Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel was born in West Germany and moved constantly as a child while his father worked as a chemical engineer, including years in apartheid-era South Africa and South West Africa before the family settled in Foster City, California. He studied philosophy at Stanford, co-founded a conservative student paper there, and went on to Stanford Law School, then a clerkship, then a corporate law job he quit after seven months, then derivatives trading at Credit Suisse. None of it held his interest for long. In 1998 he co-founded an online payments company with programmer Max Levchin, aiming first at beaming money between Palm Pilots, before the idea became something much larger: PayPal.

PayPal sold to eBay in 2002 for 1.5 billion dollars, and Thiel's stake made him roughly fifty-five million dollars, which he put into a hedge fund and then, in August 2004, into a five-hundred-thousand-dollar bet on a college social network called Facebook, the company's first outside investment, at a valuation under five million dollars. He held the stock through its rise and sold his last shares around 2020, for more than a billion dollars total. In between he co-founded Palantir, the data-analytics company that now holds large government surveillance and defense contracts, and started Founders Fund, which became one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture firms. He remains chairman of Palantir and a partner at Founders Fund.

Gawker outed Thiel as gay in 2007, and he spent the next decade quietly funding a legal campaign against the company, eventually bankrolling wrestler Hulk Hogan's invasion-of-privacy lawsuit to the tune of ten million dollars. The 140-million-dollar verdict bankrupted Gawker in 2016. That same year, at the Republican National Convention, Thiel became the first speaker in the party's history to declare himself gay from the podium, telling the crowd he was proud to be gay, proud to be Republican, and proud to be American, then went on to fund Donald Trump's campaign and later his allies in office. The man who spent a decade fighting a publication for outing him used the biggest political stage available to out himself on his own terms.

Thiel has poured tens of millions of dollars into Republican Senate candidates who once worked for him, helped elect a sitting vice president among them, and backed research into life extension, seasteading, and charter cities meant to operate outside existing governments, projects that read either as visionary or as an attempt to exit democratic accountability altogether, depending on who is describing them. He married Matt Danzeisen in Vienna in 2017; they have children born through surrogacy. Thiel remains one of the most consequential and most argued-over figures in Silicon Valley, a status his critics and admirers agree on even when they agree on almost nothing else.

Peter Thiel's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• PayPal company
  Co-founded with Max Levchin as Confinity; sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion 1998
• Palantir Technologies company
  Data-analytics company; Thiel remains chairman 2003
• Founders Fund company
  Venture capital firm focused on deep tech and defense 2005
• Thiel Fellowship other
  Grants for young entrepreneurs who forgo college 2010

• October 11, 1967 aged 0 Born in Frankfurt, West Germany
• 1992 aged ~25 Earns his JD from Stanford Law School
• 1998 aged ~31 Co-founds Confinity, later PayPal, with Max Levchin
• 2002 aged ~35 PayPal sells to eBay for $1.5 billion
• 2003 aged ~36 Co-founds Palantir Technologies
• August 2004 aged 36 Makes Facebook's first outside investment $500,000 for a 10.2 percent stake.
• July 21, 2016 aged 48 Speaks at the Republican National Convention and declares himself gay
• October 2017 aged 49 Marries Matt Danzeisen in Vienna, Austria
• 2022 aged ~55 Backs Blake Masters and JD Vance in Senate races, helping elect Vance

• Elon Musk b. 1971
  Engineer and entrepreneur whose companies have advanced electric vehicles, reusable rockets, and neural interfaces. PayPal co-founder
• Reid Hoffman b. 1967
  Co-founder of LinkedIn and influential venture capitalist who helped build Silicon Valley's startup ecosystem. PayPal Mafia colleague
• Mark Zuckerberg b. 1984
  Co-founder of Facebook who built the world's largest social media platform and reshaped global communication. first outside investor in
• Donald Trump b. 1946
  Businessman, media personality, and 45th and 47th president whose populist movement transformed American politics. funded the 2016 campaign of
• Sam Altman b. 1985
  Technology executive and investor whose leadership in generative artificial intelligence has had major but still-unsettled historical consequences. business partner