Germany backs India-EU free trade agreement as Scholz visits New Delhi

Mike Solana has opinions. Here are a few of them: Building stuff is good. The media are unduly harsh on tech companies. Labeling things as “misinformation” is just an excuse to stifle speech. Donald Trump is “the greatest clown in human history” (though not entirely in a bad way), the court cases against him are “fake show trials,” and J. D. Vance would be “a great guy in the White House.” The siege of the Capitol on January 6 was a “riot” like many others the previous year. Also, the Capitol rioters should have been shot. (He later retracted this one.) Kamala Harris is a joke of a presidential candidate, but it’d be fun to get a drink with her and gossip about members of Congress. The Democrats are “no longer a free-speech party.” Fewer people should vote. Germany is “a very stupid nation,” but France is cool. Marvel movies are good. Cats are bad. The moon should be a state.

Solana has shared these views—and many more—on Pirate Wires, the newsletter turned website that he started in 2020, as well as on his podcast of the same name. He’s also prolific on X, where he lobs takes to his quarter-million followers and trolls his haters—mostly on the left—from behind his distinctive avatar, a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant, and where Elon Musk regularly replies to his posts.

I was curious to see if the corporeal Solana matched the online version. When we met up at his favorite dive bar in Miami, where he lives, he did not disappoint, riffing on topics as varied as immigration (we need to slow it down to allow for assimilation), gay identity (it doesn’t make sense as a category), and his theory that the Marvel villain Thanos is a typical “environmentalist” because he wants to eliminate half the human population. Solana delivers his spiels with a sunny, earnest energy; with his large eyes and lively brows, he looks like a friendly Pixar dog. So it’s a bit jarring to hear him hold forth on, say, why liberals hate themselves.

For years, Solana played a supporting role in the tech world, serving as the chief marketing officer for Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s venture-capital firm. Solana calls Thiel his mentor, and says he owes his career to him.

Solana started Pirate Wires during the pandemic and has built it into a small media company covering tech, politics, and culture. After raising money from Thiel and Founders Fund, among others, in 2023, he hired a handful of staff. The Pirate Wires free daily newsletter now has 100,000 subscribers, mostly young men, according to Solana. (He would not disclose how many readers have signed up for paid subscriptions, which provide expanded access to the site.) It has become a must-read among Silicon Valley’s anti-woke crowd, including some of tech’s most influential figures, and a grudging should-read for journalists and some on the left trying to glimpse the thinking of the masters of the Thiel-verse.

Solana’s rise corresponds with the ascent of a new political ideology in Silicon Valley, one that mixes pro-tech, anti-media, and Trump-curious sentiments. To the extent that Pirate Wires has a thesis statement, it might be Solana’s pinned post on X: “I just want us to be fucking amazing.” From his perspective, the good guys are the ones trying to build stuff, while the bad guys are the ones getting in the way. These bad guys take many forms: regulators, censors, scolds, environmentalists, and “decels.” Solana doesn’t think the stuff the good guys build is always good. They can create phones that addict people, apps that spy on them, or—perhaps worst of all—generative-AI tools that refuse to show white people. But Solana trusts their motivations, and he thinks we should hear them out.  

“Technology is neither good nor bad,” he told me. “I think that it just changes the world, and there’s always a trade-off. And the question is, is it worth the trade-off? And I think most of it is.”

Solana rejects efforts to categorize his political views. He used to be a libertarian, then he was a Marxist, then he became libertarian again, only more so. Now he says he’s open to government taking a role in problem-solving—“I’m fine with taxes,” he said—and considers himself a pragmatist: “I just want things to work. I just want a new rail system. If I have to be left-wing, sure, I’ll be left-wing until the rail is finished. And then what else do I want? I want crime to be illegal. Is that right-wing? Okay, I’ll be right-wing then.” In practice, Solana articulates a politics that could be described as less pro-Trump than anti-anti-Trump. It’s often a matter of emphasis: Whatever the right might be doing wrong, the left’s reaction is worse.

Pirate Wires itself is a mix of opinion essays by Solana and others, interviews with major tech figures such as Jack Dorsey and Palmer Luckey, and reporting on tech and San Francisco politics largely from a left-critical perspective. Solana said his target reader is “a smart guy in tech or business, in his 20s or 30s, who feels a little disaffected by the conversations around him and craves community with like-minded people.” The message seems to be: We’re having more fun than you. Join us.

For now, Solana is juggling Pirate Wires with his day job at Founders Fund. To his detractors, this fact suggests that Pirate Wires is simply the house organ for Silicon Valley billionaires. But Solana stresses that the site is separate from the investment firm—Thiel has no editorial control—and says he wants it to be more than just an “anti-woke New York Times op-ed page.” “I want to be generating real news about the industry,” he said. Whether that’s possible while conducting friendly interviews with allies and taking orders from Thiel by day is an open question.

Solana’s favorite movie is The Matrix. He was 13 when it came out, in 1999, and what resonated most, besides its philosophy, was its portrayal of camaraderie. “I think everybody wants to feel like they’re in this secret crew with special knowledge about the world, right?” he said. “You’re looking at this dystopian environment and you’re thinking, Wouldn’t it be cool if I was there?”

Solana grew up in a cramped house on the Jersey Shore, the son of a teacher and an on-and-off construction worker. He got mediocre grades until senior year of high school, when, he said, he decided to pay attention in class and became an A student. “This feeling of being the smart one in class became super addicting,” he said. “I loved being better than everybody else.”

At Boston University, Solana grew irritated watching other kids coast. “I used to wreck people in class,” he said. This was his Marxist phase. Solana explains himself during that period as “a boy who realized he wanted to date other boys in the Bush years and needed a place to go where people said, There’s nothing wrong with you.” But then one day in class, he was arguing against property rights when he realized that he didn’t believe what he was saying. He turned back to libertarianism.

After college, Solana took an internship at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and then a job as an editorial assistant at Penguin Books in New York City. The imprint where he worked, TarcherPenguin, specialized in titles on metaphysics, the occult, and other offbeat topics. Mitch Horowitz, who was then Tarcher’s editor in chief and has written several books on the occult as well as hosting the Discovery series Alien Encounters: Fact or Fiction, told me he felt an affinity with Solana. “I knew the experience of feeling like an outsider,” Horowitz said.

In 2009, Solana read an essay by Thiel called “The Education of a Libertarian,” in which Thiel lays out a vision for how to “escape” politics by means of the internet, outer space, and living at sea. (It’s the essay in which Thiel famously wrote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”) Solana reached out to the Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute—an organization dedicated to establishing semiautonomous ocean-based communities—and offered to work for free. He began organizing meetups in New York, and Thiel came to the first one. “He said he had a book he was working on but didn’t know anything about publishing,” Solana said. “I was like, ‘Great—I know everything about publishing.’”

[Barton Gellman: Peter Thiel is taking a break from democracy]

Solana moved to San Francisco to work for Thiel, who needed help preparing to teach a Stanford class on start-ups. Solana and another young colleague would stay up late creating slides, download them onto two thumb drives, and commute separately from San Francisco to Palo Alto in case one of them hit traffic. The class was a digest of Thiel’s business philosophy—including the idea that monopolies can be good and “competition is for losers”—and became the basis for his best-selling book, Zero to One.

Solana wasn’t an obvious fit for Founders Fund. He felt intimidated being surrounded by experts in investing and engineering. But the company didn’t have a PR department, so Solana took up the task, in addition to organizing events and running the firm’s branding. He was also doing his own writing. In 2014, he published a sci-fi novel, Citizen Sim, and got a starred review in Kirkus Reviews. But he largely avoided writing about politics. “It felt much bigger than me,” Solana said of his fiction. “I didn’t want to poison that with my own opinions.”

That gradually changed after the 2016 election. “I was like, I’d follow this man to hell,” Solana said, of Thiel. “And then he endorsed Trump, and I did.” Solana was never exactly a Trump fan, but he found the left’s reaction to Trump’s presidency hysterical. “Trump’s purpose was the same as a court jester,” he told me. “He existed to throw the curtain back and point at the reality of what our government is and how it functions and what we’re capable of and what America is right now.” Solana started tweeting more, and his tweets were sharp and unvarnished. (“Imagine being as good at anything as germany is at fascism”; “journalists don’t miss gawker, they miss power.”) His follower count grew.

In March 2020, he created a podcast called Problematic and soon started writing a newsletter. Solana says the name Pirate Wires came to him as if it were a memory. (The protagonist in his sci-fi novel has a similar experience when discovering his powers.) It evokes various antecedents: pirate radio, digital piracy, piracy on the high seas—romantic rule-breaking for fun and profit. He stopped worrying about his political opinions hurting his career as a fiction writer: “I realized that this was my work.”

Illustration by Adam Maida

In June of this year, Solana published a manifesto titled “We Are the Media Now.” In it, he tells the familiar story of how, over the past two decades, news organizations went from comfortable businesses subsidized by classifieds to click-hungry digital-content machines reliant on display advertising. Their mistake, he writes, was a failure to control their distribution, which led to a collapse when Facebook and other social-media companies turned down the traffic spigot.

Solana says he’s designed Pirate Wires around the inbox. “That’s all that matters now,” he said. “If you don’t have distribution, you’re not a media company.” There’s an intimacy to being in a reader’s digital space, he says, which lends itself to a more personal form of writing. The challenge of the inbox is creating enough content without overwhelming the reader. For Solana, that means keeping it brief. The daily newsletter is three quick takes with no outbound links, so a reader can digest it and move on with their day. “You wake up; you read it; you’re like, Fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck yeah,” Solana said. Paid subscriptions are $20 a month or $120 annually—fairly steep for the amount of material you get.

The problem with most establishment media, Solana said, is they’re all doing the same thing. “The New York Times has a very distinct style that happens to be very popular,” he said. “The Washington Post, the L.A. Times—they’re just doing New York Times drag worse, much worse.” What makes Pirate Wires distinctive, he says, is its point of view, which leads it to report stories that liberal-leaning outlets might not.

Media coverage of technology goes through cycles. In the 1980s and ’90s, it was largely booster-ish. Steven Levy’s book Hackers valorized the “heroes of the computer revolution,” and Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine portrayed engineers as romantic obsessives. Wired magazine charted the rise of the personal computer and commercial internet with nerdy glee. The dot-com crash induced a brief bout of skepticism, but the following decade and a half saw a return to form as Google, Amazon, and Facebook ascended.

After Trump was elected, journalists turned a critical eye on the industry, and a thousand scandals bloomed: Cambridge Analytica, Uber’s efforts to evade law enforcement, alleged sexual misconduct at Google, the Facebook Papers. Theranos was exposed as a fraud and WeWork as a folly. “Move fast and break things” went from promise to threat, while start-ups pledging to “make the world a better place” became a punch line on HBO’s Silicon Valley. Also, Juicero.

But to many in Silicon Valley, the “techlash” felt like an overcorrection. The solution, according to some tech leaders: “going direct.” That is, bypassing news outlets and communicating directly with one’s audience, be it on X or one’s own website or podcast. Jason Calacanis, an investor and a co-host of the popular All-In podcast, told me in an email that he advises founders not to talk with journalists at “left-leaning publications”: “You’ll get slaughtered if you speak to The Atlantic, The New York Times, or NPR. Going direct allows you to reach more folks and avoid having your message distorted by an angry journalist looking to score points with their paid subscribers.” Calacanis added that he planned to post his responses to my questions on X, lest I misquote him.

Tech-insider media such as Pirate Wires might be considered a half step between the traditional route and going direct. Garry Tan, the CEO of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, says Pirate Wires is taking advantage of the “atomization” of media, in which readers have relationships with specific people rather than institutions. “Solana is a hybrid creature—he’s got one foot in the tech world, but he’s also just an actually good writer with a lot of access,” says Liz Wolfe, an assistant editor at Reason magazine who writes about tech. “A layperson could feasibly read Pirate Wires and understand what a whole bunch of people in Silicon Valley are talking about behind closed doors that I think frankly a lot of the tech press isn’t aware of.”

In “We Are the Media Now,” Solana implores tech workers to “give us information. Why are you sharing scoops with journalists who hate you?”

Mat Honan, the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review, told me he started following Solana for his media criticism. “Even when he was totally wrong or being an asshole, I thought he was funny,” Honan said. Ben Smith, the editor in chief and a co-founder of Semafor, told me he’s “basically a fan” of Pirate Wires. “It’s a valuable articulation of how a slice of powerful people in Silicon Valley see the world,” Smith said.

Solana does have blind spots, Smith added. “When Mike writes about the media, it reminds me of the way the media writes about Silicon Valley: These are plausible theories if you haven’t had much contact with the workings of an industry you’re writing about.”

As for Solana urging tech-industry readers to share information with him instead of with journalists who “hate you,” Smith said there’s a word for this: access journalism. “That’s a very classic pitch you hear every day in Washington,” Smith said. “I guess he’s really learning.”

“He’s a little bit of a bitch,” Solana told me, claiming that Smith had made condescending comments about him and Pirate Wires online. Smith said he didn’t know what Solana was talking about. “He should report that out,” Smith said.

In January 2022, Solana organized a summit called Hereticon. Billed as a conference for “thoughtcrime,” the event—held at the Faena Hotel in Miami Beach—featured speakers on topics including UFOs, cyborgs, sex work, hypnosis, polyamory, and eugenics. Mitch Horowitz, Solana’s former boss, gave a talk on why ESP is real. Grimes DJed, while Elon Musk bobbed his head in the background. According to attendees, there was an unofficial rooftop party with Jeffrey Epstein–themed decor. (Solana said he wasn’t aware of this party.)

“Heresy” is a recurring theme in Solana’s work. It’s likely what endeared him to Thiel, whose whole thing, according to Solana and others, is contrarianism. (Thiel did not respond to interview requests.) It also informs Solana’s views on tech. “Technology itself is a little bit heretical,” he said. “It’s fundamentally destabilizing of power.” Even if one form of technology becomes dominant, another will eventually come along to subvert it. And anyway, he thinks the media’s portrayal of Silicon Valley is largely a caricature. “I’ve never met a ‘tech bro,’” he said on his podcast.

Lately, however, the mainstream media has published plenty of positive tech coverage, including a string of sympathetic profiles of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey. In this environment, Solana’s plea for scoops from tech workers because the mainstream press “hates” them might not land in quite the same way. Which raises questions about what will make Pirate Wires distinctive going forward.

Solana told me he wants to do more original reporting. He has scored interviews with some of the biggest names in tech, including Jack Dorsey after his exit from Bluesky. Earlier this year, after Solana wrote an acid critique of Google’s Gemini AI image generator, a number of Google employees contacted him, yielding a follow-up article arguing that the company’s DEI-driven “culture of fear” makes it hard to ship good products. The two articles became the site’s most popular ever.

But unlike tech, reporting doesn’t scale—as media outlets have been learning the hard way for decades. It’s expensive and time-consuming. Another possible obstacle: Solana’s boss at Founders Fund. “I hate talking about Peter,” he said once when I mentioned Thiel. (We were sitting in the blindingly sunlit office of Founders Fund in Miami, and one of his Pirate Wires employees was working in a conference room down the hall.) In another conversation, Solana said his affiliation with Founders Fund has upsides and downsides. It opens doors and gives him insight into the worlds of tech and finance that other writers might not have. At the same time, if there were a scandal involving a start-up in the fund’s portfolio, he might not be the one to break the news. He also said he sometimes misses scoops because he agrees not to report on a portfolio company’s new feature. And although Thiel doesn’t have any control over what Pirate Wires publishes, Solana said, he’s not likely to commission a story that reflects negatively on his mentor: “There are a thousand places you can go to write a Peter Thiel takedown,” he said. “Should you expect that from Pirate Wires? No, of course not. He’s a friend of mine.”

Solana points out that he criticizes tech companies plenty. And this is true. But it’s almost always through a cultural or political lens. He mocked Google’s AI for its inability to generate images of white people. He derides attempts to moderate social media as “censorship.” A recent Pirate Wires series highlighted how political disputes among Wikipedia editors sometimes shape the site’s content. Solana seems less bothered by tech companies’ economic power. He has criticized Lina Khan’s crackdown on tech companies for alleged monopolistic behavior—“She really has a problem with people making lots of money,” he said on his podcast—and called VCs’ support for Khan a “self-own.” He dismissed congressional grilling of tech executives as punishment for “winning.”

[Kaitlyn Tiffany: What’s with all the Trumpy VCs?]

He saves his harshest words for the people trying to curb what they describe as “hate speech,” “misinformation,” and “disinformation,” but which, Solana argues, is really just 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 internet.” The 2022 suspension of the “manosphere” influencer (and now alleged human-trafficker) Andrew Tate from social-media platforms for misogynistic comments amounted to “Stasi shit.”

Part of the challenge for Solana is that journalism and free-speech crusading, although often aligned, are not the same thing. In June, Solana got a scoop when someone told him that a Trump-themed crypto token called $DJT had the backing of Donald Trump’s son Barron. If a traditional news outlet had been covering this story, it probably would have added some important context—particularly the fact that no one in the Trump family had confirmed on the record that the coin was in fact “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 name of a crypto blockchain; no relation to the man.) He also posted a link to the token’s location on the blockchain so readers could see that it indeed existed—and, if they wanted, buy it.

After the Pirate Wires post, the coin’s value skyrocketed. A frenzy ensued, as crypto enthusiasts tried to confirm Solana’s claim that Barron Trump was involved; many assumed that Pirate Wires had been hacked. Martin Shkreli, the infamous businessman who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, came forward, announcing that he had helped create the coin along with Barron and a third person, and that the project had Donald Trump’s blessing. But Barron never confirmed his involvement, and the coin quickly tanked.

The whole affair had the trappings of a classic pump and dump. According to analyses of blockchain transactions, insiders—including one wallet that was also invested in another Shkreli crypto project—made millions off the announcement. (Shkreli declined to be interviewed for this article except on the condition that his criminal record not be mentioned.)

Did Solana’s anonymous source use Pirate Wires to profit from the announcement? I asked Solana if he’d considered the motives of the person who’d leaked him the Trump-coin information. “I don’t really care what their motivation was,” he said. To him, it was news because it said something about Donald Trump’s interest in cryptocurrency.

Solana told me that starting a media company has given him a greater understanding of the challenges facing traditional news organizations. “What I try and do is give people their flowers when they deserve them more,” he said. For example, he admired The New York Times’ early reporting on the second assassination attempt on Trump. In response, he started writing a post praising the newspaper for its coverage. “Then they published this piece calling out Trump’s ‘history of violent rhetoric,’ which to my ear implicitly blamed him for the assassination attempt, and I thought, Fuck! Goddamn it, I was wrong.”

A €15,000 package deal for a dinghy, engine and 60 life jackets was offered to our reporter in Essen.