Well, I fell down another rabbit hole today.
You know how JD Vance is always talking about China owning American farm land and how its bad? Well, its not because he wants to protect American farmers – its because he wants it for himself.
Peter Thiel bankrolled JD Vance’s venture capital fund Narya Capital when Vance launched it in 2020. Thiel didn’t just write a check – he’s been Vance’s political sugar daddy for years, including cutting a fat check to boost Vance’s 2022 Senate run.
Narya then turned around and invested in AcreTrader during the companys Series B funding round in 2021. So the money chain goes: Thiel Narya AcreTrader. Vance personally threw in up to $65,000 of his own money into AcreTrader through Narya, according to his 2022 Senate ethics disclosure.
AcreTrader sells itself as a way to democratize farmland investing – letting regular folks buy shares in farm properties like they’re trading stocks. Sounds great until you realize what it actually does: it turns America’s farmland into a financial product that can be sliced up and sold to investors whove never touched dirt in their lives.
The business model is simple and kind of genius if you’re into that sort of thing. AcreTrader buys farmland, sticks it in an LLC, and sells shares to investors. They collect fees upfront and annual management fees after. The platform doesn’t care if the crops fail or the weather goes sideways – they get paid either way based on assets under management and transaction volume.
Heres the part that should make you uncomfortable: when farms go into distress – say from tariffs tanking crop prices or climate disasters – more farmland hits the market. More distressed farms mean more acquisition opportunities. More acquisitions mean more fees. Its a model that literally profits from farming families going broke.
The criticism writes itself. Family farmers lose their land, often through sale-leaseback arrangements where they become tenants on property they used to own. Meanwhile, political insiders like Vance (and by extension, his patron Thiel) collect returns while championing policies that create the exact economic conditions driving farms under.
Farm advocate Sarah Taber calls AcreTrader like Uber for buying U.
S. farmland – and she means that as the insult it sounds like. The LLC structure makes it nearly impossible to track who actually owns what, creating a perfect smoke screen for conflicts of interest.
The irony is thick. Vance built his brand on Hillbilly Elegy and championing forgotten rural America. Now he’s invested in a company that facilitates the transfer of that same rural America’s most valuable asset – land – to Wall Street types and Silicon Valley investors who view it as just another line item in a portfolio.
Thiels involvement is more indirect but no less significant. By backing Narya financially, he enabled the whole chain. And given Thiels track record – he was Facebooks first outside investor, co-founded PayPal and Palantir, and has a net worth around $20.8 billion – the guy knows how to spot a profitable bet. Farmland has been one of the most reliable assets for returns, and platforms like AcreTrader make it accessible to the investor class while pricing out the people who actually work the land.
The numbers arent small either. Narya raised $93 million from heavy hitters like Thiel, Marc Andreessen, and Eric Schmidt. AcreTrader itself has raised $80 million in venture capital from firms including Narya.
Now, Vance stepped back from running Narya when he ran for Senate in 2022. By his 2023 financial disclosure, he wasn’t listed as a partner anymore at Narya Capital, but still receives management fees.
But heres where it gets cute. He sold off his stock in Narya Capital Management LLC in 2023 – which sounds clean until you realize that’s just one legal entity. Its not the same as the investment vehicles he used to park money in companies like AcreTrader and a bunch of other startups.
His 2025 financial disclosure shows he’s still holding stakes in multiple seed funds managed by Narya Capital worth between $601,000 and $1.265 million. Plus he’s collecting management fees from Narya somewhere in the range of $500,000 to $1 million. So yeah, Colin Greenspon and Falon Donohue are running the day-to-day now, but Vance is still getting paid. The funds alive and well too – they dropped money into a company called ValueBase as recently as June 2024.
Its the classic political two-step. Step away from the title so you can claim clean hands, but keep your fingers in the till collecting profits. He gets to say he doesn’t run it anymore while banking checks from every deal the fund makes.
And heres why this matters more than your typical politician has investments story. As Vice President, Vance is now positioned to influence policies that could directly benefit companies in Naryas portfolio – and all those other investments were talking about. Those management fees mean he’s got skin in the game even if he’s not picking the investments anymore.
But wait, there’s more. His 2025 disclosure also shows he’s holding between $100,000 and $250,000 in Revolutions Rise of the Rest Seed Fund – another venture capital outfit he helped launch before he got into politics. That fund has investments in at least four defense contractors. Two of them – Hermeus and Slingshot Aerospace – scored defense contracts worth millions of dollars within weeks of Trump taking office. Hermeus got $9.36 million from the Department of Defense in February. Slingshot Aerospace has pulled in $1.7 million from the Air Force.
Vance listed all four of these companies by name on his 2023 Senate financial disclosure, so he knew damn well what he owned. He hasn’t filed any paperwork showing he sold these holdings since becoming VP.
And just to add another layer to this conflict-of-interest cake, Vance is sitting on $250,000 to $500,000 in Bitcoin while the Trump administration established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and made a bunch of crypto-friendly regulatory changes that sent Bitcoin prices to all-time highs. Through the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, he’s also invested in The Bitcoin Company – a startup trying to get everyone in the world to own Bitcoin.
So we’ve got a Vice President whos collecting management fees from his old venture fund, holding stakes in defense contractors getting Trump administration contracts, and personally profiting from crypto policies his own administration is pushing. But sure, tell me again about draining the swamp.