Entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author; cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, first outside investor in Facebook, and coauthor of Zero to One.
1967–present · San Francisco, California
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Peter Andreas Thiel was born on October 11, 1967 in Frankfurt am Main, the elder son of Klaus Friedrich Thiel, a chemical engineer, and Susanne Thiel. The family emigrated to the United States when he was one year old and settled first in Cleveland, Ohio. His father's work took them abroad again in the 1970s, including stretches in South Africa and in South West Africa, now Namibia, where Thiel attended a German language school in Swakopmund that used corporal punishment. They finally settled in Foster City, California, in 1977, after he had passed through roughly seven schools. He took up chess at six, was ranked among the strongest juniors in the country, and went on to hold a master rating with the United States Chess Federation. Thiel was valedictorian of San Mateo High School in 1985 and went to Stanford to study philosophy. There he encountered the literary theorist René Girard, whose account of mimetic desire, the idea that human wants are copied from other people rather than generated independently, became the organizing idea of his adult thinking; Thiel later funded Imitatio, a foundation devoted to Girard's work. In 1987 he cofounded The Stanford Review, a libertarian and conservative campus paper whose alumni network later supplied several of his business partners, David O. Sacks and Keith Rabois among them. He took his BA in philosophy in 1989 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1992. In 1995 he and Sacks published The Diversity Myth, a critique of Stanford's speech codes and Western culture curriculum of that period. After law school he clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, spent under a year as a securities lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell in New York, and then traded derivatives at Credit Suisse.
In 1996 Thiel raised money from friends and family to start Thiel Capital Management in the San Francisco Bay Area. In December 1998 he cofounded Confinity with the engineer Max Levchin, along with Luke Nosek and Ken Howery, to build cryptography software for handheld devices. The product that took hold was a way to send money by email, which became PayPal. In March 2000 Confinity merged with X.com, the online bank founded by Elon Musk, and the combined company adopted the PayPal name in June 2001 with Thiel as chief executive. PayPal listed on Nasdaq in February 2002 and was acquired by eBay in a stock transaction valued at about $1.5 billion that closed on October 3, 2002. Thiel's stake, reported at roughly 3.7 percent, was worth about $55 million. The PayPal alumni who went on to found or fund Tesla, SpaceX, YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Affirm became known as the PayPal Mafia. After the sale he started Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund, in 2002; its assets peaked near $8 billion in 2008 before losses and redemptions cut it to a few hundred million dollars by 2011. In 2003 he cofounded Palantir Technologies with Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings, naming it after the seeing stones in J. R. R. Tolkien's fiction, with the premise that the fraud detection methods built at PayPal could be turned on intelligence and law enforcement data. Thiel largely bankrolled the early development, the CIA affiliated fund In-Q-Tel was an early outside investor, and he remains chairman; Palantir went public through a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange on September 30, 2020. In August 2004 he became Facebook's first outside investor, putting in $500,000 for 10.2 percent of the company, structured as a convertible note that was to convert if Facebook hit 1.5 million users by year end. The company narrowly missed the target and Thiel converted anyway. He took a board seat and held it until 2022, and sold most of his shares around the 2012 initial public offering for roughly $1 billion. In 2005 he cofounded Founders Fund with Nosek and Howery, which became the first institutional investor in both SpaceX and Palantir and backed Stripe and Airbnb among others, and which managed about $17 billion as of 2025. He later added Valar Ventures in 2010 and Mithril Capital Management in 2012. In June 2021 ProPublica reported that he held a Roth retirement account worth about $5 billion, built from founder shares originally purchased at a fraction of a cent each. In the spring of 2012 Thiel taught a Stanford course, CS183: Startup. A student, Blake Masters, published his class notes online, they circulated widely, and the two reworked them into Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, published by Crown Business on September 16, 2014. Its argument is that valuable companies go from zero to one by making something genuinely new rather than copying what already works, that competition erodes profit while a durable monopoly is the normal condition of a successful business, and that founders should look for secrets, important truths that few people agree with. Around the ideas he built institutions. The Thiel Foundation funds work on life extension, artificial intelligence safety, seasteading, and Girard studies, and the Thiel Fellowship, announced at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2010, pays people in their late teens and early twenties to leave or skip university and work on companies or research instead. The grant was $100,000 over two years at launch and has since been raised. Fellows have included Vitalik Buterin, who created Ethereum, Dylan Field of Figma, Austin Russell of Luminar, and Ritesh Agarwal of OYO.
Thiel's influence runs through both the companies and the vocabulary. The PayPal cohort he assembled seeded an unusual share of the next two decades of American technology firms. Palantir became one of the largest publicly traded software companies. Founders Fund helped normalize venture backing for capital intensive, technically ambitious, long horizon companies that conventional funds had avoided, starting with SpaceX. Zero to One became a standard text in startup circles, and its terms, going from zero to one, secrets, definite optimism, last mover advantage, and competition as something to escape rather than embrace, entered everyday founder usage. The line about flying cars and 140 characters, which came from the 2011 Founders Fund manifesto and which he has repeated in talks, became shorthand for his broader claim that technological progress outside computing and finance slowed after about 1970. He has also been the subject of sustained public controversy, and several chapters remain contested. In 2007 the website Gawker published a post identifying him as gay. Beginning around 2012 he financed litigation against Gawker Media without public disclosure at the time, including the invasion of privacy suit brought by the wrestler Terry Bollea, known professionally as Hulk Hogan, over a published sex tape. A Florida jury awarded Bollea $140 million in March 2016, Forbes reported in May 2016 that Thiel had put roughly $10 million into the cases, Gawker Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in June 2016, gawker.com stopped publishing that August, and the case settled for $31 million in November 2016. The episode drew wide commentary on third party litigation funding and press freedom. In politics, Thiel spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, donated to Donald Trump's campaign and served on the presidential transition team, and in the 2022 midterm elections funded super PACs supporting the Senate candidacies of JD Vance and Blake Masters. His 2011 grant of New Zealand citizenship became a subject of debate there when it was reported in 2017. He left the Meta board in 2022.
“Competition is for losers. If you want to create and capture lasting value, build a monopoly.”
“Every moment in business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won't create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them.”
“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
“All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.”
“Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.”
“Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”
Their voice on summon.guide is grounded in:
Further reading: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
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