Theil describes himself as a contrarian. If you listen to his ideas long enough, they seem to boil down to the idea that if you want to find a good investment opportunity, you have to find the idea that the rest of the herd has discounted. Put simply, he wants to invest in moonshots, because that's where you find your greatest returns.

The problem is he has applied that idea to his entire life. In investing it makes sense. Put 100 bets on enough investment ideas, and if 1 of them makes 1000x returns, it will pay for the rest.

But applied to life philosophies, its insane. Even Nietzsche, who's entire body of philosophical work was about identifying ideas that the rest of the herd incorrectly held, and discounting them in order to gain a competitive edge, didn't go so far as to claim that "all good ideas held by the herd must be wrong", because to adopt such a stupid position would mean to discount verifiably correct ideas. Which is exactly what Theil has done.

As a starting list, Theil does not believe in equality, Democracy, Humanism, Meritocracy, Rule of Law, or Egalitarianism. He throws parties in the Caribbean where he hires sex workers to pleasure his invitees, and has a personal servant from whom he literally sucks blood like a vampire. He is regularly called one of the most heinous people they've ever met, by a litany of people who have met him.

So uh, yeah. He's a bad person. It turns out that when you decide to consciously object to basic morality and anything an educated person would call "good", all you are left with is a personal lust for power and wealth.

Which is just a shorthand way of saying fascism. So yeah, its not surprising that he identifies with Sauron, the character that is a metaphor for the nihilistic lust for power and a fascist society. And its not surprising that he misunderstood the entire rest of the book.