Peter Thiel

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power

by Max Chafkin  · 14 Sep 2021  · 524pp  · 130,909 words

publish books for every reader. Image credits appear on this page. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Names: Chafkin, Max, author. Title: The contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s pursuit of power / Max Chafkin. Description: New York: Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2021] | Includes bibliographical

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promise and potential of Silicon Valley, one of Silicon Valley’s pioneers had already turned his attention well beyond it. Over the prior two decades, Peter Thiel had accumulated billions of dollars in wealth, backing some of the biggest and most successful tech companies, including Facebook, PayPal, and SpaceX. He’d

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mother’s pregnancy had been unplanned, and thinks Thiel was trying to be nice, in a profoundly strange way. He signed the note, “Love, Peter Thiel.” Thiel had always been aloof but now he seemed indifferent to everything—high school, his friends, his teachers—and he started pushing the boundaries. According

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another $100 million in venture capital into the combined operation that spring, but it proved to be awkward interpersonally. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel had trouble relating to each other. One day, while Peter was riding in Elon’s $1 million McLaren to a meeting with Mike Moritz at

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or to somehow hedge his bets. And so, even as Thiel’s achievements as a bearish hedge funder were celebrated—“Everything Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel touches seems to turn to gold,” the New York Post observed—he was beginning to get more serious about investing in startups. Thiel did

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for rule-breaking and was also exactly the kind of person—young and aggressive, with no apparent regard for following norms, or even laws—that Peter Thiel would be taken with. After Napster had been sued into oblivion by the recording industry, Parker started Plaxo—another proto-social network. It purported

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posts Thiel had published at the college paper, he was the author of this one. Needless to say, the idea that humanity should celebrate Peter Thiel’s attempts to build an offshore tax haven but mourn the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment did not lead to universal acclaim. “Facebook backer wishes

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Strauss and Machiavelli. It was at one of these conferences, held at the end of his junior year, that he first talked at length with Peter Thiel. Over a boozy dinner, they discussed their shared enmity for elite institutions, especially liberal colleges. Thiel and Johnson stayed in touch after Johnson graduated.

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Gawker posted a series of paparazzi shots of the then-eighteen-year-old kissing his mother, the supermodel Stephanie Seymour. A slightly less likely possibility: Peter Thiel. He wasn’t the gay son of a billionaire, but a gay billionaire who obviously hated Gawker, having compared it to a terrorist organization

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9, Trump’s campaign submitted its delegate slate for California’s Republican primary. Among the three names listed for California’s third congressional district was Peter Thiel. This prompted a few head-scratching headlines that put Thiel’s Trump support in the context of his other contrarian bets, like seasteading and

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. There was his intransigence over Gawker, his support of Trump, and the increasingly indiscreet connections with the alt-right. “Every time I read” about Peter Thiel’s support of Trump, Max Levchin said, “I typically check the calendar because I’m not completely sure it’s not April 1.” Others, especially

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me about words.” The following week, Thiel got a final push. The Advocate, the queer newsmagazine, published an essay criticizing his endorsement of Trump. “Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire who made news this summer for endorsing Donald Trump at the Republican convention, is a man who has sex with other

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article by journalist Salena Zito, who was explaining how heartland voters were able to ignore Trump’s constant prevarications. But it went viral anyway. peter thiel perfectly summed up donald trump in a few sentences was the CNBC headline. The money and the speech would be significant news—Trump hadn’t

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words “deep state” undersold it, according to Bannon. “It’s not deep, it’s in your fucking grill,” he told me, crediting this as “Peter Thiel’s theory of government.” “The progressives understood something,” Bannon continued. “They said sometimes we win and sometimes we lose elections, but if we expand the

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that the company’s longest-serving investor—a man who’d survived the dot-com bust, after all—might have something encouraging to say. But Peter Thiel, unfortunately, did not play ball. “My generation was promised colonies on the moon,” he said, after being introduced by Zuckerberg. “Instead we got Facebook.”

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quickly. And then there was Silicon Valley. Factory workers had been laid off, restaurants had closed, shopping malls were abandoned—but the world that Peter Thiel inhabited was absolutely booming. All the predictions about the ways that technology would subsume aspects of our lives—“Software is eating the world,” as the

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and Human Services track vaccines. By early January, it was worth more than $40 billion. A headline that fall had summed it up succinctly: peter thiel’s palantir is skyrocketing as trump’s prospects grow dim. For his entire career Thiel had been backing long shots, profiting from their unlikely success

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in apparent ruins, as moderate Republicans began speaking openly about a “big lie” perpetrated by him and others, Axios published a short item: what peter thiel got wrong about donald trump. It blamed Thiel for having “helped establish and then cement a viewpoint through which even Trump’s most egregious statements

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were taken at other than face value.” That month, with Peter Thiel’s political project in apparent ruins, Palantir’s market capitalization would rise as high as $68 billion. EPILOGUE YOU WILL LIVE FOREVER Despite Thiel’s

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,” The New York Times, March 3, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html. tech founders are godlike: Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 23, 168, 183. 1.25 million copies worldwide: Blake Masters (@bgmasters), “Zero to

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‘Libertarian Wacko’—Now, They’ve Been Friends for 30 Years,” Business Insider, November 21, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/linkedin-founder-reid-hoffman-friendship-with-peter-thiel-2017-11. platform was anti-bureaucratic: “ASSU Elections Handbook,” Stanford Daily, April 9, 1987, 1, https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1987/04/09?page=1.

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syllabus of the class, complaining that it was “a parody of multiculturalism,” and presented it as a symptom of the pernicious effects of racial tolerance. Peter Thiel and David Sacks, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (Washington, D.C.: Independent Institute, 1995). “quite a bit of

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Masters, Zero to One, 119. “victims demanding reparations”: Thiel and Sacks, The Diversity Myth, 145‒46. “what they want to hear”: Julia Carrie Wong, “Peter Thiel, Who Gave $1.25 Million to Trump, Has Called Date Rape ‘Belated Regret,’ ” The Guardian, October 21, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct

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Stanford Daily, February 12, 1998, https://archives.stanforddaily.com/1998/02/12?page=5&section=MODSMD_ARTICLE16. an op-ed with Sacks: David Sacks and Peter Thiel, “The IMF’s Big Wealth Transfer,” The Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1998, https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=45. recent failures

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of Asian economies: David Sacks and Peter Thiel, “Internet Shakes Up Complacent Press,” The San Francisco Chronicle, March 10, 1998, https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=60. lost investors’ money:

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found Thiel and Karp arrogant: Sharon Weinberger, “Techie Software Soldier Spy,” New York, September 28, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/inside-palantir-technologies-peter-thiel-alex-karp.html. which put in $2 million: Shane Harris, “Killer App,” Washingtonian, January 31, 2012, https://www.washingtonian.com/2012/01/31/killer-app

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abuse: Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman, and Jordan Robertson, “Palantir Knows Everything about You,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 19, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/?sref=4ZgkJ7cZ. was never charged: David Kirkpatrick, “With a Little Help from His Friends,” Vanity Fair, October 2010, https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2010/10

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, https://web.archive.org/web/20090119085309/http://valleywag.gawker.com/5082473/is-apple-coo-tim-cook-gay. that he was psychologically unstable: Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue (New York: Portfolio, 2018), 31. “Wal-Mart of Banking”: Peter Goodman and Gretchen Morgenson, “Saying Yes,

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Rubin Report, 1:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h10kXgTdhNU. to feel “targeted”: Thiel, Rubin Report, 1:33. donation to the campaign: Nicholas Carlson, “Peter Thiel Supports Ron Paul, the Candidate Who Opposed the ‘Black Agenda,’ ” Valleywag, January 21, 2008, https://gawker.com/347103%2Fpeter-thiel-supports-ron-paul-the-candidate

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Amazing Money Machine,” The Atlantic, June 2008, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/06/the-amazing-money-machine/306809/. it’d be too late: Peter Thiel, “The Seasteading Institute Conference 2009,” November 12, 2009, https://vimeo.com/7577391. in a press release: “Introducing the Seasteading Institute,” April 14, 2008, https://

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founder-recruits-for-gl-1443665496; Sharon Weinberger, “Techie Software Soldier Spy,” New York, September 28, 2020, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/inside-palantir-technologies-peter-thiel-alex-karp.html. Businessweek article declared it: Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone, “Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon,” Bloomberg Businessweek, November 22, 2011

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jun/22/hacking-anonymous. smiling face on its cover: Greenberg and Mac, “ ‘Deviant’ Philosopher.” CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE ABSOLUTE TABOO “it’s a very positive thing”: “Peter Thiel on Facebook, Technology, and the Higher Education Bubble,” interview by Tim Cavanaugh, Reason.TV, November 12, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6qm7vVB5so. tech

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Founders Fund,” Techcrunch, April 16, 2009, https://techcrunch.com/2009/04/16/announcing-the-techfellow-awards-with-founders-fund/. about four hundred: Sarah Lacy, “Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education,” Techcrunch, April 11, 2011, https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10

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watch?v=uVCbjehiwqo&t=173s. “get a jump on that”: Tara Isabella Burton, “The Gospel According to Peter Thiel,” City Journal, Spring 2020, https://www.city-journal.org/peter-thiel. “stood out from the start”: Brian Solomon, “Peter Thiel’s Chosen One,” Forbes, January 3, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/briansolomon/2017/01/03/james

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in connection with payments made to an Iowa state senator. In 2020, Donald Trump pardoned the two men. Speaking to young activists: Students for Liberty, “Peter Thiel at the ISFLC 2012,” February 26, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3rp4jXTYJU. “how much voting actually works”: Dave Weigel, “Ron Paul’s

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Billionaire,” Slate, February 20, 2012, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/02/investor-peter-thiel-is-the-billionaire-behind-ron-pauls-presidential-campaign.html. a recent Romney convert: Kevin Robillard, “Hulk Hogan Ready to Rumble for Romney,” Politico, August 30

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the meeting with Thiel. David Swan, “Gawker’s Ruin: ‘Mr. A’ Revealed,” The Australian, December 7, 2017. “which is a big limitation”: Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2018), 76. it was winnable: Holiday, Conspiracy, 83. “even better, sex crime”: Holiday

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://gotnews.com/breaking-fraud-jackiecoakley-cried-rape-uvahoax/. connected to Russian intelligence: Charles Johnson, “Why I Am Suing BuzzFeed’s Ryan Mac for Libel Over Peter Thiel Story,” Charles Johnson’s Thoughts and Adventures, September 12, 2020, https://charlesjohnson.substack.com/p/why-i-am-suing-buzzfeeds-ryan-mac; Mathew Ingram, “

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the District of Columbia, Felony Branch, January 7, 2008, http://www.onepeoplesproject.com/images/Epstein/img072.jpg. key “ideological architect”: Rosie Gray and Ryan Mac, “Peter Thiel Met with the Racist Fringe as He Went All In on Trump,” BuzzFeed, September 11, 2020; “Kevin DeAnna” Southern Poverty Law Center Extremist Files, accessed

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Huffington Post, April 7, 2020, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/clearview-ai-facial-recognition-alt-right_n_5e7d028bc5b6cb08a92a5c48. CHAPTER FOURTEEN: BACKUP PLANS wearing “assless chaps”: “Peter Thiel’s Party Has a Problem: Facebook Investor’s Inebriated Guests Get Stuck in Elevator,” New York Daily News, June 22, 2011, https://www.nydailynews.com

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/entertainment/gossip/peter-thiel-party-problem-facebook-investor-inebriated-guests-stuck-elevator-article-1.128098. a backup country: Matt Nippert, “Citizen Thiel,” The New Zealand Herald, February 1,

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, 2015, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-seriously-on-the-trail-with-the-gops-tough-guy-41447/. “somewhat lower IQ”: Jamie Weinstein, “Peter Thiel Talks Politics, Living Forever and the Need for the GOP to Get Smarter Reps,” Daily Caller, September 24, 2014, https://dailycaller.com/2014/09/24

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03/02/palantir-provides-the-engine-for-donald-trumps-deportation-machine/. protestors showed up at Thiel’s home: Jenna Lyons, “Pro-immigrant Demonstrators Rally Outside Peter Thiel’s SF Home,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 14, 2017, https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Pro-immigrant-demonstrators-rally-outside-Peter-10995442.php; Anna Weiner

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via Internet Archive, November 14, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20161114060128/https://medium.com/turnonreality/turn-on-reality-f4331d007f3c. “least contrarian things”: For instance, Peter Thiel, interviewed by Maria Bartiromo, Economic Club of New York, March 15, 2018. CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: EVIL LIST restaurants and other businesses: Julian Guthrie, “Yelp’s

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Times, November 13, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/technology/missouri-google-investigation.html. for an onstage chat: “Cardinal Conversations: Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel on ‘Technology and Politics,’ ” interviewed by Niall Ferguson, Hoover Institution, January 31, 2018, https://www.hoover.org/news/stanford-first-cardinal-conversation-spotlights-technology-politics

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters  · 15 Sep 2014  · 185pp  · 43,609 words

Copyright © 2014 by Peter Thiel All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a

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specialmarkets@randomhouse.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thiel, Peter A. Zero to one: notes on startups, or how to build the future / Peter Thiel with Blake Masters. pages cm 1. New business enterprises. 2. New products. 3. Entrepreneurship. 4. Diffusion of innovations. I. Title. HD62.5.T525 2014 685

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.1, 6.1 Yammer Yelp YouTube, 10.1, 12.1 ZocDoc Zuckerberg, Mark, prf.1, 5.1, 6.1, 14.1 Zynga About the Authors Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. He started PayPal in 1998, led it as CEO, and took it public in 2002, defining a new era of

Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America

by Beth Macy  · 6 Oct 2025  · 373pp  · 97,653 words

contribution from a super PAC linked to the GOP Senate minority leader. Vance won Champaign County by a margin of 43 points. The venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s $10 million contribution to Vance’s campaign didn’t hurt.[10] Though he commutes more than an hour to the college town of Oxford

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason

by William Davies  · 26 Feb 2019  · 349pp  · 98,868 words

antipathy to “elites” rarely manifests itself in scapegoating of the very rich. How can men as wealthy as Beppe Grillo, Aaron Banks, Andrej Babis, or Peter Thiel claim to be leading a movement against elites? To which the answer is: unlike a journalist, a government statistician, a member of parliament, or a

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of the twentieth century. 6 GUESSING GAMES Market sentiment and the price of knowledge As the founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, Peter Thiel is one of the most renowned venture capitalists working in Silicon Valley, and was actively involved in seeking to build bridges between US tech companies

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economic institution for these new oligarchs, and will ensure that extremes of inequality outlive them. If they cannot achieve actual immortality (of the sort that Peter Thiel is hoping for) then achieving a dynasty becomes the best way of leaving a financial and genetic legacy. To live in a Darwinian world is

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. “Smart city” projects depend on data scientists to extract patterns of activity from the frenetic movements of urban populations, resources, and transport. Firms such as Peter Thiel’s Palantir help security services identify potential security threats, by isolating dangerous patterns of behavior. And then there are the murky cases of consultancies, such

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April 2009. 2P. Thiel (2014), Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future, Virgin Books, p. 106. 3Ibid., p. 5. 4“Peter Thiel’s Apocalypse,” San Francisco Magazine, 29 September 2017. 5C. McKenna (2006), The World’s Newest Profession: Management Consulting in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

by Mark O'Connell  · 13 Apr 2020  · 213pp  · 70,742 words

LinkedIn, claimed that “saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more.” And then there was Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who had cofounded PayPal and had been one of Facebook’s earliest investors. It had recently emerged that Thiel had bought

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our email exchange, a plan started to formulate. I was going to travel to New Zealand, and we were going to take a trip to Peter Thiel’s apocalypse retreat on the shores of Lake Wanaka. * * * — After the hike up to Mount Eden, Anthony dropped me off at my hotel. I dumped

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of ideas and ideologies.”) The exhibition was called The Founder’s Paradox, a name that came from the title of one of the chapters of Peter Thiel’s 2014 book Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Together with the long and intricately detailed catalog essay Anthony

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less healthy-looking than he appeared in photographs, Harris told me, but he had little doubt as to his identity. Harris, who was aware that Peter Thiel had not been seen in New Zealand since 2011, asked the man whether he was who he thought he was. The man smirked and, without

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opposite: an absolute surrender to an exhaustion in the bones of civilization. Since my trip to New Zealand—since my encounter with the site of Peter Thiel’s planned apocalypse retreat, and with the logic of escape and conquest represented in Simon Denny’s Founders board game piece—my fascination with the

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

by George Packer  · 4 Mar 2014  · 559pp  · 169,094 words

wasn’t senior enough. So, at the age of thirty-seven, he joined Arnold & Porter and launched a new career: as a lobbyist. SILICON VALLEY Peter Thiel was three years old when he found out that he was going to die. It was in 1971, and he was sitting on a rug

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property taxes in California to 1 percent of assessed value, sending the state’s public schools into a long decline—was still a year away. Peter Thiel moved to the Valley in the last year of its middle-class heyday. Everything was about to change, including the name. After Swakopmund, Foster City

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, wearing a wire. Van Sickler waited for the feds to make their way up the food chain to the guys at the top. SILICON VALLEY Peter Thiel and his friend Reid Hoffman had been arguing about the nature of society ever since Stanford. Over Christmas in 1994 they had spent a few

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median real wages (except for the late nineties): “They’ve identified issues that are really central to what’s going to happen to our economy.” Peter Thiel told an interviewer, “In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war, or deflationary economic collapse. It’s

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it’s not enough / To think about how close we came / I wanna walk like a giant on the land SILICON VALLEY The last time Peter Thiel went to the World Economic Forum was in January 2009. Davos was a highly visible status marker for the global elite, but inclusion that year

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video games based on the latest neuroscientific research. “My core goal is to disrupt both the education and the game sectors,” he said, sounding like Peter Thiel. Thiel expressed concern that the company would attract people with a nonprofit attitude, who felt that “it’s not about making money, we’re doing

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” (unpublished paper, 1994). Sean Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown: The Transformation of the Rust Belt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). PETER THIEL AND SILICON VALLEY Sonia Arrison, 100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, from Careers and Relationships to Family and Faith, with

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a foreword by Peter Thiel (New York: Basic Books, 2011). Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia and the Rest of Planet Earth (Los

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley

by Corey Pein  · 23 Apr 2018  · 282pp  · 81,873 words

suffering builds character, I owe many thanks to Airbnb. In the same spirit, I must thank those who declined to be interviewed, especially Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and Curtis Yarvin—my three muses. I’m genuinely grateful to everyone who was interviewed, as well as all those pseudonymous people—roommates, conferencegoers, barflies

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clear than with Hulk Hogan’s successful privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media in the spring of 2016, infamously bankrolled in secret by the billionaire VC Peter Thiel, who regarded Gawker as a “terrorist” organization. Although the East Coast press saw Thiel’s subterfuge for what it was—an attack on free speech

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fucking itchy.” Stonerr, then? Twitter for potheads? Redundant. “Twitter is … a horribly mismanaged company—probably a lot of pot smoking going on there,” the VC Peter Thiel said once on television. What about Facebook for people without friends? I could call it … Strangebook? But it would be hard to beat RentAFriend.com

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offenders virtually anywhere, anytime, at varying levels of intensity through a single, compact, body-worn unit.” •  1-800-Flowers for medicinal marijuana? Eaze, backed by Peter Thiel, offers “easy, quick, professional marijuana delivery” on demand. •  Snapchat for adult dancers? It’s called Snapchat. •  Foursquare for attractive people? Instagram. •  Social game for social

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the PayPal founder, Facebook board member, major shareholder in a CIA-funded company, Donald Trump delegate, distinguished Stanford alumnus, venture capitalist, and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel. Here was a rich, powerful man, regarded by many as a public intellectual, who, three years before White House adviser Steve Bannon declared war on

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advantages to an undeserving mob of brainwashed social justice warriors. Significantly, these radicalized youth saw in the miraculous futuristic designs of men such as a Peter Thiel and Elon Musk a vision that was entirely compatible with their notions of racial supremacy, and they expected to personally benefit in the tech titans

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, because he is forever telling them what they’d like to hear and zealously defending the excesses of consumer capitalism. Like techno-utopians such as Peter Thiel, Kurzweil has long argued that corporate interests should be calling the shots in the “new paradigms” of the future. Such views are unsurprising coming from

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-one-year-old blogger as epigraphs. Anissimov at the time was employed as the advocacy director at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, funded by Peter Thiel, whose own ideas, buoyed by money, were gaining prominence. Thiel’s support for technophilic extremists did not stop with Anissimov. The billionaire was, for example

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concerns Thiel might harbor for the fate of America and the planet, he has never lost sight of the interests of the most important person—Peter Thiel. He has reportedly used his fortune to obtain citizenship in New Zealand, along with a remote lakeside retreat where he might weather the apocalypse. While

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world set aside by global agreement for experimentation, as discussed by Larry Page. They could be floating cities in international waters as put forth by Peter Thiel, or one of the more ambitious 80,000 person colonies on Mars desired by Elon Musk. Srinivasan set what was then a new record in

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Stanford professor and partner in a $4 billion venture capital firm, not some basement-dwelling 4chan troll with no life prospects. His comrade in resentment, Peter Thiel, even offered Srinivasan’s name to the Trump White House in January 2017 as a possible appointee to lead the Food and Drug Administration (although

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of Big Tech, grim though it may appear for the rest of us. But the biggest winners of technocapitalism—men such as Larry Page and Peter Thiel and their flunkies—are increasingly aware that the system that has ennobled them creates enemies faster than allies. And they are afraid. In 2015, the

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of the most ill-considered and damaging experiments ever inflicted by a tech startup upon an unwilling group of people. And Paytm had shown that Peter Thiel’s original dream for PayPal’s “World Domination” (his words)—digital, privatized currency—could be made real by fiat, should other methods fail. “India’s

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To,” May 26, 2015, theweek.com. Gallup reran its poll “Confidence in Institutions,” gallup.com; harrisinteractive.com. “monolithic monstrosity” Peter Thiel interview with Glenn Beck, October 21, 2014. “My path was so tracked” Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown, 2014

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, Baffler (no. 30). a procedure called parabiosis Jeff Bercovici broke the news of Thiel’s quasivampirisim in an August 1, 2016, Inc. magazine story titled “Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People’s Blood.” Breitbart News would months later dismiss Bercovici’s report as “fake news” after his key source

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clammed up, though he and the magazine stood by the story. Not good government “A Conversation with Peter Thiel,” April 6, 2015, medium.com. Whatever genuine concerns Thiel might harbor David Streitfeld and Jacqueline Williams, “Peter Thiel, Trump Adviser, Has a Backup Country: New Zealand,” January 25, 2017, nytimes.com. Srinivasan laid out the

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Stanford Review Stanford University Startup Conference Startup Vitamins Startup Weekend Stephens, Trae Stoppelman, Jeremy Swain, Robert Taboola Tamkivi TaskRabbit TechCrunch Teleport Tesla Motors Theranos Thiel, Peter Thiel Capital Tiffany, Michael Time magazine Tinder Tlon Tolkien, J.R.R. Tradehill TripAdvisor Trump, Donald Tumblr Tunney, Justine 20Mission 23andMe Twitch.tv Twitch Partners Twitter

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal

by Ben Mezrich  · 13 Jul 2009  · 226pp  · 69,893 words

connections at the social network site Friendster. He’d brought them some series D VC funding, introduced them to his buddies around town—most notably, Peter Thiel, the guy behind PayPal, a colleague who’d also experienced some run-ins with the gang at Sequoia. But Friendster wasn’t going to be

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you,” Sean responded. “Fifteen minutes, in and out, that’s all it’s going to take.” Deep down, he was certain that he was right. Peter Thiel—the founding force behind the incredibly successful company PayPal, head of the multibillion-dollar venture fund Clarium Capital, former chess master, and one of the

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that came with those five hundred thousand dollars, the promise of a future for the company that he’d started in that Harvard dorm room. Peter Thiel had been exactly everything that Sean had prepared Mark for. Scary as hell, brilliant as hell—and willing to play ball. More than that, he

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, in the larger scheme of things, he didn’t matter. He didn’t exist. Standing there in the elevator, Sean thought about the last thing Peter Thiel had said to Mark after making the deal that would take the company to the next level. Right after telling Mark that when they got

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’t be getting the security deposit back anytime soon. Which was okay, now, because Facebook had its own financing in place; an angel investment from Peter Thiel, which was paying for this new house, all this computer equipment, more servers than Eduardo had imagined they’d ever need—and the lawyers, who

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any event, Mark had also told him that there was going to be a party, something really cool, when the site reached a million members. Peter Thiel was going to throw it at his restaurant in San Francisco, and Eduardo would have to make the trip back out, because it was going

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launched the thing in Mark’s Kirkland dorm room. Frisson was modern, hip, and exclusive, just like Facebook. It also happened to be owned by Peter Thiel, who was paying for the party out of his own deep pocket. Eduardo watched the young, Northern California crowd bouncing to the music; it was

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completely foreign. It felt so—fast. He’d known it from the minute he’d gotten out of the cab in front of the place. Peter Thiel’s Ferrari Spyder was parked at the curb outside. Mark’s Infiniti—the one he’d been given when his own Craigslist car hadn’t

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a force in the Silicon Valley community; recently he has been made a managing partner at the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm created by Peter Thiel that focuses on early-stage investments in tech companies, searching out deals similar to the five-hundred-thousand-dollar investment Thiel made in the early

Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature

by Ben Mezrich  · 3 Jul 2017

important. But it wasn’t until he introduced himself that Luhan realized she was sitting next to one of the richest men in the world, Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund had organized this annual meeting at the Canadian’s resort, and the enigmatic billionaire had been a financial presence, both philanthropic and

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growing inside her that had nothing to do with money. Without money, much of science was impossible. But money alone wouldn’t allow men like Peter Thiel to live forever. Nor would money alone bring the Woolly Mammoth back to life. Speaking to Thiel, Luhan had realized that she had solved her

The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

by Keach Hagey  · 19 May 2025  · 439pp  · 125,379 words

2019–2024 CHAPTER 14PRODUCTS CHAPTER 15CHATGPT CHAPTER 16THE BLIP CHAPTER 17PROMETHEUS UNBOUND EPILOGUE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS NOTES INDEX PROLOGUE ON A BALMY MID-NOVEMBER evening in 2023, Peter Thiel, the famed venture capitalist, threw a birthday party for his husband, Matt Danzeisen, at YESS, an avant-garde Japanese restaurant located in a century-old

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gay marriage rights, penning an editorial in The Stanford Daily calling an anti–gay marriage article in the conservative Stanford Review, founded in 1987 by Peter Thiel, “juvenile” and “having no rational basis.”1 He threw himself into his computer science courses with similar abandon. Blake Ross, a fellow computer science major

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for himself. Sequoia went on to make a seed investment in Stripe in 2010, followed by a Series A investment in 2011, with investors including Peter Thiel. “Sam was quite helpful in navigating that,” Collison said. “We were these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed naifs from Ireland dealing with

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Peter Thiel and Michael Moritz, who were to us kind of deities. And Sam, as usual, was completely unintimidated and uncowed by any of them. And his

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something they don’t want to do.”6 PART III 2012–2019 CHAPTER 9 “A RIDE ON A ROCKET” A MONTH AFTER LOOPT was sold, Peter Thiel strode into a packed Stanford auditorium. The class he had agreed to teach, “CS183: Startup,” had quickly hit its 250-student limit, and now those

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failed, knew better. The only way to do it was through industry. And there was one investor who would be an obvious place to start: Peter Thiel. Legg and Hassabis came to the 2010 Singularity Summit as presenters, yes, but really to meet Thiel, who often invited summit participants to his townhouse

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have no intention of focusing on AI safety or doing anything that would limit their power.”10 Musk now began hosting dinners with friends like Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, aimed at figuring out how to counter Google’s power and make AI safe. He met that May with President Obama over

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Brockman and Sutskever announced the launch of OpenAI as a nonprofit research company backed by $1 billion in funding from Musk, Altman, Brockman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research. The eye-popping number had been Musk’s idea. “We need to go with a much bigger number

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.”12 He stopped sending money, though he kept paying the rent for a while, and Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and college friend of Peter Thiel’s, stepped in to cover OpenAI employee salaries and other overhead. By the end of 2017, Musk had poached Karpathy and made him the head

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American AI expert Qi Lu, who had been the architect of Nadella’s AI strategy while at Microsoft. Altman had visited China years earlier, accompanying Peter Thiel on the tour for Zero to One, and he had been stunned by the vistas of glittering skyscrapers on land that had been occupied by

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Joe Betts-LaCroix, a sporty Gen Xer with a stubbly beard and balding pate, who had led automation at a genetic modification company backed by Peter Thiel and Elon Musk more than a decade earlier. That company had been called Halcyon Molecular; its goal was to develop cheap genomic sequencing technology so

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Modi. At his side was Oliver Mulherin, a computer programmer from Australia who Altman had been dating for about a year. They had met in Peter Thiel’s hot tub at 3 a.m. in 2015, when Mulherin was studying computer science at the University of Melbourne, and bonded over their shared

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Biden’s executive order were but a small sign of the less visible power that effective altruism was amassing in Washington. Increasingly, the warning that Peter Thiel had shared with Altman at a trendy sushi restaurant in LA in the fall of 2023—that Yudkowsky’s disciples and like-minded EAs had

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Tracy, “ChatGPT’s Sam Altman Warns Congress That AI Can ‘Go Quite Wrong,’ ” The Wall Street Journal, May 16, 2023. 9.Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2021), 120. 10.Sam Altman, “Board Members,” Sam Altman blog, November 11, 2014. 11

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YOU?” 1.Sam Altman, “Argument Against Gay Marriage Lacks Logic,” Stanford Daily, March 31, 2004. 2.Melisa Russel, Julie Black, “He’s Played Chess with Peter Thiel, Sparred with Elon Musk and Once, Supposedly, Stopped a Plane Crash: Inside Sam Altman’s World, Where Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction,” Business Insider, April

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Ingenious Invention—And Its Last?” Vanity Fair, October 2023. 6.Friend, “Manifest Destiny.” CHAPTER 9“A RIDE ON A ROCKET” 1.Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2021), 170–72. 2.David Brooks, “The Creative Monopoly,” The New York Times, April

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23, 2012. 3.Blake Masters, “CS183: Startup—Peter Thiel Class 1 Notes Essay,” April 3, 2012. 4.Blake Masters, “CS183: Startup—Peter Thiel Class 15 Notes Essay,” May 31, 2012. 5.Bruce Gibney, “What Happened to the Future,” Founders Fund website, updated

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. 8.Sophie Bearman, “OpenAI’s Sam Altman: The Human Behind the Machine,” Life in Seven Songs podcast, The San Francisco Standard, September 24, 2024. 9.Peter Thiel, “The New Atomic Age We Need,” The New York Times, November 27, 2015. 10.Kyle Russel, “Y Combinator and Mithril Invest in Helion, a Nuclear

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, March 30, 2015, posted May 21, 2019. 16.“Guest Annie Altman—Writer, Podcaster and Comedian,” Sally Take Live podcast, March 20, 2020. 17.Sam Levin, “Peter Thiel Faces Silicon Valley Backlash After Pledging $1.25 Million to Trump,” The Guardian, October 17, 2016. 18.Nitasha Tiku, “Meet the Techies Trying to Create

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, 2016. 19.Sam Altman, “What I Heard from Trump Supporters,” Sam Altman blog, February 21, 2017. 20.Douglas MacMillan, Keach Hagey, Deepa Seetharaman, “Tech Luminary Peter Thiel Parts Ways with Silicon Valley,” The Wall Street Journal, February 15, 2018. 21.Chafkin, The Contrarian, 200. 22.Tess Townsend, “Sam Altman Wants to See

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Ilya Sutskever, 176–82 enter Microsoft, 229–33 enter Mira Murati, 225–26, 242–43, 246–48, 268, 282–93, 304–5, 307–8 enter Peter Thiel, 1–7, 10, 16–17, 125, 134–48 enter Saudi Arabia, 231–32 enter Steve Jobs, 61, 85, 87, 90, 110–16 “good meeting-itis

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, 257 deal flow, 88, 95, 124 history of, 72–73 Khosla Ventures, 230, 235, 257 Kleiner Perkins, 162, 230 Matrix Partners, 90 Mithril Capital, 136 Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, 2, 6, 132, 139, 147, 226 on Sand Hill Road, Palo Alto, 79, 85, 93, 116–17, 158, 177 why they suck

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Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

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SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World

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Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America

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I Hate the Internet: A Novel

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Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

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The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality

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Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

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Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

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The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated

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Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles

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Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

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How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

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The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

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Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work

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Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History

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Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms

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Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead

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Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs

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Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

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The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum

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Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts

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The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money

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Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

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Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency

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