# Endorse Liberty The pro-[[Ron Paul]] super PAC of the 2012 cycle — FEC committee **C00508002**, registered **December 20, 2011**, effectively dead by the end of 2012. It raised **$3,937,583** and spent **$3,920,989**, of which **$3,542,482 went to independent expenditures**. Endorse Liberty matters far out of proportion to its size, for one reason: **it is the first vehicle through which Silicon Valley money was converted into organized American electoral politics at scale.** Every later structure in this vault's [[Tech Right]] money map — the Thiel Senate operations, [[America PAC]], the [[Rockbridge Network]] — is a descendant of what was tested here. ## Who paid for it Endorse Liberty took **no money from party or other committees**. Every dollar came from individuals, and almost all of it came from four of them. | Donor | Amount | Share of total raised | |---|---|---| | **[[Peter Thiel]]** | **$2,600,000** | **66.0%** | | **[[Stephen Oskoui]]** | **~$688,718** | **17.5%** | | Margaret McMahon | $200,000 | 5.1% | | Gunter Marksteiner | $160,752 | 4.1% | | **[[Luke Nosek]]** | $10,001 | 0.3% | | *All unitemized donors combined* | $105,721 | 2.7% | **Thiel and Oskoui together supplied 83.5% of the money.** Add the next two names and 92.7% of a presidential super PAC came from four people. Thiel's contributions, from FEC records, arrived in four checks: | Date | Amount | |---|---| | Dec 16, 2011 | $150,000 | | Dec 21, 2011 | $750,000 | | Jan 3, 2012 | $1,000,000 | | Jan 13, 2012 | $700,000 | The timing is the strategy: the money landed in the four weeks bracketing the **Iowa caucuses (Jan 3)** and the **New Hampshire primary (Jan 10)** — front-loaded to buy visibility in the only window where a Paul surge was possible. > **Correction to the commonly cited figure.** CNN reported in February 2012 that Thiel had supplied **76%** of the PAC's money. That was accurate *as of that date*. Measured against the full 2011–2012 cycle, his share is **66%**. Both numbers are correct about different moments; the vault uses 66% for the completed cycle. ## What Oskoui actually gave [[Stephen Oskoui]] was Endorse Liberty's **co-founder and president**, and the figure usually attached to him — "$125,000 personal plus $296,000 in media services" — **understates his giving by roughly 2.4×.** The full FEC record shows **fourteen contributions**: | Date | Amount | |---|---| | Dec 29, 2011 | $50,000 | | Dec 31, 2011 | $5,000 | | Jan 15, 2012 | **$296,230.04** *(the "media services" in-kind)* | | Jan 21, 2012 | $399 | | Jan 24, 2012 | **$125,000** | | Feb 21, 2012 | $399 | | Apr 21, 2012 | $399 | | Jul 24, 2012 | $83,444.89 | | Aug 1, 2012 | $7,000 | | Aug 2, 2012 | $76,856.29 | | Aug 13, 2012 | $16,282.90 | | Aug 14, 2012 | $12,706.44 | | Sep 19, 2012 | $10,000 | | Dec 31, 2012 | $5,000 | | **Total** | **~$688,718** | Note the **second wave in July–August 2012** — roughly $196,000 arriving months after Paul had stopped campaigning. That money was not spent trying to win the nomination. It funded the down-ballot and delegate-adjacent work described below, which is a different kind of political project. ## What it spent the money on FEC records the committee's **independent expenditures at $3,542,482** and operating expenditures at $378,508. The spending pattern, per the itemized filings: - **Online advertising was the core** — Facebook, Google, and StumbleUpon buys, an unusually digital allocation for 2012, when super PACs overwhelmingly bought broadcast television. - **Television** accounted for a comparatively small slice (~$95,635 in the itemized presidential-race view). - **Newt Gingrich was the target of the negative spending** — roughly $44,102 in TV attacking [[Newt Gingrich]], versus $189,758 supporting Paul in the presidential race. - **Down-ballot spending** reached beyond the presidential race into Minnesota and Texas legislative and congressional contests — including support for **Ted Cruz's 2012 Texas Senate primary**, then an insurgent long-shot. - **Legal services from [[Skadden]]** (~$56,400) — a white-shoe firm on a shoestring libertarian PAC, which is itself a signal about who was really behind it. The digital-first allocation is worth dwelling on. Endorse Liberty behaved like a startup buying performance ads, not like a political committee buying reach — which is unsurprising given that its president had built a $50M-a-year performance-marketing company (Smiley Media) before entering politics. ## Why it disappeared The Center for Public Integrity's summary is the whole story: Thiel's donation "comprised nearly all the group's funds, and Endorse Liberty all but disappeared once Thiel cut off funding." Ending cash on hand at the close of 2012 was **$16,593**. There was no organization independent of its two funders, and when they stopped, it stopped. That is the defining property of the one-donor super PAC, and the reason the form matters: it is not an institution with a constituency, it is a **checkbook with a legal wrapper**. It can be created in weeks, spend millions, and vanish, leaving no membership, no accountability, and no trace except a filing. ## Significance in the ecosystem **1. The prototype of the one-donor PAC.** [[Peter Thiel]] would run the same play with far more money for [[Blake Masters]] and [[JD Vance]] a decade later; [[Elon Musk]] scaled it to roughly $250M with [[America PAC]] in 2024. Endorse Liberty is where the mechanism was first tested — two years after [[Citizens United v. FEC]] made it legal, on a candidate nobody expected to win. See [[Super PACs]]. **2. The first Silicon-Valley-to-GOP money channel.** Before the [[Tech Right]] was a faction, this was a Palo Alto billionaire and a Stanford-trained ad-tech operator paying for a Texas congressman's presidential campaign. Thiel described the horizon openly: the campaign "really is for 2016... we're just trying to build a libertarian base." **3. It is where [[Gigafund]]'s politics begins.** Endorse Liberty's president, [[Stephen Oskoui]], and its small-dollar donor [[Luke Nosek]] founded [[Gigafund]] together in 2017. The vault's [[PayPal Mafia]] capital map and its electoral-money map intersect at exactly this committee. **4. The digital-buy model.** Its Facebook/Google-heavy allocation in 2012 anticipated by several cycles the platform-native political advertising that would define 2016 onward. ## See Also - [[Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign]] - [[Stephen Oskoui]] - [[Peter Thiel]] - [[Luke Nosek]] - [[Gigafund]] - [[Ron Paul]] - [[Thiel Political Donations Timeline]] - [[Blake Masters]] - [[America PAC]] - [[Super PACs]] - [[Citizens United v. FEC]] - [[Campaign Finance]] - [[Independent Expenditure]] - [[Dark Money]] - [[Tech Right]] - [[Libertarianism]]