his extensive network of connections with establishment GOP heavyweights, wealthy financiers, technology executives, the prestige press, and fellow graduates of Yale Law School—precisely the elites he rails against.
More than 200 people appear on Vance’s Venmo “friends” list. Among them is Amalia Halikias, government relations director at the Heritage Foundation—the conservative think tank coordinating the controversial Project 2025. … So are Jeff Flake, the famously anti-Trump former Arizona senator and current ambassador to Turkey; lobbyists from organizations like the Government Strategies Group; people affiliated with other conservative think tanks like the Hoover Institution and the American Enterprise Institute; journalists and media personalities like Bari Weiss and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson; and tech executives from Anthropic and AOL. (None of these people responded to requests for comment.)
This points to one important caveat—being friends on Venmo does not mean two people have transacted together, or even know the payment app has designated them as friends.
According to Venmo, when someone first uses the app, they are prompted to allow it to access their phone contacts. If they agree, Venmo will find any contacts already using the app and automatically populate the user’s friend list. Users can also intentionally add or remove friends. Along with the user’s transactions, their friends list is public by default. This means it’s likely that Vance’s list of friends was largely populated by the contacts in his phone when he set up his account in December of 2016.
If I’m not mistaken, the connection can be as remote as that Vance and the other person were both recipients in the TO: field of the same email at some point in the past.
Any time I’ve signed up for any app or website and gave it permission to read my contacts, that was where the loosest connections it made came from, the head scratchers. When I searched for them in my contacts I found no direct contact, but when I searched for them in email I found that once long ago we were both recipients of a big group email for whatever reason.
On the other hand, I don’t look kindly upon this Vance fellow and I’m happy to suppose that he’s directly connected to turds like Carlson et al.
JD Vance aside, why does anyone like venmo? Why does anyone want a social network in their payment processing? Isn’t that obviously a terrible idea?
I mean especially given how touchy Americans are about money, why are people suddenly signing up to make it all public? It seems like a huge (self)violation of privacy.
Any time I post someone on Venmo, I send it privately. Any time someone pays me, it’s always sent publicly.
I’m not a privacy nut, and that doesn’t bother me so much as I just don’t understand why you’d want these transactions being public.
Why does anyone need or want to know that I paid the neighbor kid to more my lawn?
