Thiel cofounded PayPal with Max Levchin and Elon Musk and served as its CEO. He also cofounded

Palantir, of which he is chairman. He serves as president of Clarium Capital, a global

macro hedge fund with $700 million in assets under management; a managing partner in Founders

Fund, a venture capital fund with $2 billion in assets under management; and cofounder

and investment committee chair of Mithril Capital Management. He was the first outside

investor in Facebook, the popular social-networking site, with a 10.2% stake acquired in 2004

for $500,000, and sits on the company's board of directors. Thiel was ranked #293 on the

Forbes 400 in 2011, with a net worth of $1.5 billion as of March 2012. He was ranked #4 on the

Forbes Midas List of 2014 at $2.2 billion. Thiel lives in San Francisco, California.

Early life Childhood

Born to German parents in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, Thiel moved to the United States

with his parents when he was a toddler, and was raised in Foster City, California. Thiel

was a US-rated Chess Master and one of the highest ranked under-21 players in the country.

College and law school Thiel studied 20th-century philosophy as an

undergraduate at Stanford University. He received his B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford in 1989

and acquired a J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1992.

An avowed libertarian, he founded The Stanford Review in 1987 along with Norman Book. The

Stanford Review became famous for challenging campus mores including political correctness

and laws against hate speech. The Stanford Review is now the university's main conservative/libertarian

newspaper. Thiel formed friendships with other students

at Stanford, many of whom contributed to the Stanford Review. These include Keith Rabois,

David O. Sacks, and Reid Hoffman. Some of these friends later took up jobs at PayPal

and became part of the PayPal Mafia. While studying at Stanford, Thiel also encountered

René Girard, whose mimetic theory influenced him.

Career Early career

Thiel clerked for Judge J.L. Edmondson of the United States Court of Appeals for the

11th Circuit. From 1993 to 1996, he traded derivatives for Credit Suisse Group. He founded

Thiel Capital Management, a multistrategy fund, in 1996.

PayPal In 1998 Thiel co-founded PayPal, an online

payments system, with Max Levchin. The company later merged with X.com, then headed by Elon

Musk. PayPal went public on February 15, 2002, and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion later

that year. Thiel's 3.7 percent stake in PayPal was worth approximately $55 million at the

time of the acquisition. According to Eric Jackson's account of PayPal

in his book The PayPal Wars, Thiel viewed PayPal's mission as liberating people throughout

the world from the erosion of the value of their currencies due to inflation. Jackson

recalls an inspirational speech by Thiel in 1999:

"We're definitely onto something big. The need PayPal answers is monumental. Everyone

in the world needs money – to get paid, to trade, to live. Paper money is an ancient

technology and an inconvenient means of payment. You can run out of it. It wears out. It can

get lost or stolen. In the twenty-first century, people need a form of money that's more convenient

and secure, something that can be accessed from anywhere with a PDA or an Internet connection.

Of course, what we're calling 'convenient' for American users will be revolutionary for

the developing world. Many of these countries' governments play fast and loose with their

currencies," the former derivatives trader [referring to Thiel] noted, before continuing,

"They use inflation and sometimes wholesale currency devaluations, like we saw in Russia

and several Southeast Asian countries last year [referring to the 1998 Russian financial

crisis and 1997 Asian financial crisis], to take wealth away from their citizens. Most

of the ordinary people there never have an opportunity to open an offshore account or

to get their hands on more than a few bills of a stable currency like U.S. dollars. Eventually

PayPal will be able to change this. In the future, when we make our service available

outside the U.S. and as Internet penetration continues to expand to all economic tiers

of people, PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies

than they ever had before. It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal

wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will

switch to dollars or Pounds or Yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something

more secure."

Clarium Capital Immediately after selling PayPal, Thiel launched

a global macro hedge fund, Clarium Capital, pursuing a global macro strategy. In 2005

Clarium was honored as global macro fund of the year by both MarHedge and Absolute Return,

two trade magazines. Thiel’s approach to investing became the subject of a chapter

in Steve Drobny’s book, Inside the House of Money. Thiel successfully bet that the

U.S. dollar would weaken in 2003, and gained significant returns betting that the dollar

and energy would rally in 2005. After significant losses starting in 2009, Clarium dropped

from $7 billion in assets in 2008 to around $350 million in 2011.

In 2004, well before the financial crisis of 2007–2010 bore him out in general terms,

Thiel spoke of the dot-com bubble of 2000 having migrated, in effect, into a growing

bubble in the financial sector. He specified General Electric, with its large financing

arm, and WalMart as vulnerable. To illustrate, in 2004, he reported having backed away from

buying Martha Stewart's Manhattan duplex for $7 million in the winter of 2003-2004. While

the apartment did sell in 2004 for $6.65 million to another buyer, it was on the market but

unsold in early 2010 at $15.9 million, and later at the reduced price of $13.9 million.

Facebook In August 2004, Thiel made a $500,000 angel

investment in the social network Facebook for 10.2% of the company and joined Facebook's

board. This was the first outside investment in Facebook, and Thiel went on to be portrayed

in The Social Network by actor Wallace Langham. In his book The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick

outlines the story of how Thiel came to make his investment: former Napster and Plaxo cofounder

Sean Parker, who at the time had assumed the title of "President" of Facebook, was seeking

investors for Facebook. Parker approached Reid Hoffman, the CEO of work-based social

network LinkedIn. Hoffman liked Facebook but declined to be the lead investor because of

the potential for conflict of interest with his duties as LinkedIn CEO. He redirected

Parker to Thiel, whom he knew from their PayPal days. Thiel met Parker and Mark Zuckerberg,

the Harvard college student who had founded Facebook and controlled it. Thiel and Zuckerberg

got along well and Thiel agreed to lead Facebook's seed round with $500,000 for 10.2% of the

company. Hoffman and Mark Pincus also participated in the round. The investment was originally

in the form of a convertible note, to be converted to equity if Facebook reached 1.5 million

users by the end of 2004. Although Facebook narrowly missed the target, Thiel allowed

the loan to be converted to equity anyway. Thiel said of his investment:

"I was comfortable with them pursuing their original vision. And it was a very reasonable

valuation. I thought it was going to be a pretty safe investment."

As a board member, Thiel was not actively involved in Facebook's day-to-day decision

making. According to Sarah Lacy, Thiel's main advice to Zuckerberg in their initial years

was "Just don’t fuck it up." However, he did provide help with timing the various rounds

of funding. Zuckerberg credited Thiel with helping him time Facebook's 2007 Series D

to close before the 2007–2010 financial crisis.

In September 2010, Thiel, while expressing skepticism about the potential for growth

in the consumer Internet sector, argued that relative to other Internet companies, Facebook

was comparatively undervalued. Facebook's IPO was in May 2012, with a market cap of

nearly $100 billion, at which time Thiel sold 16.8 million shares for $638 million. In August

2012, immediately upon the conclusion of the early investor lock out period, Thiel sold

almost all of his remaining stake for between $19.27 and $20.69 per share, or $395.8 million,

for a total of more than $1 billion. He still retained 5 million shares and a seat on the

board of directors. Angel investor and venture capitalist

In 2005 Thiel created Founders Fund, a San Francisco based venture capital fund. Other

partners in the fund include Sean Parker, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek.

In addition to Facebook, Thiel has made early-stage investments in numerous startups, including

Booktrack, Slide, LinkedIn, Friendster, Rapleaf, Geni.com, Yammer, Yelp, Inc., Powerset, Practice

Fusion, MetaMed, Vator, Palantir Technologies, IronPort, Votizen, Asana, Big Think, Caplinked,

Quora, Rypple, TransferWise, Nanotronics Imaging, Stripe, and Legendary Entertainment. Slide,

LinkedIn, Geni.com, and Yammer were founded by Thiel's former colleagues at PayPal, Slide

by Levchin, Linkedin by Reid Hoffman, Yelp by Jeremy Stoppelman, Geni.com and Yammer

by David Sacks, and Xero by Rod Drury. Fortune magazine reports that PayPal alumni have founded

or invested in dozens of startups with an aggregate value of around $30 billion. In

Silicon Valley circles, Thiel is colloquially referred to as the "Don of the PayPal Mafia",

as noted in the Fortune magazine article. Thiel's views on management are highly regarded,

especially his famous observation that start-up success is highly correlated with low CEO

pay. Thiel founded Palantir Technologies funded

by the CIA's venture capital arm In-Q-Tel. In February 2013, Thiel received a TechCrunch

Crunchie Award for Venture Capitalist of the year.

Mithril: a late-stage investment fund In June 2012, Peter Thiel launched Mithril,

a late-stage investment fund with $402 million at the time of launch, intended for companies

that were at the cusp between being private and going public. Other partners in the fund

include Jim O'Neill, co-founder of the Thiel Fellowship, and Ajay Royan, a former managing

director at Clarium Capital, a hedge fund started by Thiel.

Philanthropy

Thiel carries out most of his philanthropic activities through a nonprofit foundation

created by him called the Thiel Foundation. Theory of philanthropy

Thiel concentrates the bulk of his philanthropic efforts on what he sees as potential breakthrough

technologies. In November 2010, Thiel organized a Breakthrough Philanthropy conference that

showcased eight nonprofits that he believed were working on radical new ideas in technology,

government, and human affairs. A similar conference was organized in December 2011 with the name

"Fast Forward". Machine Intelligence Research Institute

Thiel believes in the importance and desirability of a technological singularity. In February 2006,

Thiel provided $100,000 of matching funds to back the Singularity Challenge donation

drive of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Additionally, he joined the Institute's

advisory board and participated in the May 2006 Singularity Summit at Stanford as well as

at the 2011 Summit held in New York City. In May 2007, Thiel provided half of the $400,000

matching funds for the annual Singularity Challenge donation drive.

The organization was a participant in the Breakthrough Philanthropy conference and the

Fast Forward conference. Anti-aging research

In September 2006, Thiel announced that he would donate $3.5 million to foster anti-aging

research through the Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation. He gave the following reasons

for his pledge: "Rapid advances in biological science foretell of a treasure trove of discoveries

this century, including dramatically improved health and longevity for all. I’m backing

Dr. [Aubrey] de Grey, because I believe that his revolutionary approach to aging research

will accelerate this process, allowing many people alive today to enjoy radically longer

and healthier lives for themselves and their loved ones."

The Thiel Foundation supports the research of the SENS Foundation, headed by Dr. de Grey,

that is working to achieve the reversal of biological aging. The Thiel Foundation also

supports the work of anti-aging researcher Cynthia Kenyon.

The SENS Foundation was a participant in the Breakthrough Philanthropy conference and

the Fast Forward conference. Seasteading

On April 15, 2008, Thiel pledged $500,000 to the new Seasteading Institute, directed

by Patri Friedman, whose mission is "to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to

enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems".

This was followed in February 2010 by a subsequent grant of $250,000, and an additional $100,000

in matching funds. In a talk at the Seasteading Institute conference

in November 2009, Thiel explained why he believed that seasteading was necessary for

the future of humanity. In 2011 Thiel was reported as having given

a total of $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute. According to the Daily Mail Peter

Thiel was inspired to do so by Ayn Rand's philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged.

The Seasteading Institute was a participant in the Breakthrough Philanthropy conference

and the Fast Forward conference. Thiel Fellowship

On September 29, 2010, Thiel said he had created a new fellowship called the Thiel

Fellowship, which will award $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years old, in order to spur

them to quit college and create their own ventures.

Breakout Labs In October 2011, the Thiel Foundation announced

the creation of Breakout Labs, a grant-making program intended to fund early-stage scientific

research that may be too radical or innovative for traditional scientific funding bodies

but also too long-term and speculative for venture investors. In April 2012, Breakout

Labs announced its first set of grantees. Other causes

The Thiel Foundation is also a supporter of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which

promotes the right of journalists to report the news freely without fear of reprisal,

and the Human Rights Foundation, which organizes the Oslo Freedom Forum.

Political activities Quotes

Peter Thiel wrote, on April 13, 2009, in the Libertarian 'Cato Unbound' blog, “Most importantly,

I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In the same article, he

also wrote, "Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension

of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians

— have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron."

On September 22, 2010, Thiel said at a 2010 fundraiser for the American Foundation for

Equal Rights, “I believe that gay rights and marriage rights for gay people should

not be a partisan issue,” and ”Gay marriage can’t be a partisan issue because as long

there are partisan issues or cultural issues in this country, you’ll have trench warfare

like on the western front in World War I. You’ll have lots of carnage and no progress.”

He wrote an editorial in National Review in 2011 claiming that the world had entered a

"tech slowdown" and that 1969 was when "the hippies took over the country, and when the

true cultural war over Progress was lost." Bilderberg Group

Thiel is listed as a member of the Steering Committee of The Bilderberg Group, a private,

annual gathering of intellectual figures, political leaders and business executives.