Peter Thiel

Peter Andreas Thiel was born in Germany in 1967 and came to the United States as a toddler.⁠[1][2][3]

In 1989, Thiel received a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University.⁠[4]

In 1992, Thiel received a J.D. from Stanford Law School. Before 1996, he practiced securities law at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell and traded derivatives at Credit Suisse’s CS Financial Products.⁠[4][4][5]

In 1995, The Diversity Myth was published, with Peter A. Thiel named on the title page.⁠[1]

Since September 1996, Thiel has been the managing member of the investment firm Thiel Capital Management, LLC.⁠[4]

In December 1998, Thiel co-founded Confinity, Inc., the predecessor of PayPal, and served as its Chief Executive Officer and Chairman through March 2000.⁠[4][6]

In March 2000, Thiel joined PayPal’s board of directors; he became Chairman in May and Chief Executive Officer and President in September. According to a widely told story, in the March 2000 funding round at a valuation of about $500 million, nearly all of the directors and management thought the valuation too low, while Thiel, believing the internet bubble had peaked, insisted on raising as much money as possible.⁠[4][7][7]

From 2002, Thiel served as President of Clarium Capital Management, a global macro investment manager.⁠[5][8]

On February 14, 2002, PayPal made its initial public offering of 5.4 million shares at $13 per share, quoted on Nasdaq under the symbol PYPL; Thiel, then 34, was Chief Executive Officer, President, and Chairman, and Elon Musk, Max Levchin, and others were directors.⁠[4][4][4][4][4][4]

On July 8, 2002, eBayeBayeBay Inc. is an online marketplace company headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar; it started out with person-to-person online auctions and listed on Nasdaq in 1998. As of the end of 2025, it had 135 million active buyers, and its platform’s gross merchandise volume in 2025 was nearly $80 billion.Open the full entry announced that it would acquire all shares of PayPal in a stock-for-stock transaction at 0.39 eBay shares for each PayPal share, valuing the deal at about $1.5 billion based on the July 5 share price.⁠[9][9][9]

On October 3, 2002, eBay completed its acquisition of PayPal, and Thiel announced the same day that he had resigned as PayPal’s CEO, with eBay senior vice president Matt Bannick assuming all of his responsibilities.⁠[10][10]

In 2003, Thiel founded the software company Palantir Technologies with Alexander Karp, Stephen Cohen, and others, and has served as its Chairman since 2003. Palantir initially built software for the U.S. intelligence community to assist in counterterrorism investigations and operations, and later expanded to commercial customers.⁠[6][11]

Under the equity arrangement at Palantir’s 2020 listing, all Class F common stock is held by a voting trust established by the three founders, Karp, Cohen, and Thiel, which generally gives the three of them the ability to control up to 49.999999% of the total voting power of the company’s capital stock.⁠[11][11]

Since 2005, Thiel has been a partner at the venture capital firm Founders Fund. Founders Fund has invested in companies such as SpaceXSpaceXSpaceX is a company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 whose businesses include space transportation, Starlink satellite communications and artificial intelligence. It went public in 2026 under the ticker SPCX.Open the full entry and Airbnb, and Palantir and AndurilAnduril IndustriesAnduril Industries is a defense technology company headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, United States, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey and several former Palantir and Oculus employees. It develops autonomous drones, unmanned undersea vehicles, border surveillance towers, counter-drone systems, and the Lattice command-and-control software, and builds its own large-scale weapons manufacturing facilities. As of May 2026, the company was valued at $61 billion.Open the full entry were incubated there; in March 2022, the firm closed two new funds totaling about $5 billion, bringing its assets under management to about $11 billion. Thiel has also provided early funding for LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry, Yelp, and dozens of other startups, many founded by his former PayPal colleagues, a group dubbed the “PayPal Mafia.”⁠[6][12][13][13][13][12]

Thiel was Facebook’s first outside investor, with an initial investment of $500,000. In April 2005, he joined Facebook’s board of directors, where he served as an independent director until 2022, including as chair of the Compensation, Nominating & Governance Committee.⁠[12][14][5][15][15]

In 2008, Clarium Capital Management, the hedge fund Thiel managed, had about $5.2 billion in assets; its return for the year reached as high as 58% in the first half, but it lost 18% in October alone and ended up with an overall loss of about 3%. Its investments were leveraged 4.4 to 1, with a large bet on a widening spread between yields on bonds of different maturities; in October the spreads narrowed instead. Clarium’s assets under management peaked at $7.2 billion and shrank to under $1 billion after the 2008 financial crisis.⁠[16][16][16][16][16][16][16][17]

In 2010, Thiel set up the venture capital firm Valar Ventures and appointed Andrew McCormack and James Fitzgerald, who had previously worked at his family office and at Clarium, to run it.⁠[8]

On September 27, 2010, Thiel, then President of Clarium Capital, announced at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference that he would provide grants of up to $100,000 to as many as 20 people under the age of 20 so they could “stop out of school.” The program was formally founded in 2011 as the Thiel Fellowship and is run by the Thiel Foundation, which he founded.⁠[18][18][18][19][20][20]

Since 2011, Thiel has been president of the investment firm Thiel Capital. In April of that year, he argued in an interview that after housing, the bubble in the United States was the “higher education bubble,” saying that education may be something Americans still believe in almost unquestioningly.⁠[6][7][7]

In the spring of 2012, Thiel taught a course at Stanford University called “Computer Science 183: Startup.” Law student Blake Masters turned his class notes into posts that drew wide attention in the tech community.⁠[21][21][22]

In May 2012, Thiel personally, and not through Founders Fund, led the $50 million Series B funding round of the question-and-answer site QuoraQuoraQuora is an American question-and-answer and knowledge-sharing website and the company that operates it, Quora, Inc., whose core product centers on users asking, answering, and voting to rank content; since 2022, the company has also offered Poe, a chat platform that aggregates AI models from multiple companies.Open the full entry at a $400 million pre-money valuation.⁠[23][23]

In June 2012, Thiel launched Mithril, a $402 million growth fund investing in late-stage, privately held technology companies, co-managed by former Clarium managing directors Jim O’Neill and Ajay Royan; the fund is named after mithril from The Lord of the Rings.⁠[17][17][17][17]

In August 2012, after Facebook’s post-IPO lockup ended, Thiel sold 20.6 million Facebook Class A shares under a Rule 10b5-1 trading plan adopted before the IPO, at an average price of $19.73, for nearly $400 million, leaving him with 5.6 million shares.⁠[14][14][14][14]

In 2014, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, co-written by Thiel and Blake Masters from the CS 183 class notes, was published; it later became a #1 New York Times bestseller.⁠[22][12]

On April 6, 2015, Tyler Cowen’s interview show Conversations with Tyler released its first episode, with Thiel as the guest, covering topics including stagnation, the Bible, company names, and chess.⁠[24][24]

When Cowen asked what indicator to watch to tell whether the “great stagnation” had ended, Thiel said he disagreed with the premise: he did not think the future was a fixed thing that simply exists, nothing was automatic about the great stagnation ending, and he always believed in human agency. He called Ray KurzweilRay KurzweilRay Kurzweil is an American inventor, author and futurist and a principal researcher at Google. He was the principal inventor of the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, omni-font optical character recognition and the CCD flatbed scanner, and is known for Kurzweil synthesizers and speech recognition systems; in books such as The Singularity Is Near he predicted that artificial intelligence would reach human level by 2029 and that humans would merge with machine intelligence around 2045 (the “Singularity”), making him a leading figure of techno-optimism and transhumanism, while his predictions have also long drawn criticism.Open the full entry’s The Singularity Is Near a hyperoptimistic book and said he disagreed with it, not only because he was more pessimistic but because he rejected a vision of the future in which all one has to do is sit back, eat popcorn, and watch the movie of the future unfold; he argued that the future is open for people to decide, and that if everyone took a nap, the great stagnation would never end.⁠[24][24][24][24][24]

In March 2016, a jury awarded $140 million to former wrestling star Hulk Hogan (legally Terry Bollea) in his lawsuit over Gawker’s publication of a sex tape clip. On May 25, Thiel confirmed to New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin that he had provided about $10 million for Hogan’s suit against Gawker and that he had decided several years earlier to secretly fund multiple cases against Gawker. Gawker’s Valleywag site had published a number of stories targeting him.⁠[25][26][26][26]

Thiel said it was “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” referring to Gawker bullying people for attention even when there was no connection with the public interest. Some thought he was right to strike back at Gawker, which had relied on tormenting him to drive traffic, while others, including reporters and First Amendment specialists, worried that wealthy people could silence press criticism by funding lawsuits. On June 1, 2016, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said that Thiel would remain on the board and that the company had no prior knowledge of the matter.⁠[26][26][26][26][27][27]

On June 10, 2016, after a judge denied a stay of the damages pending appeal, Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the Southern District of New York. Founder Nick Denton responded that even with billions of dollars, Thiel could not silence its writers. On August 16, the Spanish-language television network Univision won the auction for Gawker Media’s websites and business; Thiel had earlier written an op-ed in The New York Times arguing that the case was about protecting privacy and gay rights.⁠[25][25][25][28][28]

In May 2016, Thiel pledged to back Donald Trump as a California delegate. On July 21, he spoke at the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, addressing economic disparity and bringing Silicon Valley innovation to government, endorsing Trump, and saying: “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.”⁠[29][30][31]

In October 2016, Thiel decided to donate $1.25 million to the Trump campaign through a combination of super PAC donations and direct contributions; at the time, most high-profile tech investors supported Hillary Clinton.⁠[3][3][3]

In November 2016, after Trump was elected president, Thiel officially joined his transition team and recommended Trae Stephens of Founders Fund to help vet Defense Department staff.⁠[32][32]

In January 2017, New Zealand’s Overseas Investment Office confirmed that Thiel, a U.S. citizen, also held New Zealand citizenship, so the estate on Lake Wanaka he had bought through his company Second Star did not require consent under the Overseas Investment Act; the office said it had learned of his citizenship in 2016.⁠[31][31][31][31]

From 2020 to 2024, Thiel served on the board of directors of the biotechnology company AbCellera Biologics.⁠[6]

In 2021, Thiel was awarded the Frank Schirrmacher Prize.⁠[33]

In 2022, Thiel helped fund the Ohio U.S. Senate campaign of JD Vance, who had worked at Mithril Capital, which Thiel co-founded; Vance was elected that year. When Vance became Trump’s vice-presidential running mate in July 2024, Thiel said he was not planning to donate to any Republicans in the 2024 election.⁠[34][34][34]

On February 5, 2022, Thiel notified Meta Platforms that he would not stand for re-election to its board of directors and would serve until the 2022 annual meeting, after which the board was reduced to nine members. By then he had become increasingly involved in politics, backing several congressional candidates.⁠[35][35][35][36]

On November 4, 2022, Thiel, as a partner at Founders Fund, gave a talk titled “The End of the Future” at the Academic Freedom Conference held by Stanford University’s Classical Liberalism Initiative.⁠[37][37][38]

During the Q&A, Hollis Robbins, dean of humanities at the University of Utah, asked him about the right mix of optimism and pessimism. Thiel said that optimism and pessimism were, in his view, bad forms of psychotherapy and in the extreme the same thing: extreme optimism was like “you just need to sit back and watch the movie of the future unfold and eat some popcorn. You don’t need to do anything, the singularity is near,” a Ray Kurzweil–type view, while extreme pessimism held that nothing could be done. Extreme optimism, he said, is denial and extreme pessimism is acceptance, but both sum up to sloth.⁠[38][38][38][38][38][38]

He argued that the healthy view lies somewhere in between: the planet is not destined to destroy itself, nor destined to become a totalitarian one-world state, and there is a hard path in between that people have to fight and work for; he said this is why he keeps returning to individual human agency, and that as soon as one makes the future too optimistic or too pessimistic, one is lost.⁠[38][38][38]

As of April 2026, Thiel remained Chairman of Palantir and had designated a portion of the Class A and Class B shares beneficially owned by him and his affiliates as shares that may be voted or not voted at their discretion.⁠[6][6][6]

In June 2026, a discussion featuring Thiel as part of the Vienna Festival was canceled following protests.⁠[33][33]

On July 17, 2026, Axel SpringerAxel SpringerAxel Springer SE is a Berlin-based media company founded in Hamburg in 1946 by the publisher Axel Springer; it owns a number of news media brands in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom, as well as commerce-related businesses.Open the full entry announced that it would present the 2026 Axel Springer Award to Thiel, calling him one of the most influential entrepreneurs and investors of the digital age. On September 24, the award ceremony was held at Axel Springer’s headquarters in Berlin and streamed online; its centerpiece was a conversation between Axel Springer CEO Mathias DöpfnerMathias DöpfnerMathias Döpfner is a media executive who has been Chief Executive Officer of the German company Axel Springer since 2002 and, together with Friede Springer, holds the vast majority of its shares; during his tenure, the company has pursued a digital transformation and expanded its businesses in the United States and the United Kingdom.Open the full entry, Thiel, and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin about their early years in Silicon Valley, the creation of PayPal, and how Western societies can preserve their capacity for innovation. CBS NewsCBS NewsCBS News is the news organization of the U.S. CBS system, part of Paramount, providing news coverage through television, the web and streaming. Its history extends from radio newsgathering to television and digital platforms; its signature programs include CBS Evening News, 60 Minutes and Face the Nation, and CBS News 24/7 is its streaming news service.Open the full entry Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss paid tribute, and Sam AltmanSam AltmanSam Altman is an entrepreneur and investor, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of OpenAI. He previously served as president of Y Combinator and founded the location-based social service Loopt. He also helped found Tools for Humanity and Merge Labs, has invested in energy and life sciences ventures, and has driven public discussion of AI governance, employment, and wealth distribution.Open the full entry, Alex Karp, and Garry Kasparov sent video messages; the award is an honorary award and does not include prize money.⁠[33][33][39][40][40][39][39][39][33]

At the ceremony, Döpfner called Thiel “the most impactful German of our times” and a “principled contrarian”; in announcing the award, Axel Springer noted that Thiel had been attacked and vilified because of his views. As a memento, Thiel received a first edition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Unfinished Tales, published in 1980, reflecting his admiration for Tolkien’s work, which has inspired the names of several companies he has founded or funded.⁠[39][39][33][39][39]

Founders Fund: Official website: https://foundersfund.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

Palantir Technologies: Official website: https://www.palantir.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Thiel Foundation: Official website: https://www.thielfoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[20]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[19]