- Billionaire Peter Thiel has gained a reputation as certainly one of Silicon Valley’s most controversial figures.
- The PayPal cofounder went on to have a profitable profession in enterprise capital.
Like many billionaires, Peter Thiel is already benefiting from Donald Trump’s second presidential win.
His internet value jumped following the election, reaching a document excessive of $14 billion on Friday, in keeping with the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The election outcomes had been additionally a win for the enterprise capitalist on a extra private degree.
The vocal conservative and early Trump supporter was instrumental within the rise of vice president-elect JD Vance — and an enormous motive the Ohio politician was second on the ticket.
Thiel and different Silicon Valley elite known as Trump quite a few occasions to implore him to decide on Vance as his vp, hoping that he’d institute startup-friendly insurance policies and minimize regulation, The Washington Post reported. He was pivotal in turning Vance, as soon as a never-Trumper, right into a MAGA Republican.
The relationship between Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and Palantir, and Vance goes again to at the least 2011, when Thiel visited Yale Law School, the place Vance was a pupil. Vance, who praised Thiel’s Christianity, known as the discuss by which he mentioned the achievement rat race “probably the most vital second of my time at Yale Law School.”
Thiel went on to champion the longer term politician, writing a blurb for Vance’s 2016 ebook “Hillbilly Elegy,” hiring Vance to work at his VC agency Mithril Capital, and investing in Vance’s personal enterprise fund, Narya Capital.
He helped bankroll Vance’s marketing campaign, pouring at the least $15 million into his 2022 senatorial bid, in keeping with information from OpenSecrets, and aiding him in securing an endorsement from Trump following a 2021 Mar-a-Lago assembly the place he launched the 2, The New York Times reported.
While he didn’t contribute financially to the 2024 presidential race — “an additional $1 million or $10 million doesn’t make any distinction,” he mentioned of Trump, who reportedly known as him a “scumbag” — he was amongst Trump’s first supporters in Silicon Valley, backing him in 2016, talking on the Republican National Convention that yr, donating $1.25 million to pro-Trump teams, and serving as a member of his transition group.
With Vance’s placement on the ticket and the Trump-Vance win, Thiel has secured his standing as a conservative kingmaker and certainly one of tech’s strongest political gamers.
The don of the PayPal Mafia
Long earlier than he linked Trump and Vance, Thiel turned referred to as a connector and mentor in Silicon Valley.
Like lots of tech’s early founders, he attended Stanford, the place he would additionally earn a regulation diploma. While an undergrad, his status for contrarian opinions was starting to kind. In 1987, he cofounded The Stanford Review, a pupil publication devoted to “presenting different viewpoints,” which primarily manifested in a conservative bent. Early editions took goal at political correctness on campus.
After transient stints as a lawyer and in buying and selling, Thiel broke onto the tech scene in 1998 when he cofounded PayPal. There, he earned the nickname of the “don” of the PayPal Mafia, certainly one of tech’s most influential teams, which incorporates Elon Musk, Keith Rabois, David Sacks, and Reid Hoffman.
It’s additionally what first made him wealthy. He earned about $100 million when it went public, Bloomberg estimates. His fortune grew due to early investments in Facebook (he was its first outdoors investor), LinkedIn, and Yelp, and from his position as cofounder of Palantir, the large information agency and frequent federal authorities accomplice.
In 2005, he cofounded the VC fund Founders Fund, which has invested in SpaceX and Airbnb and the place he stays a accomplice. He additionally cofounded the VC corporations Valar Ventures and Mithril Capital.
Thiel’s sphere of affect in Silicon Valley expanded as he received richer. He turned referred to as a mentor, beginning the Thiel Fellowship, which gave $100,000 and two years of assist to founders underneath 20. His most well-known mentees — although not Thiel Fellows — embrace Mark Zuckerberg, who he linked to Trump, and Sam Altman. He shares an curiosity in longevity with the latter, reportedly signing as much as be cryogenically frozen and adapting an antiaging routine.
Conservative kingmaker
His private politics and contrarian streak additionally got here to outline Thiel, setting him aside from the largely Democratic Bay Area.
A self-described “libertarian,” Thiel has written extensively about his political views, together with a chunk within the Nineteen Nineties that railed in opposition to affirmative motion.
“I stand in opposition to confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the demise of each particular person,” he wrote in 2009.
Over the previous twenty years, he is spoken a number of occasions at occasions for the conservative and libertarian Federalist Society. He contributed to the Seasteading Institute, an try at an impartial, libertarian floating nation.
There was additionally his feud with Gawker, which some thought-about an assault on free speech. In 2007, the web outlet wrote a narrative concerning the sexuality of Thiel, who’s homosexual. Nearly a decade later, it was revealed that he had poured about $10 million into circumstances in opposition to Gawker, together with Hulk Hogan’s 2012 case, which finally led to the web site’s demise. (At the time, Thiel characterised his battle as in opposition to violations of privateness, not journalism.)
He had donated to conservative or libertarian politicians for years — together with greater than $2 million for Ron Paul’s 2012 presidential marketing campaign and hundreds of thousands to teams backing Ted Cruz that very same yr, per OpenSecrets.
It was Thiel’s 2016 endorsement of Trump that cemented his standing as tech’s most vocal conservative — and brought about rifts with others within the tech world. Reed Hastings, who was on the time on Facebook’s board with Thiel, reportedly known as Thiel’s Trump assist “catastrophically unhealthy judgment,” and there have been requires Y Combinator, the place Thiel labored as an advisor, to fireside him.
By 2018, Thiel’s friction with the San Francisco tech bubble had boiled over. He known as Silicon Valley a “one-party state” at a 2018 discuss at Stanford. Soon after, he decamped to Los Angeles.
While he didn’t donate to Trump in 2020, he solidified his status as a serious GOP donor in 2022, supporting not solely Vance but additionally Arizona senatorial candidate Blake Masters, who misplaced, Wyoming Rep. Harriet Hageman, and greater than a dozen different Conservative candidates.
Now, with Vance within the White House, it stays to be seen what Thiel’s relationship with Trump shall be. He has confirmed, although, that his contrarian viewpoint was proper, at the least this time.
Additional reporting by Sam Tabahriti and Jyoti Mann.
