The after effects of the Citizens United ruling shouldn't shock anyone. Corporations were granted the ability to spend ungodly sums on campaigns, and guess what they're doing?

Peter Thiel is finally admitting there's a big blotch on his resumé that needs to be cleaned up. Becoming Facebook's first institutional investor was brilliant; thinking he was smart enough to predict big economic swings was incredibly dumb. Six billion dollars dumb. So Thiel will retreat into tech investing.

They were going to build a fantasy island together, a floating libertarian utopia where outsiders like them might finally feel at home. They were two walking contradictions: Peter Thiel, the billionaire Facebook investor torn between his Christianity and fleshy gay parties, and Patri Friedman, the commune-dwelling…

Assless chaps."Full-on rager" partying. A Fire Department intervention. Peter Thiel's hedge fund might have cratered, but the objectivist Republican's private life is rocking.

Alright: the latest Forbes' billionaire list is out. Now we can all get out our Sharpies and draw circles around which billionaires we're gonna date this year. Kidding: billionaires only date other billionaires and underwear models.

Peter Thiel, Facebook's first outside investor, has had a bad year. His once lucrative hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management, lost money for a third straight year, bringing its assets down 90 percent since its peak. Now he's become a doomsayer.

Facebook investor Peter Thiel is planning to give college students $100,000 each to drop out and launch startups. The editor of Slate is pretty disgusted with the concept. This idea will destroy "white boys" and "middle class values!"

Peter Thiel, Facebook's first outside investor, is moving his volatile hedge fund back to California. Clarium Capital moved to New York in its boom days of fall 2008; a humble return to Silicon Valley may help break the resulting jinx.

the PayPal co-founder and artificial intelligence enthusiast, explaining to Business Insider that Luddites may well be the first up against the wall when the robot revolution comes. The new order "could be very good, it could be very bad."

Remember how brightly Peter Thiel's star was shining just last year? The PayPal co-founder's early Facebook investment started looking brilliant, his hedge fund returns were stellar and he debuted on the Forbes 400 list. My, how things change.

Peter Thiel is not a clown. The PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor sees right through bubbles and rampant, ongoing Wall Street fraud, or at least says he does. So why is he running a hedge fund, again?

So much for James O'Keefe as the scrappy, independent sparkplug of conservative media. The 25-year-old, who famously embarrassed ACORN on YouTube, got a five-figure sum that traces back to at least one rich conservative, well known to Silicon Valley.

The S&P 500 is up slightly since the start of June, rising one percent, but we're told Peter Thiel's Clarium Capital is having a much worse time. In fact, the Pay Pal co-founder should avoid thinking about work this weekend.

Elon Musk is becoming a welfare case. Federal auto-industry loans helped save his electric-car company, Tesla. Now Musk wants another federal bailout for his embarrassing space startup. And he may well get it.

Zivity, the much-ballyhooed site where you can buy pictures from amateur models, is stripping itself of most assets and employees. Appropriate, in a way, but if amateur moviemaking and journalism can work, why not user-generated porn? Some clues:

The June numbers are in, and Peter Thiel's hedge fund is looking puny, having shrunk to just $1.5 billion in assets, from $7.8 billion in June 2008. Placed in an historical context, the PayPal co-founder's fund looks even worse.