I think it's fairly well established that Thiel funds NRx types, and also has had an interest in transhumanism for a while. It is likely he's been scammed by cryogenics businesses at some point.

This is about a broader pattern of funding organisations and public figures that I think goes to just after Obama's election. During this time, a lot of libertarians (earnest or otherwise) seemed to believe that Obama would do something that would instate communism or something. The actual beliefs about Obama were quite varied.

We here obviously know that Obama was a standard neolib ghoul. That's not the issue here, the issue is what libertarians to ancaps believed.

We know that the Tea Party movement was astroturfed in this time period, and that it was very successful in turning into THE republican party for a while.

The conspiracy theory here is that ancaps and anti-democracy libertarians attempted their own version during the same time period. Obviously, the Tea Party had to outwardly support democracy. Obviously we here know that when push comes to shove, Capitalism is actually incompatible with democracy, though we come to very different conclusions to Thiel.

During this time, a hodgepodge of financiers with similar ideas coalesced and started to fund orgs, forums, and public figures in and around the rationalist sphere. This included the "atheist" sphere, which at the time was very libertarian and very against George Bush's religious supporters, but also anti-muslim which carried water for American Imperialism. This can be stuff like paying for server time, paying people to be posters, paying for magazines which people still read, having speakers at conventions etc.

Part of this was the closeness of the rationalist community to the transhumanist community, something that Thiel likely would have wanted to advertise in. (he seems to want to live forever?)

It is very likely that if you know a reactionary nerd, their intellectual pedigree likely flows back to this funding. At the front of my mind is LessWrong and NRx people, as well as many adjacent spheres.

Thiel knows that being openly anti-democracy is a pretty hard sell, and so has a vested interest in creating legitimate figures that lead you by the nose to his conclusion (to keep private property, you must have a hierarchy of ideologically focused elites to protect it from voters who will always tax more and take stuff). He certainly has the means to do it.

I don't know if it's worth thinking about whether its successful (if it happened). While I think it has caused a shift in those communities, those communities were already pretty well primed for those ideas. The public figures generated are largely annoying to read, writing literal books to make the argument "white nerd guy make good king".

Personally, I left the angry internet atheist movement a couple of years before elevatorgate. I was not very politically engaged at the time, so I personally didn't notice any shifts, though looking back there was a fairly strong "western libertarian" community.