Peter Thiel

Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967) is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 328 on the Forbes 400 in 2018, with a net worth of $2.5 billion.

Thiel was born in Frankfurt. He moved with his family to the United States as an infant, and spent a portion of his upbringing in Southern Africa before the family settled in California in 1977. He studied philosophy at Stanford University, graduating with a B.A. in 1989. He then went on to the Stanford Law School, and received his J.D. in 1992. After graduation, he worked as a judicial clerk for Judge James Larry Edmondson, a securities lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell, a speechwriter for former-U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett and as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse prior to founding Thiel Capital in 1996. Thiel co-founded PayPal in 1999, serving as chief executive officer until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.

After the sale of PayPal, he founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund. He launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, in 2004 and continues to serve as its chairman as of 2019. His Founders Fund, a venture capital firm, was launched in 2005 along with PayPal partners Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Earlier, Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake for $500,000 in August 2004. He sold the majority of his shares in Facebook for over $1 billion in 2012, but remains on the board of directors. He also co-founded Valar Ventures in 2010, co-founded Mithril Capital, of which he is investment committee chair, in 2012, and served as a partner at Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017.

Through the Thiel Foundation, Thiel governs the grant-making bodies Breakout Labs and Thiel Fellowship, and funds nonprofit research into artificial intelligence, life extension and seasteading. A co-founder of The Stanford Review, he is a conservative libertarian who is critical of high government spending, high debt levels, and foreign wars. He has donated to numerous political figures. In 2016, Thiel revealed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit, which ultimately led to the bankruptcy of Gawker.

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Over the past few days, billionaire Peter Thiel and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have found themselves in a feud over funding Thiel's endorsed Senate candidates in Arizona and Ohio. Earlier this year (2022), Mitch McConnell urged Peter Thiel to pour more money into a super PAC backing J.D. Vance, as Republicans fret over money disparities in U.S. Senate races across the United States. Peter Thiel refused, fueling frustrations among Republicans that the wealthy Thiel was abandoning the candidates he wanted Republicans to nominate at a critical juncture in the 2022 U.S. midterms campaign cycle. Thiel's decision highlights an ongoing tension between top Republican strategists and lawmakers and one of the Republican Party's most deep-pocketed donors.

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A dark money group tied to billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel  [Peter Thiel] steered hundreds of thousands of dollars into a super PAC spending on Ohio's Senate race in support of Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis author J.D. Vance - who worked at Thiel's venture capital firm. J.D. Vance faces a crowded field of Republican contenders in the Ohio Senate race with a primary scheduled for 2022-05-03.

The pro-Vance super PAC, Protect Ohio Values  [Wikipedia: Protect Ohio Values], received $200,000 from a group called Per Aspera Policy. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, also gave $10 million to the pro-Vance super PAC during the first half of 2021, but the super PAC did not report any money received from Thiel during the second half of the year [2021]. While Per Aspera Policy has not disclosed its donors, the Kansas City Star reported that Thiel gave a contribution worth "six figures" to Per Aspera Policy when it was paying for ads boosting Kris Kobach's failed 2018 gubernatorial bid.

Sources who spoke on condition of anonymity reportedly told the Kansas City Star that Peter Thiel quietly helped bankroll the after a phone call with Kris Kobach about the gubernatorial race. Thiel never openly endorsed Kris Kobach during his gubernatorial campaign but the PayPal co-founder was more open about his support of Kobach's unsuccessful 2020 Senate campaign, helping fundraise and pouring seven figures into a super PAC supporting Kris Kobach.

Per Aspera Policy has little digital footprint outside of its social media and contributions but the group was listed as a sponsor of the National Conservatism conference in 2021-10 in Orlando, Florida. Peter Thiel keynoted the conference and was also a top tier sponsor with more than $50,000 contributed. Per Aspera Policy was in the second-highest tier with a $10,000 contribution.

In the first half of 2021, Peter Thiel also made a $10 million contribution to Saving Arizona, a super PAC spending to support Thiel protégé Blake Masters'bid against incumbent Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ)  [Wikipedia: Mark Kelly] - who won his Senate seat in a special election last year [2021]. Like Ohio Values PAC, Saving Arizona did not report receiving additional contributions from Thiel during the second half of the year [2021].

Peter Thiel announced earlier this month [2022-02] that he is stepping down from the board of Meta Platforms Inc.  [Meta Platforms, Inc.] after advising CEO Mark Zuckerberg for nearly two decades. Instead, Thiel will increase his political support of candidates aligned with former President Donald Trump's agenda in 2022 midterm elections, including Blake Masters and J.D. Vance - who have each worked for Thiel's businesses in various capacities.

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Mike Pence,  Donald Trump, and Peter Thiel. Silicon Valley mogul Peter Thiel was a key ally of Donald Trump during Trump's time in the White House. Now, Peter Thiel is working on a rebrand of Trumpism  [Source]

Peter Thiel, the free press-hating,  alleged young blood enthusiast who also happens to be one of the richest people alive, has emerged as the Republican Party's latest kingmaker. Peter Thiel is - per OpenSecrets data - the co-leader among GOP donors this cycle, funding an array of pro-cryptocurrency, anti-China candidates, spending tens of millions on congressional candidates during an election year in which Republicans are expected to triumph without his involvement. A longtime donor to the Republican Party, Peter Thiel nevertheless will almost certainly see his cachet among conservatives grow exponentially: having stepped down from Facebook's board earlier this year [2022], Peter Thiel is positioned to gain an enormous level of influence within right-wing politics practically overnight.

For most of the last six years, many on the right have attempted to intellectually backfill Trumpism, turning Donald Trumpideology (when it was coherent at all) into some discernible set of political beliefs. In office, Trump reverted into a rather pro-forma type of Republican. But Peter Thiel is bringing vast resources to an effort to conjure what might have been, pushing a distilled version of former president Donald Trump's antagonistic foreign policy and authoritarianism. Republican donors have long seen the popular will  [populism] as an obstacle to overcome but have stopped short of catastrophizing democracy itself - the Koch brothers  [Political Activities of the Koch Brothers  |  Charles Koch  |  Libertarianism], for example, generally used their money and influence to shape popular opinion along their preferred anti-tax and anti-regulatory lines. But Thiel is more explicitly anti-democratic. In 2009 Thiel published a piece arguing that he had come to "no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Seven years later [2016], Thiel secretly used his considerable resources to bankrupt Gawker as revenge, after one of its blogs had outed him years earlier.  [Gawker: Outing of Peter Thiel as gay  |  Gawker: Bankruptcy]

The candidates Peter Thiel is backing tell a clear story of where Thiel hopes to lead the Republican Party. At a fundraiser for Wyoming Republican Harriet Hageman  [Ballotpedia: Harriet Hageman], who is challenging Liz Cheney in Wyoming's upcoming primary election, Thiel made it clear that his ultimate goal was to unseat all of the "traitorous 10" Republicans who had voted to impeach Donald Trump for incitement of a riot after his supporters breached the U.S. Capitol to try to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power on 2021-01-06  [2021 United States Capitol attack]. All told, Thiel has spent more than $20 million backing 16 United States House of Representatives and United States Senate candidates who back the "big lie" that Donald Trump was the real winner of the 2020 United States presidential election. Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters has said, "It's really hard to know" if Joe Biden was the real winner of the election. In Ohio, the flailing J.D. Vance - who was against Trump before he was for him - has insisted that Peter Thiel's Facebook buddy Mark Zuckerberg was behind a massive voter fraud effort.

But Peter Thiel isn't just selecting candidates based on their stance on voter fraud. Thiel has ripped into tech companies for being too cozy with China - even, in 2019, going as far as to suggest that the FBI should investigate whether spies from China had infiltrated Google - and is now spending millions in support of belligerent China critics and their cause. These include Missouri's Eric S. Schmitt, who sued China  [Wikipedia: lawsuit description] over COVID-19 pandemic in Missouri as the state's attorney general, as well as North Carolina Representative Ted Budd, who published a piece arguing that China is "not a force for good." As New York's Choire Sicha   noted in a piece earlier this week [2022-02], "If you're a Republican candidate striving for financial support from this particular billionaire, attacking China is probably a good way to get attention."

Part of Peter Thiel's focus on China also reflects his obsession with cryptocurrency. Thiel has called cryptocurrency a "Chinese financial weapon" aimed at undercutting the U.S. dollar's status as the global reserve currency. "Even though I'm a pro-crypto, pro-Bitcoin maximalist person, I do wonder whether, at this point, Bitcoin should also be thought of in part as a Chinese financial weapon against the U.S.... It threatens fiat money, but it especially threatens the dollar," Thiel said during a roundtable discussion at the Richard Nixon Foundation last year [2021]. Nearly all of the candidates Peter Thiel is backing are cryptocurrency enthusiasts, with many explicitly making the case that the United States use cryptocurrency as a means of countering the Chinese - Blake Masters, for instance has suggested  [see also] that the U.S. build a reserve of cryptocurrency.

Peter Thiel's opposition to China is about global influence and economics - not democracy. This is a significant break with the ways the U.S. has previously confronted China, with an eye toward broadening the appeal of democracy as a means to combat the perils of autocracy. Thiel would rather meet Chinese autocracy with an American version, rooted in the darker ideological strains that Silicon Valley has fostered in recent years. True to form, the candidates and ideas that Thiel has supported with his considerable wealth all flirt with a U.S. that's less democratic and more unequal. The future Thiel wants is one arguably even bleaker than the one being pushed by Donald Trump: one in which confronting the Chinese abroad and suppressing democracy at home are intertwined - one vertically integrated authoritarianism to rule them all.

• [NPR.org, 2021-09-21] 'The Contrarian' Profiles Peter Thiel, PayPal Co-Founder And Political Provocateur.  Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Max Chafkin talks about the tech billionaire who broke with most of Silicon Valley in backing Trump. Thiel also secretly funded the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker.

This fall, Peter Thiel will celebrate his 54th birthday. He has already lived more lives than most mortals can imagine. He has been a Wall Street lawyer, a hedge-fund trader, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and a fabulously successful venture capitalist. The team he led at PayPal, the online-payments company he co-founded in 1998, is so influential in the Valley that its alumni are known as the "PayPal Mafia."   Zero to One, his provocative 2014 manifesto on innovation and start-ups, has sold more than 3 million copies globally. He was the most prominent tech titan to back Donald Trump in 2016 and remains a lavish supporter of Trumpish Senate candidates. Ambitious to avoid death, or at least postpone it, he has flirted with ideas for freezing brains for future reanimation, and for transfusing the middle-aged with the blood of the young.

Thiel is, in other words, a gift to a biographer. Yet he also presents challenges. For one thing, he is a fierce guardian of his privacy: After the scurrilous blog Valleywag outed him as gay, Thiel financed a lawsuit that bankrupted its parent company, Gawker Media. For another thing, the profiler must decide which Thiel is the salient one - which of his many and varied pursuits cut to the essence of his character. And because biography aspires to capture not just the figure but the landscape - the life, but just as crucially the times - the author must also judge which of Thiel's projects matter to the rest of us. Max Chafkin, a Bloomberg journalist, wrestles with these choices in The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power. The title hits the mark. The subtitle causes difficulties.

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For many working Americans, a Roth IRA is a useful, if not particularly interesting, way to save money for retirement. For tech billionaire Peter Thiel, it was a way to accumulate more than $5 billion. The nonprofit journalism shop ProPublica ran an exposé in June revealing how a small number of extremely wealthy folks had ended up with Roths - federally subsidized retirement accounts meant for middle-class savers - worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and up. Thiel did so, the article noted, by "stuffing" his Roth IRA with wildly undervalued "founders shares" of pre-IPO startups - potentially an illegal tactic - and then watching as their values rose exponentially, and completely tax-free.

... But it turns out IRAs are only the tip of the iceberg. The bigger problem, according to Steve Rosenthal, a tax attorney and senior fellow at Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center, is that, thanks to a series of bipartisan bills Congress has passed over the past quarter-century, the government spends a fortune subsidizing a whole range of retirement plans whose benefits flow overwhelmingly to America's most affluent. "It's unbelievable the amounts of dollars at stake, and how tilted they are to the high end," Rosenthal told me. "It's just staggering."

Indeed, such subsidies are the federal government's single biggest tax-related expense, costing hundreds of billions of dollars per year. From 2020 through 2024, the JCT estimates, tax breaks and deferrals for retirement contributions will cost the Treasury $1.9 trillion - far more than the cost of the child/dependent or earned income tax credits, tax deductions for charitable donations, tax exclusions on long-term capital gains, or corporate tax breaks for employer-provided health and life insurance benefits. "These retirement reform packages are exceptionally confusing and technical and long and really hard for anyone to sort out," says Rosenthal, a former JCT staff lawyer himself. "But embedded in every one are easter eggs: big giveaways to the retirement industry and to high-net-worth individuals."

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