Peter Gregory

How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents
by Jimmy O. Yang
Published 13 Mar 2018

There was an undeniable chemistry between the five of them that shone through with every written line and improvisation. They riffed off of each other even at the table read and they never missed a beat. It seemed like they had been doing this show for ten seasons. Next to me was the late, great Christopher Evan Welch. The man was a master-class actor. I learned so much about comedy just from watching him at the table read. He portrayed the eccentric billionaire investor Peter Gregory. It was the first time I learned how silence could be just as funny as any sharply constructed joke: “Have any of you…” Christopher pauses for a beat. “… ever eaten at Burger King?” “Yes, why?” his business associate responds.

…

There wouldn’t have been a Jian Yang without Erlich. This was me and TJ’s very last take together on Silicon Valley. The end of the dynamic duo: Erlich and Jian Yang, Laurel and Hardy, Karl Malone and John Stockton. If stand-up was my bachelor’s degree in comedy, Silicon Valley was my PhD. I didn’t just go to work; I went to school: Christopher Evan Welch’s masterful table read, TJ’s dazzling improvisations, the Four Amigos’ brilliance, everyone’s excellence in acting, costume design, camera work, props and everything else behind the scenes from the crew. It was the best education anyone could ever get in comedy. I would pay to be on a show like this.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
by Max Chafkin
Published 14 Sep 2021

There was always a chance that he would push things too far, either by supporting something, or someone, truly odious and would be unable—or, more likely, given his impulses, unwilling—to pull back. For the most part, his reputation within the broader world had never been better. On HBO’s tech industry send-up, Silicon Valley, which premiered earlier that year, he’d been lovingly portrayed by Christopher Evan Welch as an out-of-touch but brilliant investor. In an early scene, the Thiel character—who is known in the show as Peter Gregory and who shares Thiel’s affectless demeanor, his love for seasteading, and his disdain for elite universities—is successfully manipulated by a promising engineer who threatens to go to back to college. The show’s writers had been unsparing with other tech figures, incorporating aspects of the Google founders and Oracle’s Larry Ellison into the villainous Gavin Belson—a greedy big tech executive with a persecution complex and full-time spiritual adviser—and savagely mocking the investor and NBA team owner Mark Cuban, whose fictional double is obsessed with his own net worth and a failed but financially remunerative tech product he created in the 1990s.