Peter Thiel Quotes
About Author
Thiel has worked as a securities lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell, a speechwriter for former U.S. Secretary of Education William Bennett, and a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. He founded Thiel Capital Management in 1996 and co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek in 1998. He served as chief executive officer of PayPal until its sale to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
Following PayPal, Thiel founded Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco. In 2003, he launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, and has been its chairman since its inception. In 2005, Thiel launched Founders Fund with PayPal partners Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake in the company for $500,000 in August 2004. He sold the majority of his shares in Facebook for over $1 billion in 2012, but remains on the board of directors. He co-founded Valar Ventures in 2010; co-founded Mithril Capital, serving as investment committee chair, in 2012; and served as a part-time partner at Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017.
Thiel is a conservative libertarian who has made substantial donations to American right-wing figures and causes. He was controversially granted New Zealand citizenship in 2011 after the Fifth National Government intervened on his behalf. Thiel had spent 12 non-consecutive days in the country, a fraction of the normal residency requirement of 1,350 days for citizenship.
Through the Thiel Foundation, Thiel governs the grant-making bodies Breakout Labs and Thiel Fellowship, which fund non-profit research into artificial intelligence, life extension, and seasteading. In 2016, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit because Gawker had previously outed Thiel as gay. The lawsuit eventually bankrupted Gawker and led to founder Nick Denton's bankruptcy.