At COSM 2024: The New American Century, tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel will be speaking on “The Future of Technology Innovation” (October 31, 9:30 am).
Thiel, a PayPal founder, is no stranger to COSM-ologists but his public profile has risen in recent years. He is no stranger to controversy either.
As his Britannica entry notes, as a philosophy student (B.A., 1989), he “founded The Stanford Review, a newspaper that was critical of political correctness.” The Encyclopedia editors also primly observe,
He then attended Stanford’s law school, and, shortly after graduating in 1992, he published The Diversity Myth (cowritten with David Sacks), about alleged political intolerance at the university. – Britannica
Decades — and many Cancelations — later, the “alleged” intolerance that The Diversity Myth addresses continues to be top news in academic life.
He probably didn’t endear himself to the academy by starting the Thiel Foundation either. It gives young entrepreneurs staged grants of $100,000 over two years to forget college and build a company.
At any rate, he went into software around 1998, backing ventures in e-commerce, social media like Facebook (2004), and venture capital. His skepticism of establishment truisms likely helped him identify promising dark horses and his net worth is estimated at nearly $9B today.
We also learn from Britannica that Thiel has told Joe Rogan that he is considering moving to Nashville or Miami to avoid California taxes. On that venture, he has company. Elon Musk (net worth $240B) has decided to leave Silicon Valley too, for Texas. Through his Founders Fund, Thiel is an investor in Musk’s SpaceX and he has been heard to call the Valley a “one-party state.”
Thiel’s importance is probably understated
Journalist Max Chafkin wrote a critical biography of Thiel, Contrarian (Penguin 2021). In a Time interview, Chafkin told editor Belinda Lunscombe,
I think that Peter Thiel is secretly the most important person in Silicon Valley. He’s this behind the scenes player, who is behind so many of the really important things that have happened over the last two decades. Obviously Facebook is one of the world’s largest companies; a lot of people think it’s uniquely bad for the world. And a lot of people are super skeptical of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO. And of course, Thiel is behind Facebook. He was the first outside money in the company. He is also the person who basically set up Mark Zuckerberg to be Mark Zuckerberg and turned him into this imperial CEO, who is now, arguably more powerful than a lot of world leaders.
A lot of people are really excited about cryptocurrency and you can connect it back to to PayPal, which is the company that Thiel co-founded in the late 1990s with an explicitly libertarian ethos. There’s this aspect of crypto-world now, where people are really excited about the idea of taking power away from institutions and governments and that’s something that Thiel and his libertarian brethren that were starting that company were really interested in. It’s not something that happens accidentally.
Belinda Luscombe, “Who’s Afraid of Peter Thiel? A New Biography Suggests We All Should Be,” Time, September 21, 2021
Is that a tinfoil hat peeking out from under Chafkin’s classic Press fedora…?
No one is forced to use Facebook (or PayPal) and poor old Mark Zuckerberg has been apologizing this morning all over the internet for giving in to the White House’s demands for censorship in recent years. If you want to blame someone for all that dark power stuff, blame the White House. Thiel probably would.
But on the whole, it’s likely true that Thiel has an outsize influence on Big Tech and Chafkin is right to point to that fact. From the New Yorker: “Thiel has fans who follow him in his peregrinations. He has become a center of gravity in the culture of Silicon Valley, and his infrequent talks and essays are circulated and analyzed by both admirers and critics.” (2021)
His contrarian mystique arises from the fact that he is in a position to say out loud what many less high-powered Valley dwellers must be content to merely whisper. If you can get to COSM 2024 to hear him and other “contrarians,” you’d be crazy to miss it.
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COSM 2024 attendees can mingle with top tech movers and shakers and get their insider perspective on the hopes, the hypes, the gripes… If you register here by September 6, a special discount of $100 off the Early Adopter registration fee of $1,250. Simply use the discount code DI-FRIEND.