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Thiel was particularly taken with Girard’s concept of mimetic desire. He played speed chess, discovered Ayn Rand, and gravitated toward the work of Girard, a professor at the school. Chafkin describes Thiel’s upbringing as Christian and writes that his parents were eventual “fanatical Republicans.” (Thiel denies claims that his parents were Evangelical or Republican.) Thiel, meanwhile, became an archetypal nineteen-eighties geek-a talented student, chess player, and science-fiction enthusiast who was bullied by his peers. when Thiel was still a young child, settling in Foster City, a middle-class suburb in the Bay Area.
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The family moved to Cleveland in 1968, but later relocated to what was then South West Africa, where Thiel’s father, a chemical engineer, oversaw the development of a uranium mine near Swakopmund. Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, and first came to the United States as an infant. How has a tech investor with esoteric interests captured the imaginations of so many? What is it about Peter Thiel? Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and even Mark Zuckerberg have their own fan clubs, but there are no equivalents to Thielian exegesis few people seem to bother speculating on the intellectual roots of Mark Zuckerberg’s business philosophy. He is not a technologist or a product visionary he does not helm a company that obviously shapes everyday life. Still, he is an odd entry in the Silicon Valley pantheon. In “ The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power,” the Bloomberg journalist Max Chafkin argues that Thiel “has been responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly-with little, if any, regard for potential costs or dangers to society.” Thiel’s devotees see him differently-as a techno-libertarian who associates technological advancement with personal freedom, scientific progress, and even salvation.įascination with the rich is pervasive and inevitable, and, as a conservative in a superficially progressive industry, Thiel naturally attracts adherents. He has become a center of gravity in the culture of Silicon Valley, and his infrequent talks and essays are circulated and analyzed by both admirers and critics. Thiel has fans who follow him in his peregrinations. Thiel also has side projects: Frisson, a now shuttered lounge and restaurant in San Francisco American Thunder, a short-lived conservative publication geared toward Nascar fans and the bankrolling of a lawsuit launched on behalf of the wrestler Hulk Hogan, which culminated in the 2016 bankruptcy of Gawker Media. He publishes long, winding essays on politics, globalization, economics, and the nature of humanity that often contain Biblical epigraphs and references to the philosophy of his late mentor and friend, the anthropological theorist René Girard. He served on Donald Trump’s transition team and, in an address before the Republican National Convention, declared, “I am proud to be gay.” He has invested in efforts to “cure” aging, and also in libertarian organizations that hope to create floating cities in international waters. In 2018, citing a regional intolerance of conservative perspectives, he moved from Silicon Valley to Los Angeles he recently purchased a mansion in Miami Beach. But Thiel’s aura emanates not so much from these achievements as from a more general fish-out-of-water quality. He has co-written a business best-seller, “ Zero to One,” and launched a hedge fund he now runs three venture-capital firms. He went on to co-found Palantir, the data-intelligence company that has worked with the U.S.
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A billionaire several times over, Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal, the digital-payment service, and the first outside investor in Facebook. Still, Peter Thiel has cultivated a mystique. Silicon Valley is not a milieu known for glamour and charisma.