Capitol on January 6 was a “riot” like many others the earlier 12 months. Also, the Capitol rioters ought to have been shot. (He later retracted this one.) Kamala Harris is a joke of a presidential candidate, nevertheless it’d be enjoyable to get a drink together with her and gossip about members of Congress. The Democrats are “now not a free-speech get together.” Fewer folks ought to vote. Germany is “a really silly nation,” however France is cool. Marvel motion pictures are good. Cats are dangerous. The moon ought to be a state.
Solana has shared these views—and lots of extra—on Pirate Wires, the publication turned web site that he began in 2020, in addition to on his podcast of the identical identify. He’s additionally prolific on X, the place he lobs takes to his quarter-million followers and trolls his haters—totally on the left—from behind his distinctive avatar, a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, and the place Elon Musk frequently replies to his posts.
I used to be curious to see if the corporeal Solana matched the net model. When we met up at his favourite dive bar in Miami, the place he lives, he didn’t disappoint, riffing on subjects as assorted as immigration (we have to sluggish it down to permit for assimilation), homosexual id (it doesn’t make sense as a class), and his principle that the Marvel villain Thanos is a typical “environmentalist” as a result of he desires to get rid of half the human inhabitants. Solana delivers his spiels with a sunny, earnest vitality; together with his giant eyes and full of life brows, he appears like a pleasant Pixar canine. So it’s a bit jarring to listen to him maintain forth on, say, why liberals hate themselves.
For years, Solana performed a supporting position within the tech planet, serving because the chief advertising officer for Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s venture-capital agency. Solana calls Thiel his mentor, and says he owes his profession to him.
Solana began Pirate Wires in the course of the pandemic and has constructed it right into a small media firm masking tech, politics, and tradition. After elevating cash from Thiel and Founders Fund, amongst others, in 2023, he employed a handful of workers. The Pirate Wires free day by day publication now has 100,000 subscribers, largely younger males, in keeping with Solana. (He wouldn’t disclose what number of readers have signed up for paid subscriptions, which offer expanded entry to the positioning.) It has change into a must-read amongst Silicon Valley’s anti-woke crowd, together with a few of tech’s most influential figures, and a grudging should-read for journalists and a few on the left attempting to glimpse the considering of the masters of the Thiel-verse.
Solana’s rise corresponds with the ascent of a brand new political ideology in Silicon Valley, one which mixes pro-tech, anti-media, and Trump-curious sentiments. To the extent that Pirate Wires has a thesis assertion, it is perhaps Solana’s pinned submit on X: “I simply need us to be fucking superb.” From his perspective, the great guys are those attempting to construct stuff, whereas the dangerous guys are those getting in the best way. These dangerous guys take many varieties: regulators, censors, scolds, environmentalists, and “decels.” Solana doesn’t assume the stuff the great guys construct is at all times good. They can create telephones that addict folks, apps that spy on them, or—maybe worst of all—generative-AI instruments that refuse to point out white folks. But Solana trusts their motivations, and he thinks we must always hear them out.
“Technology is neither good nor dangerous,” he informed me. “I feel that it simply adjustments the planet, and there’s at all times a trade-off. And the query is, is it definitely worth the trade-off? And I feel most of it’s.”
Solana rejects efforts to categorize his political beliefs. He was a libertarian, then he was a Marxist, then he grew to become libertarian once more, solely extra so. Now he says he’s open to authorities taking a task in problem-solving—“I’m effective with taxes,” he mentioned—and considers himself a pragmatist: “I simply need issues to work. I simply need a new rail system. If I’ve to be left-wing, certain, I’ll be left-wing till the rail is completed. And then what else do I need? I need crime to be unlawful. Is that right-wing? Okay, I’ll be right-wing then.” In apply, Solana articulates a politics that may very well be described as much less pro-Trump than anti-anti-Trump. It’s typically a matter of emphasis: Whatever the best is perhaps doing unsuitable, the left’s response is worse.
Pirate Wires itself is a mixture of opinion essays by Solana and others, interviews with main tech figures akin to Jack Dorsey and Palmer Luckey, and reporting on tech and San Francisco politics largely from a left-critical perspective. Solana mentioned his goal reader is “a wise man in tech or enterprise, in his 20s or 30s, who feels a little bit disaffected by the conversations round him and craves group with like-minded folks.” The message appears to be: We’re having extra enjoyable than you. Join us.
For now, Solana is juggling Pirate Wires together with his day job at Founders Fund. To his detractors, this reality means that Pirate Wires is just the home organ for Silicon Valley billionaires. But Solana stresses that the positioning is separate from the funding agency—Thiel has no editorial management—and says he desires it to be extra than simply an “anti-woke New York Times op-ed web page.” “I wish to be producing actual information concerning the {industry},” he mentioned. Whether that’s potential whereas conducting pleasant interviews with allies and taking orders from Thiel by day is an open query.
Solana’s favourite film is The Matrix. He was 13 when it got here out, in 1999, and what resonated most, apart from its philosophy, was its portrayal of camaraderie. “I feel all people desires to really feel like they’re on this secret crew with particular information concerning the planet, proper?” he mentioned. “You’re taking a look at this dystopian setting and also you’re considering, Wouldn’t or not it’s cool if I used to be there?”
Solana grew up in a cramped home on the Jersey Shore, the son of a trainer and an on-and-off development employee. He bought mediocre grades till senior 12 months of highschool, when, he mentioned, he determined to concentrate in school and have become an A pupil. “This feeling of being the sensible one in school grew to become tremendous addicting,” he mentioned. “I beloved being higher than all people else.”
At Boston University, Solana grew irritated watching different youngsters coast. “I used to wreck folks in school,” he mentioned. This was his Marxist section. Solana explains himself throughout that interval as “a boy who realized he wished thus far different boys within the Bush years and wanted a spot to go the place folks mentioned, There’s nothing unsuitable with you.” But then in the future in school, he was arguing in opposition to property rights when he realized that he didn’t imagine what he was saying. He turned again to libertarianism.
After faculty, Solana took an internship at Farrar, Straus and Giroux after which a job as an editorial assistant at Penguin Books in New York City. The imprint the place he labored, TarcherPenguin, specialised in titles on metaphysics, the occult, and different offbeat subjects. Mitch Horowitz, who was then Tarcher’s editor in chief and has written a number of books on the occult in addition to internet hosting the Discovery collection Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction, informed me he felt an affinity with Solana. “I knew the expertise of feeling like an outsider,” Horowitz mentioned.
In 2009, Solana learn an essay by Thiel known as “The Education of a Libertarian,” through which Thiel lays out a imaginative and prescient for how one can “escape” politics by the use of the web, outer area, and residing at sea. (It’s the essay through which Thiel famously wrote, “I now not imagine that freedom and democracy are suitable.”) Solana reached out to the Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute—a corporation devoted to establishing semiautonomous ocean-based communities—and provided to work free of charge. He started organizing meetups in New York, and Thiel got here to the primary one. “He mentioned he had a e-book he was engaged on however didn’t know something about publishing,” Solana mentioned. “I used to be like, ‘Great—I do know every little thing about publishing.’”
Solana moved to San Francisco to work for Thiel, who wanted assist making ready to show a Stanford class on start-ups. Solana and one other younger colleague would keep up late creating slides, obtain them onto two thumb drives, and commute individually from San Francisco to Palo Alto in case one in all them hit site visitors. The class was a digest of Thiel’s enterprise philosophy—together with the concept that monopolies could be good and “competitors is for losers”—and have become the premise for his best-selling e-book, Zero to One.
Solana wasn’t an apparent match for Founders Fund. He felt intimidated being surrounded by consultants in investing and engineering. But the corporate didn’t have a PR division, so Solana took up the duty, along with organizing occasions and working the agency’s branding. He was additionally doing his personal writing. In 2014, he printed a sci-fi novel, Citizen Sim, and bought a starred assessment in Kirkus Reviews. But he largely averted writing about politics. “It felt a lot greater than me,” Solana mentioned of his fiction. “I didn’t wish to poison that with my very own opinions.”
That regularly modified after the 2016 election. “I used to be like, I’d comply with this man to hell,” Solana mentioned, of Thiel. “And then he endorsed Trump, and I did.” Solana was by no means precisely a Trump fan, however he discovered the left’s response to Trump’s presidency hysterical. “Trump’s function was the identical as a court docket jester,” he informed me. “He existed to throw the curtain again and level on the actuality of what our authorities is and the way it features and what we’re able to and what America is correct now.” Solana began tweeting extra, and his tweets had been sharp and unvarnished. (“Imagine being pretty much as good at something as germany is at fascism”; “journalists don’t miss gawker, they miss energy.”) His follower rely grew.
In March 2020, he created a podcast known as Problematic and shortly began writing a publication. Solana says the identify Pirate Wires got here to him as if it had been a reminiscence. (The protagonist in his sci-fi novel has an identical expertise when discovering his powers.) It evokes numerous antecedents: pirate radio, digital piracy, piracy on the excessive seas—romantic rule-breaking for enjoyable and revenue. He stopped worrying about his political views hurting his profession as a fiction author: “I noticed that this was my work.”
In June of this 12 months, Solana printed a manifesto titled “We Are the Media Now.” In it, he tells the acquainted story of how, over the previous twenty years, information organizations went from snug companies sponsored by classifieds to click-hungry digital-content machines reliant on show promoting. Their mistake, he writes, was a failure to manage their distribution, which led to a collapse when Facebook and different social-media firms turned down the site visitors spigot.
Solana says he’s designed Pirate Wires across the inbox. “That’s all that issues now,” he mentioned. “If you don’t have distribution, you’re not a media firm.” There’s an intimacy to being in a reader’s digital area, he says, which lends itself to a extra private type of writing. The problem of the inbox is creating sufficient content material with out overwhelming the reader. For Solana, meaning retaining it transient. The day by day publication is three fast takes with no outbound hyperlinks, so a reader can digest it and transfer on with their day. “You get up; you learn it; you’re like, Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck yeah,” Solana mentioned. Paid subscriptions are $20 a month or $120 yearly—pretty steep for the quantity of fabric you get.
The downside with most institution media, Solana mentioned, is that they’re all doing the identical factor. “The New York Times has a really distinct model that occurs to be highly regarded,” he mentioned. “The Washington Post, the L.A. Times—they’re simply doing New York Times drag worse, a lot worse.” What makes Pirate Wires distinctive, he says, is its standpoint, which leads it to report tales that liberal-leaning retailers may not.
Media protection of know-how goes via cycles. In the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s, it was largely booster-ish. Steven Levy’s e-book Hackers valorized the “heroes of the pc revolution,” and Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine portrayed engineers as romantic obsessives. Wired journal charted the rise of the private pc and business web with nerdy glee. The dot-com crash induced a short bout of skepticism, however the next decade and a half noticed a return to type as Google, Amazon, and Facebook ascended.
After Trump was elected, journalists turned a crucial eye on the {industry}, and a thousand scandals bloomed: Cambridge Analytica, Uber’s efforts to evade regulation enforcement, alleged sexual misconduct at Google, the Facebook Papers. Theranos was uncovered as a fraud and WeWork as a folly. “Move quick and break issues” went from promise to menace, whereas start-ups pledging to “make the planet a greater place” grew to become a punch line on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Also, Juicero.
But to many in Silicon Valley, the “techlash” felt like an overcorrection. The answer, in keeping with some tech leaders: “going direct.” That is, bypassing information retailers and speaking instantly with one’s viewers, be it on X or one’s personal web site or podcast. Jason Calacanis, an investor and a co-host of the favored All-In podcast, informed me in an e mail that he advises founders to not discuss with journalists at “left-leaning publications”: “You’ll get slaughtered for those who communicate to The Atlantic, The New York Times, or NPR. Going direct means that you can attain extra of us and keep away from having your message distorted by an indignant journalist seeking to rating factors with their paid subscribers.” Calacanis added that he deliberate to submit his responses to my questions on X, lest I misquote him.
Tech-insider media akin to Pirate Wires is perhaps thought-about a half step between the standard route and going direct. Garry Tan, the CEO of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, says Pirate Wires is profiting from the “atomization” of media, through which readers have relationships with particular folks fairly than establishments. “Solana is a hybrid creature—he’s bought one foot within the tech planet, however he’s additionally simply an really good author with a number of entry,” says Liz Wolfe, an assistant editor at Reason journal who writes about tech. “A layperson may feasibly learn Pirate Wires and perceive what an entire bunch of individuals in Silicon Valley are speaking about behind closed doorways that I feel frankly a number of the tech press isn’t conscious of.”
In “We Are the Media Now,” Solana implores tech staff to “give us info. Why are you sharing scoops with journalists who hate you?”
Mat Honan, the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, informed me he began following Solana for his media criticism. “Even when he was completely unsuitable or being an asshole, I believed he was humorous,” Honan mentioned. Ben Smith, the editor in chief and a co-founder of Semafor, informed me he’s “principally a fan” of Pirate Wires. “It’s a worthwhile articulation of how a slice of highly effective folks in Silicon Valley see the planet,” Smith mentioned.
Solana does have blind spots, Smith added. “When Mike writes concerning the media, it jogs my memory of the best way the media writes about Silicon Valley: These are believable theories for those who haven’t had a lot contact with the workings of an {industry} you’re writing about.”
As for Solana urging tech-industry readers to share info with him as an alternative of with journalists who “hate you,” Smith mentioned there’s a phrase for this: entry journalism. “That’s a really traditional pitch you hear day-after-day in Washington,” Smith mentioned. “I suppose he’s actually studying.”
“He’s a little bit little bit of a bitch,” Solana informed me, claiming that Smith had made condescending feedback about him and Pirate Wires on-line. Smith mentioned he didn’t know what Solana was speaking about. “He ought to report that out,” Smith mentioned.
In January 2022, Solana organized a summit known as Hereticon. Billed as a convention for “thoughtcrime,” the occasion—held on the Faena Hotel in Miami Beach—featured audio system on subjects together with UFOs, cyborgs, intercourse work, hypnosis, polyamory, and eugenics. Mitch Horowitz, Solana’s former boss, gave a chat on why ESP is real. Grimes DJed, whereas Elon Musk bobbed his head within the background. According to attendees, there was an unofficial rooftop get together with Jeffrey Epstein–themed decor. (Solana mentioned he wasn’t conscious of this get together.)
“Heresy” is a recurring theme in Solana’s work. It’s probably what endeared him to Thiel, whose complete factor, in keeping with Solana and others, is contrarianism. (Thiel didn’t reply to interview requests.) It additionally informs Solana’s views on tech. “Technology itself is a little bit bit heretical,” he mentioned. “It’s basically destabilizing of energy.” Even if one type of know-how turns into dominant, one other will finally come alongside to subvert it. And anyway, he thinks the media’s portrayal of Silicon Valley is essentially a caricature. “I’ve by no means met a ‘tech bro,’” he mentioned on his podcast.
Lately, nevertheless, the mainstream media has printed loads of constructive tech protection, together with a string of sympathetic profiles of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey. In this setting, Solana’s plea for scoops from tech staff as a result of the mainstream press “hates” them may not land in fairly the identical means. Which raises questions on what’s going to make Pirate Wires distinctive going ahead.
Solana informed me he desires to do extra unique reporting. He has scored interviews with among the largest names in tech, together with Jack Dorsey after his exit from Bluesky. Earlier this 12 months, after Solana wrote an acid critique of Google’s Gemini AI picture generator, various Google staff contacted him, yielding a follow-up article arguing that the corporate’s DEI-driven “tradition of concern” makes it laborious to ship good merchandise. The two articles grew to become the positioning’s hottest ever.
But in contrast to tech, reporting doesn’t scale—as media retailers have been studying the laborious means for many years. It’s costly and time-consuming. Another potential impediment: Solana’s boss at Founders Fund. “I hate speaking about Peter,” he mentioned as soon as once I talked about Thiel. (We had been sitting within the blindingly sunlit workplace of Founders Fund in Miami, and one in all his Pirate Wires staff was working in a convention room down the corridor.) In one other dialog, Solana mentioned his affiliation with Founders Fund has upsides and disadvantages. It opens doorways and provides him perception into the worlds of tech and finance that different writers may not have. At the identical time, if there have been a scandal involving a start-up within the fund’s portfolio, he may not be the one to interrupt the information. He additionally mentioned he generally misses scoops as a result of he agrees to not report on a portfolio firm’s new characteristic. And though Thiel doesn’t have any management over what Pirate Wires publishes, Solana mentioned, he’s not more likely to fee a narrative that displays negatively on his mentor: “There are a thousand locations you’ll be able to go to put in writing a Peter Thiel takedown,” he mentioned. “Should you count on that from Pirate Wires? No, in fact not. He’s a buddy of mine.”
Solana factors out that he criticizes tech firms loads. And that is true. But it’s nearly at all times via a cultural or political lens. He mocked Google’s AI for its lack of ability to generate photos of white folks. He derides makes an attempt to average social media as “censorship.” A current Pirate Wires collection highlighted how political disputes amongst Wikipedia editors generally form the positioning’s content material. Solana appears much less bothered by tech firms’ financial energy. He has criticized Lina Khan’s crackdown on tech firms for alleged monopolistic habits—“She actually has an issue with folks making numerous cash,” he mentioned on his podcast—and known as VCs’ help for Khan a “self-own.” He dismissed congressional grilling of tech executives as punishment for “successful.”
He saves his harshest phrases for the folks attempting to curb what they describe as “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation,” however which, Solana argues, is actually simply speech they don’t like. When Trump was kicked off Twitter and Facebook after January 6, Solana equated it to the president being “erased from the web.” The 2022 suspension of the “manosphere” influencer (and now alleged human-trafficker) Andrew Tate from social-media platforms for misogynistic feedback amounted to “Stasi shit.”
Part of the problem for Solana is that journalism and free-speech crusading, though typically aligned, will not be the identical factor. In June, Solana bought a scoop when somebody informed him {that a} Trump-themed crypto token known as $DJT had the backing of Donald Trump’s son Barron. If a standard information outlet had been masking this story, it in all probability would have added some essential context—notably the truth that nobody within the Trump household had confirmed on the file that the coin was, actually, “official.”
Instead, Solana posted to the Pirate Wires X account: “Per conversations, Trump is launching an official token—$DJT on Solana. Barron spearheading.” (Solana is the identify of a crypto blockchain; no relation to the person.) He additionally posted a hyperlink to the token’s location on the blockchain so readers may see that it certainly existed—and, in the event that they wished, purchase it.
After the Pirate Wires submit, the coin’s worth skyrocketed. A frenzy ensued, as crypto fanatics tried to verify Solana’s declare that Barron Trump was concerned; many assumed that Pirate Wires had been hacked. Martin Shkreli, the notorious businessman who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, got here ahead, asserting that he had helped create the coin together with Barron and a 3rd individual, and that the challenge had Donald Trump’s blessing. But Barron by no means confirmed his involvement, and the coin shortly tanked.
The complete affair had the trimmings of a traditional pump and dump. According to analyses of blockchain transactions, insiders—together with one wallet that was additionally invested in one other Shkreli crypto challenge—made millions off the announcement. (Shkreli declined to be interviewed for this text besides on the situation that his legal file not be talked about.)
Did Solana’s nameless supply use Pirate Wires to revenue from the announcement? I requested Solana if he’d thought-about the motives of the one that’d leaked him the Trump-coin info. “I don’t actually care what their motivation was,” he mentioned. To him, it was information as a result of it mentioned one thing about Donald Trump’s curiosity in cryptocurrency.
Solana informed me that beginning a media firm has given him a larger understanding of the challenges going through conventional information organizations. “What I try to do is give folks their flowers once they deserve them extra,” he mentioned. For instance, he admired The New York Times’ early reporting on the second assassination try on Trump. In response, he began writing a submit praising the newspaper for its protection. “Then they printed this piece calling out Trump’s ‘historical past of violent rhetoric,’ which to my ear implicitly blamed him for the assassination try, and I believed, Fuck! Goddamn it, I used to be unsuitable.”
