Billionaire Peter Thiel has a Republican US Senate candidate on his corporate payroll who is earning more than $1 million, documents show

Blake Masters made seven figures in salary and royalties from his work with Thiel Capital.

Peter Thiel has given $10 million to a super PAC backing Masters' challenge of Sen. Mark Kelly.

Masters also has seven figures' worth of cryptocurrency holdings, a new financial filing says.

The Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters earned about $1 million from his business relationship with the investor and GOP megadonor Peter Thiel last year, underscoring just how financially enmeshed he is with his billionaire benefactor, new documents show.

Thiel, the PayPal founder and Facebook investor and board member, paid Masters a salary of $775,000 over the past year, according to Masters' personal-finance disclosure, filed on Thursday with the US Senate clerk.

The documents — filed nearly 10 weeks late, Insider previously reported — also show that Masters earned more than $340,000 in royalty payments from Thiel Capital stemming from sales of the book "Zero to One," which Masters wrote with Thiel.

Masters is the chief operating officer of Thiel Capital and the president of the Thiel Foundation. Thiel has already donated $10 million to Saving America, a pro-Masters super PAC; such committees may raise and spend unlimited amounts of money to advocate for or against political candidates.

Masters did not immediately return Insider's message seeking comment. He'd told Insider in September that his financial disclosure would be "pretty vanilla." In October, he said he hadn't filed a timely disclosure because he was "busy campaigning and parenting," adding that "the most interesting and unique thing in my disclosure will be crypto."

His cryptocurrency holdings are indeed intriguing: He reported between $1.47 million and $6.19 million worth of assets across nine cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, bitcoin cash, dogecoin, ether, filecoin, litecoin, tezos, and zcash.

This makes Masters one of the most heavily cryptocurrency-invested congressional candidates.

Masters also owns between $2,000 and $30,000 in gold and silver bars and coins, according to his disclosure.

Masters also reported having a gun trust, described in the disclosure as a "trust established to hold weapons regulated by the National Firearms Act."

Masters' trust contains "guns and silencers," the disclosure said, without detailing his holdings further. Gun trusts may contain any kind of legally owned weapon but are often used to legally possess machine guns, short-barrel rifles, and shotguns.

Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is also a major Republican Party political donor. John Lamparski/Getty Images

Masters, 35, filed papers with the Federal Election Commission on July 9 to run in the GOP Senate primary in Arizona. If he wins, he would likely face incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat, in what could become one of the most expensive races of the 2022 midterm elections.

Under federal law, Masters had 30 days to disclose his financial records or otherwise file for an extension, which he did not. Had Masters filed for an extension, Senate officials could have granted him as many as 90 more days to submit his personal financial information. He faces a $200 late-filing penalty, according to Senate rules.

Masters' ties with Thiel date to his Stanford Law School days, when he took the investor's entrepreneurship class, published his notes online, and then, with Thiel, wrote a bestselling compendium of the notes, "Zero to One."

After a stint in legal-tech entrepreneurship, Masters spent the past seven years at Thiel Capital.

When Donald Trump became president, Thiel — at times with Masters — helped Trump vet and select candidates for senior government positions. For example, Thiel sought to replace the longtime director of the National Institutes of Health with Andy Harris, a Republican congressman and doctor with far-right views, according to Max Chafkin's recent biography of Thiel.