If the author had gotten a big lavish dinner he'd use it to talk about the .1% and how out of touch they are. Instead he got an eccentric geek circle with probably a lot of boring SV inside baseball chatter and no food and uses it to drag out the spectre of the rich weirdo.

We've survived two centuries of mega rich people with strange agendas and we can survive this. Honestly this crowd is far, far less scary than the Ahmanson family and other supporters of things like "theonomy." Google the "Chalcedon foundation." Or Henry Ford and his admiration for Hitler and Mussolini, or countless other examples. The SV crowd and their rather tame gentrified version of transhumanism and Ayn Rand is fluffy bunny of light stuff compared to those things.

Is Thiel actually a Trump supporter or is he just contractually bound to cast a vote for him due to being a delegate?

I'm getting bored with the SV bashing genre. You can criticize SV for many things, but SV did not cause the decline of the middle class. That trend was firmly in place by the mid-late 70s and began a full 30 years before SV rose as a power. It's largely due to outsourcing, the decline of unions, and the siphoning of trillions out of the American economy to support our pointless waffling quasi-empire. Blame Nixon.