Biographies of Silicon Valley protagonists

A History of Silicon Valley

This biography is an appendix to my book "A History of Silicon Valley"

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Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel (Germany, 1967) was raised in Germany and South Africa by parents who were evangelical Christians, and who settled in the Bay Area (Foster City). In middle school Thiel played chess and became an enfant prodige, ranking seventh nationally. Thiel studied philosophy and law at Stanford University until 1992. While at Stanford, in 1987 he founded the conservative student magazine Stanford Review and became a successful stock trader. He briefly worked in New York and then returned to the Bay Area, publishing the book "The Diversity Myth" (1995). After failing with a hedge fund called Thiel Capital Management, Thiel funded Confinity (originally Fieldlink) in december 1998 in Palo Alto with two editors of the Stanford Review, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery. The company was the brainchild of Max Levchin, a Ukrainian Jew from Chicago who brought with him a group of University of Illinois alumni, including Russel Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman. Their goal was to develop a system for Palm Pilot users to send ("beam") money to other Palm Pilot users, i.e. to make payments without using cash, cheques or credit cards. The first entities to be impressed by Confinity were European: Nokia and Deutsche Bank used Confinity software to "beam" from a Palm Pilot their $3 million investment in the company to Thiel. In 2000 Confinity and their competitor X.com merged to form PayPal, and Confinity's original concept evolved into a web-based service to send money over the Internet to an e-mail address, therefore bypassing banks and even borders. PayPal's success was immediate, beating all the competitors that had preceded it in trying to help consumers sell and buy over the Internet. In october 2001 PayPal already boasted 12 million registered users. Thiel resigned and let X's founder, Elon Musk, become the new CEO, but the employees (led by Levchin) mutinied unless Thiel returned. He did and under him PayPal's IPO in early 2002 netted $1.2 billion dollars. He then sold PayPal to eBay in July 2002 for $1.5 billion. Then Thiel started his own venture-capital fund, Clarium Capital, and in 2003 cofounded a secretive startup, Palatir Technologies, backed by the CIA's venture fund, a startup who business is to help governments conduct surveillance on their citizens. In 2004 Thiel invested in a startup called Facebook. In 2005 he launched the venture capital firm Founders Fund In 2006 Thiel donated money to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and to the Methuselah Foundation of gerontologist Aubrey de Grey. In 2007 he wrote the essay "The Straussian Moment". In 2008 Thiel donated money to the Patri Friedman's libertarian Seasteading Institute whose mission is to create communities in the middle of the oceans, outside the jurisdiction of governments. In 2008 Thiel also supported Ron Paul, a Libertarian running for president (despite the fact that Palantir's business is the exact opposite of Libertarian). In 2010 he founded he Thiel Fellowship that encourages bright students to drop out of university. In 2007 a tech blog called Gawker had published a gossip that Thiel was gay, and Thiel spent the next few years plotting to destroy Gawker. He funded a lawsuit against Gawker that in 2016 forced Gawker to shut down (so much so for Thiel's vocal defense of free speech). In 2014 he published the bestseller "Zero to One". In 2016 he supported the neofascist politician Donald Trump.

History of Silicon Valley | Biographies | History pages | Editor | Correspondence