Photo by Gage Sizemore/Flickr
By Yvonne Wingett Sanchez | Arizona Republic
Blake Masters, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate hoping to defeat Democratic incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, has the attention of former President Donald Trump, who recently called in to one of Masters’ campaign events and is expected to make an endorsement in the Arizona race.
Masters is a relative newcomer to Arizona’s GOP political scene but is fairly well-known in the tech world because of his years-long ties to investor Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and a Trump ally.
Masters is in a competitive five-way GOP primary race. Here’s what you should know about Masters, a first-time candidate.
Where is he from?
Masters was born in Colorado and raised in Tucson. He lived in California for several years. He returned to Tucson in 2018, where he lives with his wife and three young sons.
How old is he?
At 35, Masters is the youngest candidate in the wide-open Republican primary race and one of the youngest Senate candidates in the nation.
How did he meet venture capitalist, PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel?
They first met in 2011 while Masters was a student at Stanford University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in political science and then a law degree.
Masters worked that summer at Founders Fund, a venture capital fund that Thiel helped create. It was “a crash course in thinking about the future,” he told TechCrunch, an online news site in 2014.
By then, he considered Thiel a mentor of sorts, Masters told TechCrunch.
The next year, Thiel invited him to attend a class he was teaching on startups.
Masters did, and he kept detailed notes. He posted them online, captivating students and tech enthusiasts who widely circulated them. Masters’ notes eventually helped lay the foundation for “Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future,” which Thiel and Masters co-authored and released in 2014.
