Everyone knows this was politically motivated. Everyone.

Arizona Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters responding to the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.

We even know what's going on, right? But we know. All of us know it's messed up.

On yesterday's show, we told you about the new right. A group Masters is associated with.

It's a small but influential bunch of thinkers and politicians who want to reshape the US with a nationalist bent.

They're skeptical of democracy, but that's the system we have and so they want to win elections, which means they need money.

And that is where the billionaire Peter Teal comes in.

With somebody like Peter Teal, it's always hard to tell whether the contrarianism, the desire to just disagree with people,

comes first or the ideology comes first, but I think they're tied together.

Coming up on today's explained the man bankrolling the new right and the wildly provocative past that might have you thinking,

we should have seen this one coming.

It's today explained. I'm Newell King. Max Chaffkin, reporter for Bloomberg, wrote the contrarian, a biography of Peter Teal.

Max, how much did Peter Teal agree to talk to you for the book?

Well, Teal is pretty secretive and somebody who's done a lot to kind of try to control the narrative around him.

He was aware of the book and there was a single off the record meeting.

We're spoke for a little over an hour, but unfortunately I can't give any details from that conversation.

Is Peter Teal a guy who doesn't want publicity or is he a guy who wants a certain kind of publicity?

Oh, I think he definitely wants publicity.

Please welcome the co-founder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook, entrepreneur Peter Teal.

Good evening.

It's a publicity that he wants to control.

I mean, and he's somebody who's been extremely effective at creating kind of a mythology around his entrepreneurial exploits and around his ideas.

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