Way back in January 2020, Peter Thiel wrote an email to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen and others warning that Millennials turn toward socialism needed to be taken seriously. Here’s that email which started going viral this week in the wake of Zohran Mamdani’s win in NYC.
Here is Peter Thiel’s email to Zuck and Andreessen in Jan-2020 predicting socialism.
Tl;dr too much student debt and lack of affordable housing keeps young people with negative capital for too long. And without a stake in the capitalist system, they will turn against it. pic.twitter.com/BOKgwJ2cV0
— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) November 5, 2025
His conclusion was that “if one has no stake in the capitalist system, one may well turn against it.” He was referring specifically to some of the same young people who just elected Mamdani.
Today the Free Press published an interview with Thiel in which they asked him about the email and his thoughts on what to do about the rise of socialism.
If you graduated in 1970 with no student debt, compare that to the millennial experience: too many people go to college, they don’t learn anything, and they end up with incredibly burdensome debt. Student debt is a version of this generational conflict that I’ve talked about for a long time…
It’s extremely difficult these days for young people to become homeowners. If you have extremely strict zoning laws and restrictions on building more housing, it’s good for the boomers, whose properties keep going up in value, and terrible for the millennials. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.
As for Mamdani himself, Thiel’s take is that he’s go no real plans to fix anything, but at least he’s talking about the thing young people are worried about.
…to Mamdani’s credit, he at least talked about these problems. So my cop-out answer is always to say: The first step is to talk about the problems, even if you don’t know what to do about them. There’s been a failure of, let’s say, the center left-center right establishment to even talk about them…
So the idea is: Maybe we should look for solutions outside the Overton Window. And that includes some very left-wing economics, socialist-type stuff. I don’t think those ideas will ultimately work, but they’re more than whatever was on offer. Cuomo did not have a plan for housing. He didn’t even think it was an issue. And of course, he’s been in politics and government for many, many years, so it’s hard not to ask: Why is he going to do something now, if he hasn’t done anything before? So, I’m not optimistic about Mamdani, but if you score it relatively, this is the kind of thing that’s going to happen if you look outside the Overton Window for solutions.
He also offered this warning to people who’d like to defeat Mamdani and people like him.
We’ll see how much Mamdani can do as mayor of New York. But I would say it’s symptomatic of things being very unhealthy. It’s symptomatic of establishment parties not tackling certain very basic problems, of having broken this generational compact. I would prefer people to focus more on solving this generational problem.
If all you can say is that Mamdani is a jihadist, communist, ridiculous young person, what that sounds like to me is that you still don’t have any idea what to do about housing or student debt. If that’s the best you can do, you are going to keep losing.
He may have a point. Obviously, the fact that Mamdani is a far-left socialist who won’t denounce Hamas didn’t matter to a lot of people who want free buses and rent freezes. We may be seeing the same thing happen in Maine where Graham Platner also called himself a communist and said a bunch of things the left would normally find objectionable. But so long as he’s promising some kind of fundamental change, Democrats seem willing to overlook his other issues.
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