Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal, made the first outside investment in Facebook, and became the most politically active investor in Silicon Valley. Born in Frankfurt in 1967, he moved to the United States as an infant and spent part of his childhood in South West Africa, now Namibia, where his father worked in uranium mining. He read philosophy at Stanford and then took a law degree there, founded a conservative campus paper, clerked, and worked briefly at a law firm and a bank. He started a fund in 1996 and, with Max Levchin, founded what became PayPal in 1998, originally to beam money between Palm Pilots. It found its market in eBay payments and was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. The people who built it — Musk, Hoffman, Sacks, Levchin and others — went on to found or fund a large share of the next decade's companies, and are collectively called the PayPal Mafia. He put $500,000 into Facebook in 2004 for just over ten per cent, the most profitable angel investment on record, and co-founded Palantir the same year to sell data analysis to intelligence and defence agencies. He funded the litigation that bankrupted Gawker in 2016, nine years after it had outed him, and disclosed it afterwards. He endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 from the convention stage, alone among major technology figures, and has since funded a network of candidates including JD Vance. His book Zero to One argues that competition is for losers. He has funded life-extension research, seasteading and a fellowship that pays students to leave university.
- Lived: 1967 CE – ?
- Nationality: American
- Roles: investor, entrepreneur
