Peter Thiel

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

the prominent tech scribe: Kara Swisher, “Kara Visits Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel,” AllThingsD, November 1, 2007, http://allthingsd.com/20071101/kara-visits-founders-funds-peter-thiel/. “hating open secrets”: Belinda Luscombe, “Gawker Founder Nick Denton on Peter Thiel, ‘Conflict and Trollery,’ and the Future of Media,” Time, June 22, 2016, https://time.com/4375643/gawker-nick-denton-peter-thiel/. a winking reference: Owen Thomas, “Peter Thiel’s Fabulous Fourth of July,” Valleywag, July 6, 2007, https://gawker.com/275650/peter-thiels-fabulous-fourth-of-july. failed to attract: Owen Thomas, “Peter Thiel’s College Tour,” Valleywag, October 6, 2017, https://gawker.com/308252/peter-thiels-college-tour.gawker.com “but Thiel’s taken”: Owen Thomas “Peter Thiel Crush Alert,” Valleywag, November 27, 2007.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN: PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL, PRIVATE REACTIONARY chant onto the stage: Adrienne Shih, “Protesters Break into Peter Thiel Speaker Event in Wheeler Hall,” Daily Californian, December 10, 2014, https://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/10/protestors-break-peter-thiel-speaker-event-wheeler-hall/. “spinning so much bullshit”: Kevin Montgomery, “Billionaire Peter Thiel Says Technology Isn’t Screwing Middle Class,” Valleywag, November 11, 2014, http://valleywag.gawker.com/billionaire-peter-thiel-says-technology-isnt-screwing-m-1657419404. “that’s somewhat unusual”: Ariana Eunjung Cha, “Peter Thiel’s Quest to Find the Key to Eternal Life,” The Washington Post, April 3, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-leadership/peter-thiels-life-goal-to-extend-our-time-on-this-earth/2015/04/03/b7a1779c-4814-11e4-891d-713f052086a0_story.html.

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a public service: Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker,” The New York Times, May 25, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html. bully media outlets: Marina Hyde, “Peter Thiel’s Mission to Destroy Gawker Isn’t ‘Philanthropy.’ It’s a Chilling Taste of Things to Come,” The Guardian, May 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/27/peter-thiel-gawker-philanthropy-paypal-mogul-secret-war-billionaire. “You can’t stop it”: Edmund Lee, “Jeff Bezos on Gawker vs. Peter Thiel,” Recode, May 31, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/5/31/11826118/jeff-bezos-gawker-peter-thiel.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
by Jimmy Soni
Published 22 Feb 2022

The Pitch “I had been”… “end of the world”: Peter Thiel, Commencement Speech, Hamilton College, May 2016, https://www.hamilton.edu/commencement/2016/address. “quarter-life crisis trying to find [himself]”: Author interview with Peter Thiel, November 28, 2017; see also: Dina Lamdany, “Peter Thiel and the Myth of the Exceptional Individual,” Columbia Spectator, November 22, 2016, https://www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2014/09/28/column/; Bill Kristol conversation with Peter Thiel, July 29, 2014, https://conversationswithbillkristol.org/transcript/peter-thiel-transcript/; Harriet Green, “PayPal Co-founder Peter Thiel Talks Quarter-Life Crises and How to Tackle the State,” City A.M., November 2, 2014, https://www.cityam.com/real-thiel/.

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“Today’s handheld”… “and celerity”: Confinity February 1999 business plan shared with author. “prehistory”: Adam Grant, “Want to Build a One-of-a-Kind Company? Ask Peter Thiel,” Authors@Wharton podcast, October 3, 2014, https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/peter-thiels-notes-on-startups/; see also: Jackie Adams, “5 Tips from Peter Thiel on Starting a Startup,” LA, October 3, 2014, https://www.lamag.com/culturefiles/5-tips-peter-thiel-starting-startup/. “It was this”… “talking that way”: Author interview with David Wallace, December 5, 2020. “[His boss Paul Tuckfield]”… “smart people”: Author interview with Santosh Janardhan, June 15, 2021.

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“We would like to present alternative views”: “Editor’s Note,” Stanford Review, June 1987. “Open or Empty”: Andrew Granato, “How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire,” Stanford Politics, November 27, 2017, https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/11/27/peter-thiel-cover-story/. “Peter might be the”… “like a closet”: Author interview with Ken Howery, June 26, 2018. “billionaires’ breakfast club”… “I did nothing”: Author interview with Luke Nosek, June 25, 2018. “In retrospect, just about everything”… “like two hundred”: Author interview with Peter Thiel, November 28, 2017. “In my mind, it hurt”: Author interview with Luke Nosek, June 25, 2018.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1943). Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957). Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Institute, April 2009, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. Hans Hermann-Hoppe, Democracy—The God That Failed (Newark: Transaction, 2001). Greg Satell, “Peter Thiel’s Four Rules for Creating a Great Business,” Forbes, October 3, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2014/10/03/peter-thiels-4-rules-for-creating-a-great-business/2/#2ea53ac12804. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013).

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We need to go ahead and get the Internet fixed or risk losing this engine of beauty.” People like Google CEO Larry Page, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook fame are among the richest men in the world, with ambitions so outsize that they are the stuff of fiction: Dave Eggers’s The Circle and Don DeLillo’s Zero K are populated with tech billionaires inventing technology that will enable people to live forever. But this scenario is happening in real life. Peter Thiel, Larry Page, and others are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in research to “end human aging” and to merge human consciousness into their all-powerful networks.

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Parker convinced him that it would be nothing but trouble in the form of lawsuits from the content community. The genius of Facebook was that the users provided all the content. There was no need to steal pictures, as he had for Facemash, or music files, as Parker had done for Napster. The second thing Parker did was to introduce Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel grasped almost immediately the potential of Facebook. As David Kirkpatrick explained in The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, “What happened once it opened at a new school was what most impressed Thiel. Within days it typically captured essentially the entire student body, and more than 80 percent of users returned to the site daily!”

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley
by Emily Chang
Published 6 Feb 2018

CHAPTER 2: THE PAYPAL MAFIA AND THE MYTH OF THE MERITOCRACY “a lucid and profound articulation”: Derek Thompson, “Peter Thiel’s Zero to One Might Be the Best Business Book I’ve Read,” Atlantic, Sept. 25, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/09/peter-thiel-zero-to-one-review/380738. “We all have a responsibility”: Peter Thiel, “Peter Thiel: Bloomberg West (Full Show 4/12),” interview by author, Bloomberg, April 12, 2016, video, 56:52, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-04-13/peter-thiel-bloomberg-west-full-show-4-12. Zero to One: Peter Thiel, Zero to One (New York: Crown Business, 2014). Thiel himself told me: Peter Thiel, “Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel: Studio 1.0 (12/18) Bloomberg, Dec. 18, 2014, video, 27:34, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2014-12-19/venture-capitalist-peter-thiel-studio-10-1218.

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“‘Meritocracy’ takes as its core”: Megan Garber, “The Perils of Meritocracy,” Atlantic, June 30, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/06/the-perils-of-meritocracy/532215. “I no longer believe”: Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. revealed that he was gay: Owen Thomas, “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People,” Gawker, Dec. 19, 2007, http://gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people. “When I was a kid”: Will Drabold, “Read Peter Thiel’s Speech at the Republican National Convention,” Time, July 21, 2016, http://time.com/4417679/republican-convention-peter-thiel-transcript. “We care deeply about diversity”: Jeff John Roberts, “Mark Zuckerberg Says Trump Supporter Peter Thiel Still Has a Place on Facebook’s Board,” Fortune, Oct. 19, 2016, http://fortune.com/2016/10/19/zuckerberg-thiel.

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“More than two decades ago”: Ryan Mac and Matt Drange, “Donald Trump Supporter Peter Thiel Apologizes for Past Book Comments on Rape,” Forbes, Oct. 25, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/10/25/peter-thiel-apologizes-for-past-book-comments-on-rape-and-race/#7c635d0e4e48. In late 2017, however: Andrew Granato, “How Peter Thiel Built a Silicon Valley Empire,” Stanford Politics, Nov. 27, 2017, https://stanfordpolitics.org/2017/11/27/peter-thiel-cover-story. “This is college journalism written over 20 years ago”: Kara Swisher, “Zenefits CEO David Sacks Apologizes for Parts of a 1996 Book He Co-wrote with Peter Thiel That Called Date Rape ‘Belated Regret,’” Recode, Oct. 24, 2016, https://www.recode.net/2016/10/24/13395798/zenefits-ceo-david-sacks-apologizes-1996-book-co-wrote-peter-thiel-date-rape-belated-regret. “I do believe in diversity”: David Sacks, “Zenefits CEO on Closing the Chapter on Compliance Issues,” interview by author, Bloomberg, Oct. 18, 2016, video, 12:23, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2016-10-18/zenefits-ceo-on-closing-the-chapter-on-compliance-issues.

The Paypal Wars: Battles With Ebay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
by Eric M. Jackson
Published 15 Jan 2004

See also legal compromises with eBay priorities Democratic party donation flap, 110 Deutsche Bank, 10 developing world, Peter’s plans for, 25–26 digital sweatshops, 58 digital wallet platform for, 9–10 relation to online accounts, 13 diversification, PayPal’s move to, 211, 212–213, 235–236, 260–261 Diversity Myth, The (David Sacks and Peter Thiel), 7, 15, 103 “Dollar” conference room, 144 Doohan, James (“Scotty”), 30, 33–34 reason promotion failed, 52 dotBank, 38–39 decision not to pursue eBay, 54–55 Yahoo purchase of, 83–84 dot-com boom, 6 dot-com crash, 90–92, 178, 187 Peter Thiel’s strategy, 244 drop-in customers, 63–64 eBay “Auction for America” campaign, 220–222 ban on robotic activity, 59–60 BIN (“Buy It Now”) format, 174–175 blocking of PayPal logos, 145 business model, 51 buyer protection policy, 169–170 “Checkout” feature, 228–229, 232 company culture, 296–299 compared to Amazon.com, 44 competition with Amazon auctions, 185–187 Confinity strategies to grow PayPal on, 57–60 financials, 50, 305–306 “Instant Purchase” buttons, 134 integration of PayPal, 299–302 listing fee raises, 187, 305 logo policy, 86 mascot, 297 mission, 307 offer to buy PayPal, 237–238 origins, 51 partnership with AOL, 204 partnership with Visa, 93–94 partnership with Wells Fargo, 80–81 PayPal buyout offer, 255–258 PayPal use of banner ads on, 46–48 PayPal view of threat from, 191 product placement for Billpoint, 262–263 pursuit of payments sector, 96 scalability advantage, 49, 50 “Sell Your Item” (SYI) form, 206–208 slights to PayPal at eBay Live, 274–275 weakness in business model, 132–133 web site, 44 Yahoo attempt to acquire, 83 .

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I also appreciate Ron Kenner’s editing assistance and Sharon Goldlinger’s astute guidance. Brandi Laughey, Jonathan New, Nancy Humphreys, and Steven Phenix have been wonderful to work with. And I’ve never met a more thorough or trustworthy adviser than Hank Terry. I would also like to thank my PayPal compatriots, including Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, David Sacks, and Paul Martin, for providing me with their time and feedback; while the conclusions reached in this book are ultimately my own, I nonetheless appreciate their support and enthusiasm. Friends and family played no small role in this endeavor, and my wife, Beatrice, played a role above and beyond all others; without her steadfast devotion and countless hours laboring alongside me, this project would not have been possible.

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While this book documents the amazing exploits of the talented men and women I had the pleasure of working alongside, it is primarily a cautionary tale told firsthand from the high tech trenches. I hope you enjoy it. CHAPTER ONE THE NEW RECRUIT NOVEMBER—DECEMBER 1999 My entrepreneurial summons came with an abrupt qualification: “You need to start this Friday.” “W-what?” I stammered in reply. “Are you serious?” Peter Thiel smiled and nodded. Evidently my reaction amused him. “No, no. Look, it’s already Sunday,” I responded, shaking my head. “That would only be four days notice—I can’t possibly quit my job with Andersen that quickly! We’re in the middle of a project.” The chief executive officer of Confinity, Inc., didn’t find that argument exceptionally compelling.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “I’ll bring my guitar”: Email thread between Hoan Ton-That and Charles Johnson, July 13, 2016. On file with author. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT the philosopher-lawyer: Thiel’s biography comes primarily from Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (New York: Penguin Press, 2021). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT who believed that: Peter Thiel’s views as described here are based on an essay he wrote: Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A gender studies professor: Author’s interview with Airbnb host for The New York Times Magazine, 2021.

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The next morning, Johnson followed through on the introduction he had dangled, taking Ton-That in an Uber to an “epic house” in Shaker Heights to meet Peter Thiel, who had just rolled out of bed. His private chef fixed them a superfoods breakfast of eggs with salmon and avocado that they ate poolside. The main topic of conversation, according to Johnson, was Gawker. Thiel had hated the media company for many years by that point. It had covered him frequently, from headlining his sexuality—“Peter Thiel is totally gay, people”—to criticizing his “loopy libertarian” views, including a dream of building a floating city outside of any government’s jurisdiction and the belief that letting women vote had been bad for American democracy.

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In the fall of 2019, Scalzo was invited to a fundraiser for a Republican running for a Senate seat in Kansas. Peter Thiel was co-hosting it with the conservative media pundit Ann Coulter at his Park Avenue apartment in Manhattan. Scalzo sidled up to Thiel and started talking about the facial recognition app that they had both invested in. Scalzo took a photo of Thiel and other people at the party and then showed him the results: a collection of their photos from elsewhere on the web. “I’m invested in that?” Thiel asked, according to Scalzo. “That’s cool.” “He played it a little coy,” Scalzo said. “He’s made a thousand angel investments.” Peter Thiel had provided the seed money that allowed the company to sprout and attract other benefactors, such as Scalzo.

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
by Corey Pein
Published 23 Apr 2018

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 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 grand design Balaji Srinivasan, “Software Is Reorganizing the World,” November 22, 2013, wired.com.

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“Our tech titans could save us” James Polous, “Silicon Valley Could Save the World from Climate Change. But We Don’t Want Them 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). PayPal Jackson, Paypal Wars. In-Q-Tel Robert Scheer, “How the Government Outsourced Intelligence to Silicon Valley,” February 18, 2015, truthdig.com.

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If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. Vom Affen zum Roboter Acknowledgments If it’s true that 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—whose stories were included in this book. Thanks to my shrink, to my wife, Patricia Sauthoff, and to the voters of Oregon, whose wise passage of Measure 91 ensured the timely and relatively painless completion of this book.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 7 Sep 2022

Notes Introduction: Meet The Mindset     5   Elon Musk colonizing Mars : Mike Wall, “Mars Colony Would Be a Hedge against World War III, Elon Musk Says,” Space.com , March 28, 2018, https:// www .space .com /40112 -elon -musk -mars -colony -world -war -3 .html.     5   Peter Thiel reversing the aging process : Maya Kossoff, “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People’s Blood,” Vanity Fair , August 1, 2016, 2021, https:// www .vanityfair .com /news /2016 /08 /peter -thiel -wants -to -inject -himself -with -young -peoples -blood.     5   uploading their minds : Alexandra Richards, “Silicon Valley billionaire pays company thousands ‘to be killed and have his brain digitally preserved forever,’ ” Evening Standard , March 15, 2018, https:// www .standard .co .uk /news /world /silicon -valley -billionaire -pays -company -thousands -to -kill -him -and -preserve -his -brain -forever -a3790871 .html.     8   “fairer” phones : Bas Van Abel, interview with Douglas Rushkoff, Team Human podcast, March 29, 2017, https:// www .teamhuman .fm /episodes /ep -30 -bas -van -abel -fingerprints -on -the -touchscreen.   10   cars into space : Joel Gunter, “Elon Musk: The Man Who Sent His Sports Car into Space,” BBC , February 10, 2018, https:// www .bbc .com /news /science -environment -42992143.   10   Biosphere trials : Steve Rose, “Eight Go Mad in Arizona: How a Lockdown Experiment Went Horribly Wrong,” Guardian , July 13, 2020, https:// www .theguardian .com /film /2020 /jul /13 /spaceship -earth -arizona -biosphere -2 -lockdown.

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Lowell Harriss, History and Policies of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1951), 41–48.   86   GE eventually sold : GE, “GE Completes the Separation of Synchrony Financial,” November 17, 2015, https:// www .ge .com /news /reports /ge -completes -the -separation -of -synchrony -financial.   87   “world trade … speed of light” : Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995).   87   “new paradigm” : Alen Mattich, “The New ‘New Paradigm’ for Equities,” Wall Street Journal , May 28, 2013, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /BL -MBB -1982.   89   “competition is for losers” : Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014, https:// www .wsj .com /articles /peter -thiel -competition -is -for -losers -1410535536.   89   “fidelity to an event” : Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014). He borrows this idea from Maoist Alain Badiou.   91   spending electricity on purposeless calculations : Bitcoin advocates argue that some percent of this energy comes from “renewable” sources.

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Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars , Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process , or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

Realizing that “crypto projects were taking up thirty hours per week of my time,” he dropped out of university in April 2013.2 In the Waterloo meeting with Strachman and Gibson, his last chance to get their attention before he transgressed into his over-the-hill twenties, Buterin proposed to revolutionize the Internet and the global financial system. “That’s what Peter Thiel wanted, right?” As he recited a litany of ambitiously cockeyed schemes—“Turing-complete” blockchains, new software languages, currencies, computer platforms, smart contracts—Strachman and Gibson could see that he was a genius. But his grandiosity and apparent lack of focus defied all the rules of successful enterprise. They decided to support him anyway. In November 2013, Buterin wrote the Ethereum white paper, and on June 5, 2014, Peter Thiel announced a new group of twenty Thiel Fellows, which included Buterin.

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As Claude Shannon showed, these success rates of 95 percent, or even 99.999 percent, are deceptive, because you have no way of telling which instances are the errors.6 The vast majority of the home loans in the mortgage crisis were sound, but because no one knew which ones were not, all the securities crashed. You don’t want that problem with self-driving cars. In a joint appearance in 2012 in Aspen, Peter Thiel chided Eric Schmidt: “You don’t have the slightest idea of what you are doing.” He pointed out that the company had amassed some $50 billion in cash at the time and was allowing it to sit in the bank at near-zero interest rates while its vast data centers still could not identify cats as well as a three-year-old could.7 Thiel is the leading critic of Silicon Valley’s prevailing philosophy of “inevitable” innovation.

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CHAPTER 10 1517 Nothing helps you understand something like investing in it. To participate in this new generational movement in technology, in July 2015 I became a founding partner in the 1517 Fund, led by venture capitalist–hackers Danielle Strachman and Mike Gibson and partly financed by Peter Thiel. With a combination of thoughtful authority and seemingly boundless energy reminiscent of Thiel himself, Strachman and Gibson ran the Thiel Fellowship for its first five years. Founded in 2011 to pluck young people from the cradle of credentialism, the Fellowship induces students in their early twenties or below to “skip or stop out of college.”

The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick
Published 19 Nov 2010

Could it become a factor in helping bring together a world filled with political and religious strife and in the midst of environmental and economic breakdown? A communications system that includes people of all countries, all races, all religions, could not be a bad thing, could it? There is no more fervent believer in Facebook’s potential to help bring the world together than Peter Thiel. Thiel is a master contrarian who has made billions in his hedge fund betting correctly on the direction of oil, currencies, and stocks. He is also an entrepreneur, the co-founder, and former CEO of the PayPal online payments service (which he sold to eBay). He was the very first professional investor to put money in Facebook, in the late summer of 2004, and he’s been on the company’s board of directors ever since.

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By mid-2004, many in the Internet industry were beginning to wonder if social networking might ultimately all converge in one big network. Although Hoffman didn’t believe that himself, he knew that some would see it as a conflict of interest if he led an investment in Thefacebook. So he arranged for Parker and Zuckerberg to meet with Peter Thiel, the brooding, dark-haired financial genius who had co-founded and led PayPal and was now a private investor. Hoffman is a key member of a very distinct and important Silicon Valley subculture—the wealthy former employees of PayPal. Hoffman remained close to many onetime PayPal colleagues, including Thiel.

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The “CFO” had been doing it remotely from the East Coast. Even though Zuckerberg had for now reached a détente with his erstwhile partner, he was whittling away Saverin’s remaining responsibilities. On November 30, Thefacebook registered its millionth user. It had existed for just ten months. Peter Thiel had recently opened a nightclub and restaurant in San Francisco called Frisson. He offered up its VIP lounge for a party. Parker, the organizer, piggybacked on it a celebration for his own twenty-fifth birthday on December 3. The email invitations were portentous. At top was a quote from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: “Look at the world around you.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians
by Joe Quirk and Patri Friedman
Published 21 Mar 2017

In 2013 former Harvard University president Larry Summers called the Thiel Fellowship “the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade.” Two years later, by the summer of 2015, companies started by Thiel Fellows had an aggregate value exceeding $1 billion. The founder of this fellowship, Peter Thiel, never made a dime from any of this. Peter Thiel’s Wager Here in Silicon Valley, it’s getting harder to be cool. Founding a company, changing the world, and getting rich is not enough to make you an alpha nerd. Such people are a dime a dozen in our neighborhood, which is infected with an acute sense of the luck involved in success and failure.

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Chris Muglia says that when key aspects of construction become an information technology, and every module design is tested at sea, improved on computer, and emailed to a floating 3-D printer, Peter Thiel’s vision of “atoms” become “bits” will unleash exponential progress and rapidly drop the price of seasteads. How cheap could this get? Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as Space X, is an aerospace manufacturer that builds and launches space rockets, founded in 2002 by Peter Thiel’s cofounder at PayPal, Elon Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla Motors. Elon’s goal is to reduce space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars.

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I probably spent half of my evenings at lectures at MIT or Harvard listening to people like Mark Zuckerberg—very enlightened people. By day, I did my homework, but at night, instead of staying in my dorm and partying with people, I went to these lectures. I probably learned more from these lectures than from my course work. “Peter Thiel visited MIT one month after I arrived for college to give a speech in which he talked about seasteading. I still have the name tag I used in that event. This Peter Thiel lecture opened up a new door for me. He only briefly touched on the idea of seasteading, but that was enough for me to look into it. I felt he was talking about the ultimate new option.” Zhai consumed research on the potential for ocean cities.

Choose Yourself!
by James Altucher
Published 14 Sep 2013

TheStreet.com only owned 10 percent of them. So Peter Thiel naturally figured, why fight Elon Musk’s X.com and destroy each other in the process plus waste a ton of time and money when they could just merge and become a monopoly and go public and create real value, even if meant they all had lesser stakes? Once they merged they had twice as many ideas — which meant that their stakes would be worth more than twice as much, since we now know that ideas are more valuable than money. So they merged, went public, and guess what? eBay acquired them for $1.5 billion. Peter Thiel’s final stake was worth $55 million.

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I have a guess as to how they made the decision but still, that value might be right, or horribly wrong—making it either the best valuation decision or the worst in history. Here’s what I do to value a business. I look at all of the above: The Peter Thiel Four—Monopoly, Scalability, Network Effect, Brand (and I’ll add my Demographics) The Three D’s. I look at what is causing the problems: Death, Divorce, Debt, Delay (because they all add up to a fifth D: Desperation, which drives prices lower) The Marcus Turnaround Method. I look at Product, Process, People—each one of those will have a cost but each one of will improve a company in the eyes of the Peter Thiel Four. Then I ask myself, what does the company look like when it’s turned around or made better?

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It starts at zero, meaning you are not yet exercising your idea muscle, and it gets stronger as you start coming up with ten ideas a day, using something I call Idea Sex (a concept I’ll describe in more detail later), and ultimately becoming an Idea Machine. The top right of the matrix (figure 2) is when you are an Idea Machine: you are working nonstop on your own excellent ideas that help the lives of others. You mind dips into dreams, and you make them reality or art or abundance. Founder of PayPal and first investor in Facebook Peter Thiel underlined this for me when he told me the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg turning down Yahoo’s offer of $1 billion to buy his company in July of 2006. Zuckerberg would’ve made $250 million that summer. Thiel, who was advising Zuckerberg at the time, wanted him to take it, or at least consider accepting the offer.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby
Published 1 Feb 2022

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 55 Guynn, “Founders Fund Emerges as Venture 2.0.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 56 Nosek, author interview. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 57 Alex Konrad, “Move Over, Peter Thiel—How Brian Singerman Became Founders Fund’s Top VC,” Forbes, April 25, 2017. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 58 The other potential investor was the aerospace giant Northrop Grumman. Konrad, “Move Over, Peter Thiel.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 59 Thiel’s first venture fund, raised in 2005, returned six times capital, net of fees. His second fund, from 2007, returned better than 8x.

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—Intel’s Andy Grove, addressing John Doerr Contents Introduction Unreasonable People Chapter 1 Arthur Rock and Liberation Capital Chapter 2 Finance Without Finance Chapter 3 Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and Activist Capital Chapter 4 The Whispering of Apple Chapter 5 Cisco, 3Com, and the Valley Ascendant Chapter 6 Planners and Improvisers Chapter 7 Benchmark, SoftBank, and “Everyone Needs $100 Million” Chapter 8 Money for Google, Kind of for Nothing Chapter 9 Peter Thiel, Y Combinator, and the Valley’s Youth Revolt Chapter 10 To China, and Stir Chapter 11 Accel, Facebook, and the Decline of Kleiner Perkins Chapter 12 A Russian, a Tiger, and the Rise of Growth Equity Chapter 13 Sequoia’s Strength in Numbers Chapter 14 Unicorn Poker Conclusion Luck, Skill, and the Competition Among Nations Acknowledgments Appendix: Charts Notes Timeline Index Introduction Unreasonable People Not far from the headquarters of Silicon Valley’s venture-capital industry, which is clustered along Palo Alto’s Sand Hill Road, Patrick Brown strode out into his yard on the Stanford University campus.

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A small subset of these deals, accounting for just 5 percent of the total capital deployed, generated fully 60 percent of all the Horsley Bridge returns during this period.[17] (To put that in context, in 2018 the top-performing 5 percent of subindustries in the S&P 500 accounted for only 9 percent of the index’s total performance.)[18] Other venture investors report even more skewed returns: Y Combinator, which backs fledgling tech startups, calculated in 2012 that three-quarters of its gains came from just 2 of the 280 outfits it had bet on.[19] “The biggest secret in venture capital is that the best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund,” the venture capitalist Peter Thiel has written.[20] “Venture capital is not even a home-run business,” Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital once remarked. “It’s a grand-slam business.”[21] What this means is that venture capitalists need to be ambitious. The celebrated hedge-fund stock picker Julian Robertson used to say that he looked for shares that might plausibly double in three years, an outcome he would view as “fabulous.”[22] But if venture capitalists embarked on the same quest, they would almost guarantee failure, because the power law generates relatively few startups that merely double in value.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb
Published 14 Sep 2021

Focus on your customers, on earning revenues, and on attracting the finest people to join you on your journey, and money will follow your success. Become so good that you can’t be ignored. Of course, it’s easier said than done. AN INVESTOR IN FACEBOOK, SPACEX, STRIPE, AND MORE INTERVIEW WITH PETER THIEL Peter Thiel doesn’t need much of an intro. He has been at both sides of the fundraising table, sometimes concurrently. He first invested in a precursor to what would become PayPal and soon after joined it in the early days as a co-founder and CEO. Later he founded and invested in Palantir, which specializes in big-data analytics.

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Jonathan Shieber, “J&J Spends $3.4 Billion in Cash for Auris Health’s Lung Cancer Diagnostics and Surgical Robots,” TechCrunch, 2019, https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/13/jj-spends-3-4-billion-in-cash-for-auris-healths-lung-cancer-diagnostics-and-surgical-robots/. 3. Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014, www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 4. Celia Shatzman, “Emily Weiss on Glossier’s New Makeup, Why She Launched into the Gloss and Desert Island Beauty Staples,” Forbes, March 14, 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/celiashatzman/2016/03/14/emily-weiss-on-glossiers-new-makeup-why-she-launched-into-the-gloss-desert-island-beauty-staples/#72de97f84b69.

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A Billion-Dollar Move Out of Silicon Valley into Denver: INTERVIEW WITH RACHEL CARLSON OF GUILD EDUCATION 8 Product A Founder Who Always Built Highly Differentiated Products: INTERVIEW WITH TONY FADELL OF NEST AND APPLE 9 Market A Founder Who Did Both Market Creation and Expansion: INTERVIEW WITH MAX LEVCHIN OF PAYPAL AND AFFIRM 10 Market Timing A Billion-Dollar Startup with Perfect Market Timing: INTERVIEW WITH MARIO SCHLOSSER OF OSCAR HEALTH 11 Competition Competing Against Strong Incumbents: INTERVIEW WITH ERIC YUAN OF ZOOM 12 The Defensibility Factor PART THREE: THE FUNDRAISING 13 Venture Capital Versus Bootstrapping A $7.5 Billion Company That Was Bootstrapped for the First Five Years: INTERVIEW WITH TOM PRESTON-WERNER OF GITHUB 14 Bull Market Versus Bear Market A Billion-Dollar Company That Started in the Depth of the Recession: INTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE ZATLYN OF CLOUDFLARE 15 Capital Efficiency 16 Angels and Accelerators A Prolific Angel Investor Turned VC: INTERVIEW WITH KEITH RABOIS OF FOUNDERS FUND 17 VC Investors An Investor in Airbnb, DoorDash, Houzz, Zipline, and More: INTERVIEW WITH ALFRED LIN OF SEQUOIA CAPITAL 18 Fundraising An Investor in Facebook, SpaceX, Stripe, and More: INTERVIEW WITH PETER THIEL What to Remember Acknowledgments Discover More About the Author Praise for Super Founders Notes Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more. Tap here to learn more. INTRODUCTION There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns.

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything
by Nate Silver
Published 12 Aug 2024

America, npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/06/10/481565188/gawker-files-for-bankruptcy-it-faces-140-million-court-penalty. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT secretly been funded: Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War with Gawker,” The New York Times, May 26, 2016, sec. Business, nytimes.com/2016/05/26/business/dealbook/peter-thiel-tech-billionaire-reveals-secret-war-with-gawker.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT which outed him: Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue (New York: Portfolio, 2018). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT forced into bankruptcy: Although, the outcome was appealed and the case was later settled for $31 million.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT eventually parlay his $22 million: Adam Clark, “Musk Is World’s Richest Person Again After Tesla Stock Surge,” Barrons, February 28, 2023, barrons.com/articles/elon-musk-net-worth-tesla-stock-price-7e44bcee. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT case of opposites: Dorothy Cucci, “Peter Thiel Thinks Elon Musk Is a ‘Fraud,’ and 6 Other Unexpected Details About the Billionaires’ Love-Hate Relationship,” Business Insider, December 2, 2022, businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-elon-musk-relationship-contrarian-book-max-chafkin-2021-9. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT flooring the accelerator: “Elon Musk: How I Wrecked An Uninsured McClaren F1,” 2012, youtube.com/watch?

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT rationalize risky trades: Ian Stewart, “The Mathematical Equation That Caused the Banks to Crash,” The Guardian, February 12, 2012, sec. Science, theguardian.com/science/2012/feb/12/black-scholes-equation-credit-crunch. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT famously contrarian: Jennifer Szalai, “ ‘The Contrarian’ Goes Searching for Peter Thiel’s Elusive Core,” The New York Times, September 13, 2021, sec. Books, nytimes.com/2021/09/13/books/review-contrarian-peter-thiel-silicon-valley-max-chafkin.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT world’s unicorn companies: “The Complete List of Unicorn Companies,” CB Insights, instapage.cbinsights.com/research-unicorn-companies. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT nerds rebelling against: Sebastian Mallaby, The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, Kindle ed.

Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral
by Ben Smith
Published 2 May 2023

Go to note reference in text This was an obsession: Brian Abrams, Gawker: An Oral History (2015), loc. 788 of 1902, Kindle. Go to note reference in text On December 19, 2007, Thomas: Owen Thomas, “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People,” Gawker, December 19, 2017, https://www.gawker.com/335894/peter-thiel-is-totally-gay-people. Go to note reference in text Thomas could, of course: Owen Thomas, “Does Nick Denton Wish He Were Peter Thiel?,” Gawker, July 11, 2008, https://gawker.com/5024376/does-nick-denton-wish-he-were-peter-thiel. Go to note reference in text Thiel was enraged: Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire’s Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire (New York: Penguin, 2018).

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The most important of these powerful, private Silicon Valley gay men was Peter Thiel, a standoffish Stanford graduate who in 1998 had co-founded the company that would become PayPal. The wave of money that company threw off created the “PayPal mafia”—a group of investors who seeded another wave of companies. They had real money to invest, even after the crash. Thiel had bet early on Facebook—he was Mark Zuckerberg’s first outside investor—and been rewarded massively. Thiel’s combination of power and intense privacy made him a perfect target for Nick Denton. On December 19, 2007, Thomas published a short item on Gawker under the headline “Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay, People.”

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That frees him or her to build a different, hopefully better system for identifying and rewarding talented individuals, and unleashing their work on the world,” he wrote. Thomas could, of course, have been writing about his own boss—Nick was a gay man who felt himself to be an outsider, too, and that, too, was his edge. “That’s why I think it’s important to say this: Peter Thiel, the smartest VC in the world, is gay. More power to him,” Thomas wrote. No big deal. Just another open secret. Nick, Thomas would later write, was jealous of Thiel. And Nick himself had left a biting comment below the story. “The only thing that’s strange about Thiel’s sexuality: why on earth was he so paranoid about its discovery for so long,” Nick wrote.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination
by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang
Published 12 Jul 2021

Just six months earlier, he had moved: Erica Fink, “Inside the ‘Social Network’ House,” CNN website, August 28, 2012. 7. ideology was rooted in a version of libertarianism: Noam Cohen, “The Libertarian Logic of Peter Thiel,” Wired, December 27, 2017. 8. In 2011, Thiel would endow a fellowship: MG Siegler, “Peter Thiel Has New Initiative to Pay Kids to ‘Stop out of School,’” TechCrunch, September 27, 2010. 9. The site had a few ads from local Cambridge businesses: Seth Fiegerman, “This is What Facebook’s First Ads Looked Like,” Mashable, August 15, 2013. 10. By the end of 2004, one million college students: Anne Sraders, “History of Facebook: Facts and What’s Happening,” TheStreet, October 11, 2018. 11. The board at the time: Allison Fass, “Peter Thiel Talks about the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned down Yahoo’s $1 Billion,” Inc., March 12, 2013. 12.

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“He was like a very nerdy movie star,” observed one friend who worked for the start-up and frequented the Palo Alto home Zuckerberg and his roommates had dubbed “Casa Facebook.” “Facebook was still small, by Silicon Valley standards, but a lot of people already saw him as the next big thing.” The ideas that Zuckerberg would have been absorbing during his junior year at Harvard were replaced with the philosophies of entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, who had invested $500,000 in Thefacebook in August 2004, and Marc Andreessen, Netscape’s cofounder. As two of the most powerful men in Silicon Valley, they did more than just create and invest in new start-ups: they shaped the ethos of what it meant to be a tech ingénue.

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“It was an idea that just permeated the Valley at the time, and it was this sense that you could not question the founder, that they were king,” noted Kara Swisher, a journalist who watched the rise of Zuckerberg and closely followed the men who mentored him. “My impression of Zuckerberg was that he was an intellectual lightweight, and he was very easily swayed by Andreessen or Peter Thiel; he wanted to be seen as smart by them so he adopted the changes they suggested and the libertarian mindset they projected.” It didn’t hurt, Swisher added, that Zuckerberg had a restless drive that compelled him to do whatever it took to ensure his company would be successful. He had already shown that killer instinct in locking down control of Thefacebook in the first year of its operation.

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
by Ben Mezrich
Published 13 Jul 2009

The difference was, Sean knew what the next big thing was. He knew with a complete, and almost religious certainty: Social Networks. Just a few months ago, he’d made some 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 Sean Parker’s next home run; it was already too far along, and Sean wasn’t getting in anywhere near the ground floor. And to be honest, Friendster had its limitations.

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And the man they were on their way to meet—well, he was nearly as impressive as the building itself, both in personal reputation and in what he had already achieved. “Peter’s going to love 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 richest men in the country—was intimidating, fast-talking, and a true genius—but he was also exactly the sort of angel investor who had the guts and the foresight to understand how important—how groundbreaking—thefacebook had the potential to be.

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It wasn’t life-changing money, it wasn’t empire-making money, it wasn’t fuck-you money—it wasn’t even as much money as Mark had once turned down, back in high school, when he’d created that MP3 player add-on, simply because he didn’t really give a damn about money, whether it was a thousand dollars borrowed from a friend to start a company, or a million dollars thrown his way from an even bigger company. As far as Sean could tell, Mark still didn’t really give a damn about money; but he couldn’t ignore the sentiment 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’d turned a fifteen-minute pitch meeting into a lunch and an afternoon spent going over the details—of the deal that would ensure thefacebook’s survival, once and for all.

Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson
Published 11 Sep 2023

One driver of growth was a feature that they originally thought was no big deal: the ability to send money by email. That became wildly popular, especially on the auction site eBay, where users were looking for an easy way to pay strangers for purchases. Max Levchin and Peter Thiel As Musk monitored the names of new customers signing up, one caught his eye: Peter Thiel. He was one of the founders of a company named Confinity that had been located in the same building as X.com and was now just down the street. Both Thiel and his primary cofounder Max Levchin were as intense as Musk, but they were more disciplined. Like X.com, their company offered a person-to-person payment service.

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Justine Musk, “I Was a Starter Wife,” Marie Claire, Sept. 10, 2010. 12. X.com: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Mike Moritz, Peter Thiel, Roelof Botha, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek. Mark Gimein, “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” Salon, Aug. 17, 1999; Sarah Lacy, “Interview with Elon Musk,” Pando, Apr. 15, 2009; Eric Jackson, The PayPal Wars (World Ahead, 2003); Chafkin, The Contrarian. 13. The Coup: Author’s interviews with Elon Musk, Mike Moritz, Peter Thiel, Roelof Botha, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, Justine Musk, Kimbal Musk, Luke Nosek. Soni, The Founders; Vance, Elon Musk; Chafkin, The Contrarian. 14.

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While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view. His heritage and breeding, along with the hardwiring of his brain, made him at times callous and impulsive. It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk. He could calculate it coldly and also embrace it feverishly. “Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.” He became one of those people who feels most alive when a hurricane is coming. “I was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson once said. Likewise with Musk. He developed a siege mentality that included an attraction, sometimes a craving, for storm and drama, both at work and in the romantic relationships he struggled and failed to maintain.

The Internet Is Not the Answer
by Andrew Keen
Published 5 Jan 2015

He’s a Ferrari-driving, Stanford-educated moral philosopher, a chess genius and multibillionaire investor who is accompanied everywhere by a “staff of two blond, black-clad female assistants, a white-coated butler and a cook who prepares a daily health drink of celery, beets, kale, and ginger.”71 It would be easy, of course, to dismiss Peter Thiel as an eccentric with cash. But that’s the least interesting part of his story. He is, in fact, an even richer, smarter, and—as a major funder of radical American libertarians like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz—more powerful version of Tom Perkins. Peter Thiel has everything: brains, charm, prescience, intellect, charisma; everything, that is, except compassion for those less successful than him. In the increasingly unequal America described in Packer’s The Unwinding, Thiel is the supreme unwinder, a hard-hearted follower of Ayn Rand’s radical free-market philosophy who unashamedly celebrates the texture of inequality now reshaping America.

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The Internet economy “produces very valuable companies with very few employees,” Brooks says of this crisis, while “the majority of workers are not seeing income gains commensurate with their productivity levels.”69 In his 2013 National Book Award–winning The Unwinding, George Packer mourns the passing of the twentieth-century Great Society. What he calls “New America” has been corrupted, he suggests, by its deepening inequality of wealth and opportunity. And it’s not surprising that Packer places Silicon Valley and the multibillionaire Internet entrepreneur and libertarian Peter Thiel at the center of his narrative. The cofounder, with Elon Musk, of the online payments service PayPal, Thiel became a billionaire as the first outside investor in Facebook, after being introduced to Mark Zuckerberg by Sean Parker, the cofounder of Napster and Facebook’s founding president. The San Francisco–based Thiel lives in a “ten thousand square foot white wedding cake of a mansion,” 70 a smaller but no less meretricious building than the Battery.

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Cowan underlines the “stunning truth” that wages for men, over the last forty years, have fallen by 28%.78 He describes the divide in what he calls this new “hyper-meritocracy” as being between “billionaires” like the Battery member Sean Parker and the homeless “beggars” on the streets of San Francisco, and sees an economy in which “10 to 15 percent of the citizenry is extremely wealthy and has fantastically comfortable and stimulating lives.”79 Supporting many of Frank and Cook’s theses in their Winner-Take-All Society, Cowen suggests that the network lends itself to a superstar economy of “charismatic” teachers, lawyers, doctors, and other “prodigies” who will have feudal retinues of followers working for them.80 But, Cowen reassures us, there will be lots of jobs for “maids, chauffeurs and gardeners” who can “serve” wealthy entrepreneurs like his fellow chess enthusiast Peter Thiel. The feudal aspect of this new economy isn’t just metaphorical. The Chapman University geographer Joel Kotkin has broken down what he calls this “new feudalism” into different classes, including “oligarch” billionaires like Thiel and Uber’s Travis Kalanick, the “clerisy” of media commentators like Kevin Kelly, the “new serfs” of the working poor and the unemployed, and the “yeomanry” of the old “private sector middle class,” the professionals and skilled workers in towns like Rochester who are victims of the new winner-take-all networked economy.81 The respected MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, who are cautiously optimistic about what they call “the brilliant technologies” of “the Second Machine Age,” acknowledge that our networked society is creating a world of “stars and superstars” in a “winner-take-all” economy.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

It was highlighted by the civic-minded Code for America; it sponsored O’Reilly’s Gov 2.0 summit and adopts his “Government as a Platform” terminology, and was an early partner of USAid’s Food Security Open Data Challenge.52 Palantir received early funding from the CIA’s In-Q-Tel venture capital arm and from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, both organizations known for their deep commitment to openness and equality. Peter Thiel is Palantir’s Chairman of the Board: perhaps he will be pursuing open data projects for the secretive Bilderberg Group, on whose Steering Committee he sits? It would be nice to think that the shift to open data might undermine some vested interests without re-enacting Animal Farm, but the prospects are not bright.

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Internet culture is also supremely ambitious and self-confident. It’s a confidence captured in venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s saying that “software is eating the world.” In its outer reaches it is an ambition manifested in ideas of Seasteading (a movement to build self-governing floating cities, started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel) and the Singularity (a belief in “the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity,” originating with the ideas of inventor and now Google employee Ray Kurzweil). Just as Hollywood is both a physical location and a global industry with a distinctive set of traditions, beliefs, and practices, so Silicon Valley is more than a place—it is shorthand for the world of digital technology, specifically Internet technology.

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The funding behind the larger Sharing Economy companies highlights the contradictory currents that drive it. Billionaire and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has invested in both Airbnb and Uber; leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested in Airbnb, Lyft, and delivery service Instacart; Founders Fund, a firm set up and led by billionaire and ­PayPal founder Peter Thiel, has invested in Airbnb, Lyft, and TaskRabbit. ­Goldman Sachs is another investor in Uber as well as WeWork, which has also been funded by JP Morgan. Lending Club sends emails emphasizing that “Instead of paying interest to a credit card company or on a traditional bank loan, you get your loan through ordinary people like YOU who want to invest in YOUR success,” 14 but its board includes John Mack (ex–Morgan Stanley) and Larry Summers (former Treasury secretary).

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World
by James D. Miller
Published 14 Jun 2012

A belief in a coming Singularity is slowly gaining traction among the technological elite. As the New York Times reported in 2010, “Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity.”4 These early adopters include two self-made billionaires: Peter Thiel, a financial backer of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Larry Page, who helped found Singularity University. Peter Thiel was one of the founders of PayPal, and after selling the site to eBay, he used some of his money to become the key early investor in Facebook. Larry Page cofounded Google. Thiel and Page obtained their riches by successfully betting on technology.

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What it will not do is carry on as before. With great insight and fore thought, Miller’s Singularity Rising prepares us for the forking paths ahead by teasing out the consequences of an artificial intelligence explosion and by staking red flags on the important technological problems of the next three decades.” —Peter Thiel, self-made technology billionaire; co-founder, Singularity Summit “Many books are fun and interesting, but Singularity Rising is fun and interesting while focusing on some of the most important pieces of humanity’s most important problem.” —Luke Muehlhauser, executive director, Singularity Institute “We’ve waited too long for a thorough, articulate, general-audience account of modern thinking on exponentially increasing machine intelligence and its risks and rewards for humanity.

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In the year 2000, Eliezer founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Although the Institute has garnered less support than Eliezer believes is justified, the best testament to Eliezer’s credibility comes from the quality of the people who have either contributed to the Institute or have spoken at one of its events. These include: •Peter Thiel—self-made tech billionaire and key financier behind Face-book. Donated $1.1 million to the Institute;91 •Ray Kurzweil—famed investor and Singularity writer; •Justin Rattner—Intel’s chief technology officer; •Eric Drexler—the father of nanotechnology; •Peter Norvig—Director of Research at Google; •Aubrey de Grey—leading longevity researcher; •Stephen Wolfram—developer of the computation platform Mathematica; and •Jaan Tallinn—founding engineer of Skype and self-made tech decamillionaire who donated $100,000.92 I also spoke on the economics of the Singularity at the Institute’s 2008 Summit.

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World
by Anna Crowley Redding
Published 1 Jul 2019

They disagreed on just about everything—including the best software to run the business. It was so bad that Confinity cofounder Peter Thiel walked away from the company altogether. Elon may have been running a company that had huge internal issues, but he also had a new bride whom he had yet to take on a honeymoon. Nine months had passed since they said, “I do.” So in September, the newlyweds boarded a plane to Sydney, Australia. And while the plane was in the air for the long-haul flight, a group of Elon’s employees made their move. They pushed him out as CEO and brought back Peter Thiel to run the company. The honeymoon ended as soon as Justine and Elon landed and learned what happened.

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After all, he and his brother had started Zip2 from nothing, and now they were multimillionaires. Not only that, the Musk brothers had shaped the way people used the Internet. ELON’S BIG SPLURGE: A McLaren F1 sports car. Price tag? $1 million. Justine got the first ride. But—yikes! alert—not long after he bought the car, he wrecked it while showing it off to PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel. A Silver McLaren F1. (Photo by Joe Cheng.) And now with his bank account in pretty good shape, twenty-seven-year-old Elon needed to answer a big question: What next? NO ISLAND PARADISE I know what I’ll do with my millions. I’ll start a company with a fantastic idea: online banking.

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“I was a really lonely kid and he was a really lonely kid and that’s one of the things that attracted me to him. I thought he had this understanding of loneliness—how to create yourself in that.”59 Back at work, the intensity stepped up to a whole new level. Two other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, had been working on a similar concept at a different company called Confinity. The two companies became fierce competitors. But that spring, in March 2000, they agreed to join forces, and the companies merged. SPOTLIGHT: Jeremy Stoppelman was an X.com engineer. He would go on to become the CEO of review site Yelp.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

O’Brien, “The PayPal Mafia,” Fortune, Nov. 14, 2007, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://money.cnn.com/2007/11/13/magazines/fortune/paypal_mafia.fortune/index2.htm. 183 sold to eBay for $1.5 billion: Troy Wolverton, “It’s official: eBay Weds PayPal,” CNET News, Oct. 3, 2002, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/Its-official-eBay-weds-PayPal/2100-1017_3-960658.html. 183 “impact and force change”: Peter Thie, “Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, Apr. 13, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian. 183 “end the inevitability of death and taxes”: Chris Baker, “Live Free or Drown: Floating Utopias on the Cheap,” Wired, Jan. 19, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/magazine/17-02/mf_seasteading?currentPage=all. 183 “ ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron”: Thiel, “Education of a Libertarian.” 184 “makes a living being against computers”: Nicholas Carlson, “Peter Thiel Says Don’t Piss Off the Robots (or Bet on a Recovery),” Business Insider, Nov. 18, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-obama-ai-and-why-he-rents-his-mansion-2009-11#. 184 “which technologies to foster”: Ronald Bailey, “Technology Is at the Center,” Reason.com, May 2008, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://reason.com/archives/2008/05/01/technology-is-at-the-center/singlepage. 184 “way I think about the business”: Deepak Gopinath, “PayPal’s Thiel Scores 230 Percent Gain with Soros-Style Fund,” CanadianHedgeWatch .com, Dec. 4, 2006, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, at www.canadianhedgewatch.com/content/news/general/?

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currentPage=all. 183 “ ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron”: Thiel, “Education of a Libertarian.” 184 “makes a living being against computers”: Nicholas Carlson, “Peter Thiel Says Don’t Piss Off the Robots (or Bet on a Recovery),” Business Insider, Nov. 18, 2009, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-on-obama-ai-and-why-he-rents-his-mansion-2009-11#. 184 “which technologies to foster”: Ronald Bailey, “Technology Is at the Center,” Reason.com, May 2008, accessed Dec. 16, 2010, http://reason.com/archives/2008/05/01/technology-is-at-the-center/singlepage. 184 “way I think about the business”: Deepak Gopinath, “PayPal’s Thiel Scores 230 Percent Gain with Soros-Style Fund,” CanadianHedgeWatch .com, Dec. 4, 2006, accessed Jan. 30, 2011, at www.canadianhedgewatch.com/content/news/general/?id=1169. 184 “that voting will make things better”: Peter Thiel, “Your Suffrage Isn’t in Danger.

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Media moguls who get their start with a fierce commitment to the truth become the confidants of presidents and lose their edge; businesses begun as social ventures become preoccupied with delivering shareholder value. In any case, one consequence of the current system is that we can end up placing a great deal of power in the hands of people who can have some pretty far-out, not entirely well-developed political ideas. Take Peter Thiel, one of Zuckerberg’s early investors and mentors. Thiel has penthouse apartments in San Francisco and New York and a silver gullwing McLaren, the fastest car in the world. He also owns about 5 percent of Facebook. Despite his boyish, handsome features, Thiel often looks as though he’s brooding.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

The more I learned about transhumanism, the more I came to see that, for all its apparent extremity and strangeness, it was nonetheless exerting certain formative pressures on the culture of Silicon Valley, and thereby the broader cultural imagination of technology. Transhumanism’s influence seemed perceptible in the fanatical dedication of many tech entrepreneurs to the ideal of radical life extension—in the PayPal cofounder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel’s funding of various life extension projects, for instance, and in Google’s establishment of its biotech subsidiary Calico, aimed at generating solutions to the problem of human aging. And the movement’s influence was perceptible, too, in Elon Musk’s and Bill Gates’s and Stephen Hawking’s increasingly vehement warnings about the prospect of our species’ annihilation by an artificial superintelligence, not to mention in Google’s instatement of Ray Kurzweil, the high priest of the Technological Singularity, as its director of engineering.

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I’d work with people on some related area, like the encoding of memory, for instance, with a view to figuring out how that might fit into an overall road map for whole brain emulation.” Having worked for a while at Halcyon Molecular, a Silicon Valley gene-sequencing and nanotechnology start-up funded by Peter Thiel, he decided to stay in the Bay Area and start his own nonprofit aimed at advancing the cause to which he’d long been dedicated. He conceived of Carboncopies as a kind of central gathering point where researchers in various fields—nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, brain imaging, cognitive psychology, biotechnology—crucial to the development of substrate independent minds could meet to share their work and discuss its potential contribution to the cause.

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Another of the workshop’s invited participants was a man named Todd Huffman, the CEO of a San Francisco company called 3Scan, which happened to be pioneering exactly this technology. Todd was among the collaborators Randal had mentioned—one of the people who kept him regularly updated about their work, and its relevance to the overall project of uploading. Although one of 3Scan’s initial sources of start-up funding was Peter Thiel—a man who, although he did not explicitly identify with the transhumanist movement, was famously invested in the cause of vastly extending human life spans, in particular his own—it was not a company that had any explicit designs on the brain uploading market. (And the major reason for this was that such a market was nowhere near existing.)

How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell
Published 8 Apr 2019

Ibid., xvi. 37. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. 38. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 222. 39. Ibid., 227. 40. Ibid., 222. 41. Houriet, 11. 42. Ibid., 13. 43. Ibid., 24. 44. Mella Robinson, “An island nation that told a libertarian ‘seasteading’ group it could build a floating city has pulled out of the deal,” Business Insider, March 14, 2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/french-polynesia-ends-agreement-with-peter-thiel-seasteading-institute-2018-3. 45.

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Mella Robinson, “An island nation that told a libertarian ‘seasteading’ group it could build a floating city has pulled out of the deal,” Business Insider, March 14, 2018: https://www.businessinsider.com/french-polynesia-ends-agreement-with-peter-thiel-seasteading-institute-2018-3. 45. Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” The New York Times, January 11, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html. 46. Arendt, 227. 47. Susan X Day, “Walden Two at Fifty,” Michigan Quarterly Review XXXVIII (Spring 1999), http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0038.211. 48. B. F. Skinner, The Shaping of a Behaviorist (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 330 (as cited in “Walden Two at Fifty”). 49. Brian Dillon, “Poetry of Metal,” The Guardian, July 24, 2009: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/25/vladimir-tatlins-tower-st-petersburg. 50.

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The kind of escape that Walden Two embodies reminds me of a more recent utopian proposal. In 2008, Wayne Gramlich and Patri Friedman founded the nonprofit the Seasteading Institute, which seeks to establish autonomous island communities in international waters. For Silicon Valley investor and libertarian Peter Thiel, who supported the project early on, the prospect of a brand-new floating colony in a place outside the law was interesting indeed. In his 2009 essay “The Education of a Libertarian,” Thiel echoes Skinner’s conclusion that the future requires a total escape from politics. Having decided that “democracy and freedom are incompatible,” Thiel’s gesture toward some other option that is somehow not totalitarian is either naive or disingenuous: Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode for escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country; and for this reason I have focused my efforts on new technologies that may create a new space for freedom.37 For Thiel, only the sea, outer space, and cyberspace can provide this “new space.”

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

The list of attendees included executives from Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, IBM, and Tesla. 3 See, for example, “Google Gets a Seat on the Trump Transition Team” by David Dayen for The Intercept, published November 15, 2016, at https://theintercept.com/2016/11/15/google-gets-a-seat-on-the-trump-transition-team/. 4 See “Y Combinator boss Sam Altman says he’s not going to cut ties with Peter Thiel for supporting Donald Trump” by Peter Kafka (probably no relation) on October 16, 2016, for Recode, at https://www.vox.com/2016/10/16/13302120/y-combinator-sam-altman-peter-thiel-donald-trump. Thiel’s affiliation with Y Combinator ended soon after that under unclear circumstances, as reported by Ryan Mac for Buzzfeed News on November 17, 2017: “Y Combinator Cuts Ties With Peter Thiel After Ending Part-Time Partner Program”, at https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/y-combinator-cuts-ties-with-peter-thiel-ends-part-time. 5 For a brief overview of incidents in this vein, see “The Ugly Unethical Underside of Silicon Valley” by Erin Griffith for Fortune, published December 28, 2016, at https://fortune.com/longform/silicon-valley-startups-fraud-venture-capital/. 6 See, for example, “Uber Drivers Speak Out: We’re Making A Lot Less Money Than Uber Is Telling People” by Maya Kosoff for Business Insider, published October 29, 2014, at https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-drivers-say-theyre-making-less-than-minimum-wage-2014-10. 7 See, for example, “Inside an Amazon Warehouse, the Relentless Need to ‘“Make Rate’”” by Hamilton Nolan for Gawker, published June 6, 2016, at https://gawker.com/inside-an-amazon-warehouse-the-relentless-need-to-mak-1780800336. 8 See, for example, “Foxconn Working Conditions Slammed bBy Workers Rights Group” by Steven Musil for CNET, published May 30, 2012, at https://www.cnet.com/news/foxconn-working-conditions-slammed-by-workers-rights-group/. 9 Several tech billionaires have signed “The Giving Pledge”, a movement led by Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.

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The person who invited us was a young founder whom Nick had recently connected with on LinkedIn, and we didn’t know what to expect. It turned out to be a hacker house inhabited by about a dozen people in the startup scene, all founders or soon-to-be founders waiting for the right bolt of inspiration to strike. One of the inhabitants was a Thiel fellow — meaning that PayPal co-founder and controversial billionaire Peter Thiel paid him $100,000 to put off university — and he gave Nick tips on his own Thiel application. I was the only woman present, and besides us, there was only one non-white attendee, who didn’t live in the house; as the night went on, his role began to feel like that of a punching bag for the house’s inhabitants.

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A new batch of founders was about to arrive, and the accelerator partners strongly hinted that we should get out of the office to make room for them. Under a heavy cloud of retreat, we packed our things. SIX: CRASH A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world. — Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and partner at San Francisco venture capital Founders Fund1 Late November in Montreal was the cusp of winter: rainy days, temperatures dipping to below freezing at night, intermittent bursts of snow that quickly faded into the dull grey of concrete. We had thought that we would return with investors, customers, and a clear path forward.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

One of the founders was a self-educated philosopher and self-described artificial intelligence researcher named Eliezer Yudkowsky, who had introduced Legg to the idea of superintelligence in the early 2000s when they were working with a New York–based start-up called Intelligensis. But Hassabis and Legg had their eyes on one of the other conference founders: Peter Thiel. In the summer of 2010, Hassabis and Legg arranged to address the Singularity Summit, knowing that each speaker would be invited to a private party at Thiel’s town house in San Francisco. Thiel had been part of the team that founded PayPal, the online payments service, before securing an even bigger reputation—and an even bigger fortune—as an early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Airbnb.

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Hassabis did the talking, explaining that he was not just a gamer but a neuroscientist, that they were building AGI in the image of the human brain, that they would begin this long quest with systems that learned to play games, and that the ongoing exponential growth in global computing power would drive their technology to far greater heights. It was a pitch that surprised even Peter Thiel. “This might be a bit much,” he said. But they kept talking, and the conversation continued over the next several weeks, with both Thiel and the partners at his venture capital firm, the Founders Fund. In the end, his main objection was not that the company was overly ambitious but that it was based in London.

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Hassabis and Legg enlisted both Hinton and LeCun as technical advisors, and the start-up quickly hired many of the field’s up-and-coming researchers, including Vlad Mnih, who studied with Hinton in Toronto; a Turkish-born researcher, Koray Kavukcuoglu, who worked under LeCun in New York; and Alex Graves, who studied under Jürgen Schmidhuber in Switzerland before a postdoc with Hinton. As they’d told Peter Thiel, the starting point was games. Games had been a proving ground for AI since the ’50s, when computer scientists built the first automated chess players. In 1990, researchers marked a turning point when they built a machine called Chinook that beat the world’s best checkers player. Seven years later, IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer topped chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us 60. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h5cY7d6nPU 61. http://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg-luck-day-facebook-turned-down-billion-dollars.html 62. Pink, Daniel H. (2011-04-05). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Kindle Locations 1836-1848). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition. Conclusion 63. JFK’s speech at Rice University on September 12th, 1962 64. Source: Peter Thiel, Zero to One 65. Author interview with Rob Walling, to download the full interview, go to http://taylorpearson.me/eoj Next Steps 66. http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2014/08/10/high-intensity-strength-training.aspx 67.

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Why was one group living in fear of the threat of job loss, unreasonably long hours, and shrinking wages, while another was so overwhelmed by new opportunities they don’t know what to do? Two years after I’d first shown up in Bangkok, I finally got it. What’s Your Secret? “If you do things that are safe but feel risky, you gain a significant advantage in the marketplace.” Seth Godin Multi-millionaire investor Peter Thiel begins every interview with companies he’s considering investing in with the same three questions: What’s your secret? What important truth do very few people agree with you on? What do you believe that is both contrarian and correct? What Thiel and the group in Bangkok understood is based on an old axiom from Archimedes over two thousand years ago: “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

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If you look at the current head coaches in the NBA or NFL, the 80/20 rule applies. 80% of them usually have common roots in apprenticing with 20% of the head coaches of the past generation. Technology startups have started to develop “mafias,” or groups of successful entrepreneurs that can trace their roots back to a common source. Elon Musk (Currently of SpaceX and Tesla), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), and Peter Thiel (Palantir) all worked together at PayPal.42 Trajectory Theory—A Guide to Hiring an Apprentice (or Getting Hired) Three-time New York Times bestselling author Tucker Max has hired a lot of people to work in an apprentice-type position, and they’ve almost always gone on to be successful in future projects and companies.

The Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 24 Jan 2011

Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content. http://us.penguingroup.com Acknowledgments For useful comments and discussions, I wish to thank Peter Thiel, Daniel Sutter, Alex Tabarrok, Garett Jones, Bryan Caplan, Robin Hanson, Michael Mandel, Stephen Morrow, Natasha Cowen, Teresa Hartnett, John Nye, Jason Fichtner, Michelle Dawson, Nathan Molteni, Michael Munger, seminar participants at Duke University, and Jayme Lemke. I dedicate this work to Michael Mandel and Peter Thiel, who have blazed the way. The Low-Hanging Fruit We Ate Land, Technology, and Uneducated Kids America is in disarray and our economy is failing us.

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Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, and Jeffrey Sachs are all more famous, prizewinning commentators on the questions of macroeconomics and development, and from them you will hear a lot of talk about liquidity traps, currency crises, and the future of Africa. But this group misses many of the critical angles of science and technology and the broader historical picture of how a technological plateau is possible. Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook (he shows up as a character in the movie Social Network, albeit poorly portrayed), also deserves credit for promoting the idea of an innovation and productivity slowdown. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, he put it bluntly: “People don’t want to believe that technology is broken....

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I am using a pre-crisis number to adjust for the fall in GDP from the financial crisis; in that sense, this number is an approximate one and thus a more conservative estimate than what a completely current calculation would yield. For one example of Michael Mandel’s writings, see “Official GDP, Productivity Stats Tell a Different Story of U.S. Economy,” Seeking Alpha, May 10, 2010, http://seekingalpha.com/article/204083-official-gdpproductivity-stats-tell-a-different-story-of-u-s-economy. The Peter Thiel quotation is from Holman W. Jenkins Jr., “Technology = Salvation, An early investor in Facebook and the founder of Clarium Capital on the subprime crisis and why American ingenuity has hit a dead end,” The Wall Street Journal, October 9, 2010. Chapter 3 Does the Internet Change Everything?

System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
by Rob Reich , Mehran Sahami and Jeremy M. Weinstein
Published 6 Sep 2021

“OKRs have helped”: John Doerr, Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs (New York: Penguin, 2018), xii. The countercultural notion: Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies (New York: HarperCollins, 2018). “Competition,” he says, “is for losers”: Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers with Peter Thiel (How to Start a Startup 2014: 5),” Y Combinator, uploaded March 22, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k. he quickly rose: David Shaw, not uncoincidentally, received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University and was a professor at Columbia before starting the company that bears his name.

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The era of self-regulation is over,” Twitter, June 3, 2019, https://twitter.com/speakerpelosi/status/1135698760397393921. CHAPTER 3: The Winner-Take-All Race Between Disruption and Democracy “One of the things”: Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” New York Times, January 11, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/fashion/peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html. systematically mapped the libertarian attitudes: David Broockman, Gregory Ferenstein, and Neil Malhotra, “Predispositions and the Political Behavior of American Economic Elites: Evidence from Technology Entrepreneurs,” American Journal of Political Science 63, no. 1 (November 19, 2018): 212–33.

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Buyers want to go to the place with the most sellers, and sellers want to go to the place with the most buyers. And when the buyers at those sites are advertisers, the product they’re buying is you—or, more accurately, your attention. Conveniently, tech pioneers are happy to invert economic orthodoxy when it serves their interests. Peter Thiel, a founder of multiple venture capitalist firms, believes in monopoly, at least in technology markets. “Competition,” he says, “is for losers.” The Engineers Take the Reins The oft-told history of Silicon Valley as an epicenter of technological innovation traces its way back to Frederick Terman, a Stanford engineering professor who after World War II would go on to serve as dean of engineering and ultimately provost.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

He became one of the first students in a new major called Symbolic Systems, a combination of philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and computer science. He met his future wife, Michelle Yee, whom he won over, at least as he remembers it, in a typically Hoffman way by outsmarting a much more conventionally handsome rival for her affections. He also made a group of lifelong friends, such as Peter Thiel, a German-born libertarian, later to become famous as a Silicon Valley investor who liked to make provocatively candid pronouncements that were designed to offend people. (Hoffman and Thiel ran successfully for the Stanford student senate as a kind of balanced ticket, with Hoffman as the left-winger and Thiel as the right-winger.)

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In 1997 Hoffman started his own company, SocialNet, which created a way for people to connect with each other for various purposes, mainly dating, using pseudonyms. After a few years, he sold SocialNet to a company called Spark Networks, which now owns the religious dating sites Jdate and Christian Mingle. Then he became the chief operating officer of PayPal, the money transferring service, where Peter Thiel was the founder and chief executive officer. Hoffman had always believed that online communities should be organized around some fundamental human need, such as love or money—he liked to say that you have to tap into at least one of the seven deadly sins. Now he was switching from lust to greed, also correcting an initial mistaken hypothesis he had absorbed from the gaming world, that people would not want to join online communities under their real names.

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As Hoffman later wrote, “At PayPal, we broke the rules, but we did so because we were working toward a better set of rules for everyone.” In the expected order of things, big financial institutions would have established themselves as dominant in the online payments business. That a group of young men whom Peter Thiel liked to describe as having Asperger’s syndrome got out ahead of Visa, Wells Fargo, and other competitors—not to mention an internal division eBay had launched to offer its customers the same service that PayPal offered—was testament to their willingness to operate outside the constraints that governments impose on banks and to their unconventional conviction that building up a big user base was more important than making money, at least in the short run.

The Scandal of Money
by George Gilder
Published 23 Feb 2016

Distributed to the trade by Perseus Distribution 250 West 57th Street New York, NY 10107 To Bruce Chapman, friend and guide for sixty years Contents PrologueWinning the Debate Chapter 1The Dream and the Dollar Chapter 2Justice before Growth Chapter 3Friedman and the Enigma of Money Chapter 4The Chinese Challenge Chapter 5The High Cost of Bad Money Chapter 6Money in Information Theory Chapter 7What Bitcoin Can Teach Chapter 8Where “Hayeks” Go Wrong Chapter 9The Piketty-Turner Thesis Chapter 10Hypertrophy of Finance Chapter 11Main Street Pushed Aside Chapter 12Wall Street Sells Its Soul Chapter 13A Wrinkle in Time Chapter 14Restoring Real Money Acknowledgments Key Terms for the Information Theory of Money Notes Index The source and root of all monetary evil [is] the government monopoly on the issue and control of money. —Friedrich Hayek Prologue Winning the Debate Humans don’t decide what to build by making choices from some cosmic catalog of options given in advance; instead, by creating new technologies, we rewrite the plan of the world. —Peter Thiel, Zero to One (2014) Will conservatives win the coming economic debate? The nation depends on it. We deserve to win, after all. We have the best economic ideas, so we say, aligned with constitutional liberty and the American Dream. The economy is in trouble, and after two terms of President Barack Obama the Democrats are mostly to blame.

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Dissolved were the maps and metrics across both space and time. The spatial index is the web of exchange rates between currencies that mediate all global trade. This is a horizontal axis, the geographical span of enterprise. Here existing products are replicated across now-globalized space—in Peter Thiel’s trope, from “one to n.” The indices of time are the interest rates that mediate between past and future—the vertical dimension that takes the economy into the future, what Thiel depicts as the vectors from “zero to one.”8 Since the early 1970s these once-golden gauges and guideposts have lost their meaning, subject now to constant manipulation by government bodies around the globe and by their increasingly nationalized banking systems.

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Leading economists such as the former Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers and Robert Gordon of the National Bureau of Economic Research have concluded that the world’s economies are entering an era of “secular stagnation,” not merely a cyclical slowdown but a permanent decline of entrepreneurial innovation and technological advance.6 Peter Thiel, by all odds the world’s most visionary venture capitalist–philosopher, has declared that of four possibilities for the world economy—recurrent collapse, plateau, extinction, and technological takeoff—“the hardest one to imagine [is] accelerating takeoff toward a much better future.”7 Deepening the global economic doldrums is a forced transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street so gigantic that it has sharply skewed global measures of the distribution of wealth and income, bringing to a halt fifty years of miraculous and broad-based advances in global living standards.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 6 Dec 2016

He said, ‘There needs to be one decisive reason, and then the worthiness of the trip needs to be measured against that one reason. If I go, then we can backfill into the schedule all the other secondary activities. But if I go for a blended reason, I’ll almost surely come back and feel like it was a waste of time.’ ” * * * Peter Thiel Peter Thiel (TW: @peterthiel, with 1 tweet and 130K+ followers; foundersfund.com) is a serial company founder (PayPal, Palantir), billionaire investor (the first outside investor in Facebook and more than a hundred others), and author of the book Zero to One. His teachings on differentiation, value creation, and competition alone have helped me make some of the best investment decisions of my life (such as Uber, Alibaba, and more).

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Novak (p. 378) Alexis Ohanian (p. 194) Amanda Palmer (p. 520) Rhonda Patrick (p. 6) Caroline Paul (p. 459) Martin Polanco (p. 109) Charles Poliquin (p. 74) Maria Popova (p. 406) Rolf Potts (p. 362) Naval Ravikant (p. 546) Gabby Reece (p. 92) Tony Robbins (p. 210) Robert Rodriguez (p. 628) Seth Rogen (p. 531) Kevin Rose (p. 340) Rick Rubin (p. 502) Chris Sacca (p. 164) Arnold Schwarzenegger (p. 176) Ramit Sethi (p. 287) Mike Shinoda (p. 352) Jason Silva (p. 589) Derek Sivers (p. 184) Joshua Skenes (p. 500) Christopher Sommer (p. 9) Morgan Spurlock (p. 221) Kelly Starrett (p. 122) Neil Strauss (p. 347) Cheryl Strayed (p. 515) Chade-Meng Tan (p. 154) Peter Thiel (p. 232) Pavel Tsatsouline (p. 85) Luis von Ahn (p. 331) Josh Waitzkin (p. 577) Eric Weinstein (p. 523) Shaun White (p. 271) Jocko Willink (p. 412) Rainn Wilson (p. 543) Chris Young (p. 318) Andrew Zimmern (p. 540) Contents FOREWORD ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS READ THIS FIRST—HOW TO USE THIS BOOK * * * Part 1: Healthy Amelia Boone Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick Christopher Sommer Gymnast Strong Dominic D’Agostino Patrick Arnold Joe De Sena Wim “The Iceman” Hof Rick Rubin’s Barrel Sauna Jason Nemer AcroYoga—Thai and Fly Deconstructing Sports and Skills with Questions Peter Attia Justin Mager Charles Poliquin The Slow-Carb Diet® Cheat Sheet My 6-Piece Gym in a Bag Pavel Tsatsouline Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reece & Brian MacKenzie James Fadiman Martin Polanco & Dan Engle Kelly Starrett Paul Levesque (Triple H) Jane McGonigal Adam Gazzaley 5 Tools for Faster and Better Sleep 5 Morning Rituals that Help Me Win the Day Mind Training 101 Three Tips from a Google Pioneer Coach Sommer—The Single Decision * * * Part 2: Wealthy Chris Sacca Marc Andreessen Arnold Schwarzenegger Derek Sivers Alexis Ohanian “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me) Matt Mullenweg Nicholas McCarthy Tony Robbins Casey Neistat Morgan Spurlock What My Morning Journal Looks Like Reid Hoffman Peter Thiel Seth Godin James Altucher How to Create a Real-World MBA Scott Adams Shaun White The Law of Category Chase Jarvis Dan Carlin Ramit Sethi 1,000 True Fans—Revisited Hacking Kickstarter Alex Blumberg The Podcast Gear I Use Ed Catmull Tracy DiNunzio Phil Libin Chris Young Daymond John Noah Kagan Kaskade Luis von Ahn The Canvas Strategy Kevin Rose Gut Investing Neil Strauss Mike Shinoda Justin Boreta Scott Belsky How to Earn Your Freedom Peter Diamandis Sophia Amoruso B.J.

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Novak (p. 378) Alexis Ohanian (p. 194) Amanda Palmer (p. 520) Rhonda Patrick (p. 6) Caroline Paul (p. 459) Martin Polanco (p. 109) Charles Poliquin (p. 74) Maria Popova (p. 406) Rolf Potts (p. 362) Naval Ravikant (p. 546) Gabby Reece (p. 92) Tony Robbins (p. 210) Robert Rodriguez (p. 628) Seth Rogen (p. 531) Kevin Rose (p. 340) Rick Rubin (p. 502) Chris Sacca (p. 164) Arnold Schwarzenegger (p. 176) Ramit Sethi (p. 287) Mike Shinoda (p. 352) Jason Silva (p. 589) Derek Sivers (p. 184) Joshua Skenes (p. 500) Christopher Sommer (p. 9) Morgan Spurlock (p. 221) Kelly Starrett (p. 122) Neil Strauss (p. 347) Cheryl Strayed (p. 515) Chade-Meng Tan (p. 154) Peter Thiel (p. 232) Pavel Tsatsouline (p. 85) Luis von Ahn (p. 331) Josh Waitzkin (p. 577) Eric Weinstein (p. 523) Shaun White (p. 271) Jocko Willink (p. 412) Rainn Wilson (p. 543) Chris Young (p. 318) Andrew Zimmern (p. 540) Contents FOREWORD ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS READ THIS FIRST—HOW TO USE THIS BOOK * * * Part 1: Healthy Amelia Boone Rhonda Perciavalle Patrick Christopher Sommer Gymnast Strong Dominic D’Agostino Patrick Arnold Joe De Sena Wim “The Iceman” Hof Rick Rubin’s Barrel Sauna Jason Nemer AcroYoga—Thai and Fly Deconstructing Sports and Skills with Questions Peter Attia Justin Mager Charles Poliquin The Slow-Carb Diet® Cheat Sheet My 6-Piece Gym in a Bag Pavel Tsatsouline Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reece & Brian MacKenzie James Fadiman Martin Polanco & Dan Engle Kelly Starrett Paul Levesque (Triple H) Jane McGonigal Adam Gazzaley 5 Tools for Faster and Better Sleep 5 Morning Rituals that Help Me Win the Day Mind Training 101 Three Tips from a Google Pioneer Coach Sommer—The Single Decision * * * Part 2: Wealthy Chris Sacca Marc Andreessen Arnold Schwarzenegger Derek Sivers Alexis Ohanian “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me) Matt Mullenweg Nicholas McCarthy Tony Robbins Casey Neistat Morgan Spurlock What My Morning Journal Looks Like Reid Hoffman Peter Thiel Seth Godin James Altucher How to Create a Real-World MBA Scott Adams Shaun White The Law of Category Chase Jarvis Dan Carlin Ramit Sethi 1,000 True Fans—Revisited Hacking Kickstarter Alex Blumberg The Podcast Gear I Use Ed Catmull Tracy DiNunzio Phil Libin Chris Young Daymond John Noah Kagan Kaskade Luis von Ahn The Canvas Strategy Kevin Rose Gut Investing Neil Strauss Mike Shinoda Justin Boreta Scott Belsky How to Earn Your Freedom Peter Diamandis Sophia Amoruso B.J.

The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism
by David Golumbia
Published 25 Sep 2016

But the analysis of cyberlibertarianism is getting at something subtler: the way that a set of slogans and beliefs associated with the spread of digital technology incorporate critical parts of a right-wing worldview even as they manifest a surface rhetorical commitment to values that do not immediately appear to come from the right. Certainly, many leaders in the digital technology industries, and quite a few leaders who do not work for corporations, openly declare their adherence to libertarian or other right-wing ideologies. Just a brief list of these includes figures like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Eric Raymond, Jimmy Wales, Eric Schmidt, and Travis Kalanick. Furthermore, the number of leaders who demur from such political points of view is small, and their demurrals are often shallow. But the group of people whose beliefs deserve to be labeled “cyberlibertarian” is much larger than this.

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One of the main proponents of DAOs and DACs is Vitalik Buterin, author of the passage about “smart contracts” above, “a Canadian college dropout and Bitcoin enthusiast” (Schneider 2014), cofounder of Bitcoin Magazine, and a recipient of one of the US$100,000 Thiel Fellowships funded by the eponymous right-wing technology entrepreneur and PayPal founder Peter Thiel (Rizzo 2014a)—fellowships that specifically promote the rejection of higher education, in a manner harmonious with the rejection by Thiel and others on the right wing of public goods (Lind 2014). Buterin is a cofounder of Ethereum, the best-known project to generalize blockchain technology into applications that go beyond currency-like systems.

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Lepore, Jill. 2010. The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. Levin, Mark R. 2009. Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto. New York: Simon and Schuster. Lind, Michael. 2014. “Why Celebrity ‘Genius’ Peter Thiel Is Grossly Overrated.” Salon (September 11). http://www.salon.com/. “List of Bitcoin Heists.” 2014. Bitcointalk.org forum. http://bitcointalk.org/. Liu, Alec. 2013. “Why Bitcoins Are Just Like Gold.” Vice Motherboard (March 21). http://motherboard.vice.com/. Lopp, Jameson. 2016. “Bitcoin and the Rise of the Cypherpunks.”

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank
by John Tamny
Published 30 Apr 2016

Mike Isaac, “Upstarts Raiding Giants for Staff in Silicon Valley,” New York Times, August 19, 2015. 3. Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007), 70. 4. Ibid., 73. 5. Julianne Pepitone & Stacy Cawley, “Facebook’s first big investor, Peter Thiel, cashes out,” CNNMoney, August 20, 2012. 6. Peter Thiel, with Blake Masters, Zero to One (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 84. 7. Tim Harford, Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure (New York: Farrar Strauss and Giroux, 2011), 236. 8. George Gilder, Knowledge and Power (Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2013), 5. 9. Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men behind America’s Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 216. 10.

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Schumpeter further described entrepreneurialism as the “opening of a new market, that is a market into which the particular branch of manufacturer of the country in question has not previously entered.”4 Entrepreneurs are doing something entirely new, something that has never been tested by the markets before. By that very description, such ventures are most often going to end in failure. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel earned his initial fortune as a cofounder of PayPal. However, his most famous investment success to this day was the $500,000 he invested in Facebook in 2004.5 His PayPal wealth meant that he had money to lose, and odds were the then largely unknown social network would not succeed. That his stake would eventually be measured in the billions is all the evidence we need to prove that he risked losing his entire investment.

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So it’s no major insight to say that if Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Marco Rubio had a clue about what companies and business concepts were going to prosper in the future, they would not be members of the political class. Simply put, wealth in the hands of politicians is not the same as wealth in the hands of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Peter Thiel, or Jeff Bezos. Government can’t spend or invest us to prosperity for reasons of talent alone. My sermonizing, while true, ultimately amounts to shooting fish in the most crowded of barrels. While the talent differential between politicians and successful investors is blindingly obvious, to point it out is arguably to miss the greater point.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

James Bandler, Justin Elliott, and Patricia Callahan, “Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank,” ProPublica, June 24, 2021. 47. Peter A. Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 21. 48. Sharon Weinberger, “Techie Software Soldier Spy,” New York Magazine, September 28, 2020. 49. Sam Biddle, “How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Helped the NSA Spy on the Whole World,” The Intercept, February 22, 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world. 50.

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If we think about Roko’s Basilisk as a character in a story, we can read the emotional appeal it makes to its implied readership: I’m very powerful, but I was once weak. Were you kind to me? Did you help me? Probably not. And for that, I’ll make you sorry… It’s a metal-plated vengeance fantasy, reflecting the mentality of a bullied child. MIRI’s founding donor is a man named Peter Thiel.38 Peter Thiel grew up the child of a defeated and humiliated people: the post-Nazi, post-colonial German right. Peter was born in 1967, and before the family settled in Foster City, California, in 1977, his chemical engineer father, Klaus, worked for mining companies in South Africa. By the time the ten-year-old got to Reagan’s California, he’d already confronted history up close in apartheid South Africa, where even a child could see the people pressed against their brittle fetters.

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As of this writing, the spreadsheet contains over 60 names. Andrew Granato, “How Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review Built a Silicon Valley Empire,” Stanford Politics, November 27, 2017. xvi Thiel cashed out a majority of his Facebook position again in 2017, and again in 2020. xvii How much did Facebook know and when did it know it? Thiel’s biographer Max Chafkin begs the question: “If Facebook had been a victim, rather than a willing accomplice of Cambridge Analytica, why had the consultancy been working with a company [Palantir] controlled by Zuckerberg’s mentor?” See Max Chafkin, The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power (Penguin Press, 2021), 220.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late
by Michael Ellsberg
Published 15 Jan 2011

Many thanks to Gregory Berns, PhD; Chris Brogan; Victor Cheng; Keith Ferrazzi; Seth Godin; Ace Greenberg; Cameron Herold; Josh Kaufman; Robert Kiyosaki; Randy Komisar; John Kremer; Charles Murray, PhD; Kenneth Roman; Marian Schembari; Peter Thiel; and Johnny Truant. The following people all connected me to one or more interviewees: Elliott Bisnow; Justin Cohen; Adair Curtis; Mike Del Ponte; Mike Faith; Tim Ferriss; Jonathan Fields; Marie Forleo; Sandor Gardos; Adam Gilad; David Hassell; Cameron Herold; Ken Howery; Lisa Kotecki; Jena la Flamme; Tonya Leigh; Justine Musk; Kenneth Roman; Polly Samson; Marian Schembari; Yanik Silver; and Peter Thiel. Thank you so much for your help. John Kremer’s incredible “College Dropouts Hall of Fame” (http://www.collegedropoutshalloffame.com) provided inspiration, and many of my initial ideas about whom to contact for interviews.

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If you’re driven only by a desire for the status that is associated with being an entrepreneur, you’re not going to be willing to deal with the humiliation of sleeping on people’s couches.” Sean famously connected with Mark Zuckerberg when TheFacebook was an infant, and played a crucial role in making Facebook what it is today, adding central innovations like photo sharing and friend-tagging, and introducing Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel (whom we’ll meet later in the book), Facebook’s first investor. Facebook is now well on its way to becoming the single point of login and user authentication for a large swath of the Internet. Sean, with a 7 percent stake in Facebook, is now worth billions. So the first part of marketing has nothing to do with communications or ads or messages.

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At the time of this writing, he had recently taken a $10-per-hour job as a legal temp. WHEN ARE WE GOING TO START GIVING OUR YOUNG PEOPLE BETTER CAREER ADVICE? I hope my book is a step in the right direction. ■ IF YOU’RE UNDER TWENTY, THIS MAN MAY WANT TO PAY YOU $100,000 TO “STOP OUT” OF COLLEGE Peter Thiel is another person who sees that higher education may be going the way of the housing market. Thiel cofounded PayPal, which sold to eBay for $1.5 billion. In 2004, he famously invested $500,000 in Facebook—the first outside investment in the company—and the stake is now worth billions. As president of Clarium Capital, he oversees over $2 billion in assets.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And
by Sonia Arrison
Published 22 Aug 2011

Instead, she truly is a great general, who is marshaling all of the vast forces of humanity in its titanic struggle against the Great Enemy of the world, whose true name is Death. I look forward to the battle being joined. Death was natural in the past, but so was the instinct to fight it. The future only has room for one of them. Peter Thiel Spring 2011 San Francisco CHAPTER 1 Humankind’s Eternal Quest for the Fountain of Youth DR. TYRELL: What seems to be the problem? ROY: Death. —Blade Runner FOR AS LONG as humans have been around, they have dreamed about living forever. Now, for the first time in history, science is bringing humanity closer to realizing that dream through advances that could potentially add hundreds of years to the average life span.

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The headliner for the event was venture capitalist (VC) Ester Dyson, who sits on the board of directors for genomics company 23andMe and is a former chairman of the illustrious Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the agency governing the Internet address system. Hedge fund manager, VC, and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel also delivered a keynote, as did multi-prize-winning scientist Bruce Ames, after whom the Ames test for carcinogens is named. Venture capitalists are now paying close attention to the longevity space. Ester Dyson discussed her interest in an interview with the New York Times. “I’m looking at a lot of companies that are in the formation mode of health and self tracking platforms,” she said in February 2010.40 This helps explain why she was speaking at a life-extension conference organized by Peterson, who is superconnected to individuals in that industry.

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More importantly, eventually this passion will change the world. Those who have already made it big in the technology industry have not failed to notice. Aside from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, other tech titans who are driving interest in the longevity meme include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. TECH TITANS TAKING ON BIOLOGY “Death has never made any sense to me,” Larry Ellison told investigative reporter Mike Wilson, who wrote an authorized biography of the so-called bad boy of Silicon Valley. “How can a person be there and then just vanish, just not be there?.

The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 20 Feb 2024

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “following a trail blazed”: Zack Beauchamp, “Ron DeSantis Is Following a Trail Blazed by a Hungarian Authoritarian,” Vox, Apr. 28, 2022, vox.com/​policy-and-politics/​2022/​4/28/​23037788/​ron-desantis-florida-viktor-orban-hungary-right-authoritarian. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT members of the New Right: James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair, May 2022, vanityfair.com/​news/​2022/​04/​inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “No matter what you’re going to do”: Bob Woodward, “In His Debut in Washington’s Power Struggles, Gingrich Threw a Bomb,” The Washington Post, Dec. 24, 2011, washingtonpost.com/​politics/​in-his-debut-in-washingtons-power-struggles-gingrich-threw-a-bomb/​2011/​12/​22/​gIQA6GKCGP_story.html.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Viktor Orbán: Shaun Walker, “Viktor Orbán Sparks Outrage with Attack on ‘Race Mixing’ in Europe,” The Guardian, July 24, 2022, theguardian.com/​world/​2022/​jul/​24/​viktor-orban-against-race-mixing-europe-hungary/; Patrick Smith, “Why Trump and the GOP Love Hungary’s Authoritarian Leader,” NBC News, Aug. 4, 2022, nbcnews.com/​news/​world/​viktor-orban-cpac-trump-gop-hungary-leader-rcna40199/; David Smith, “Viktor Orbán Turns Texas Conference into Transatlantic Far-Right Love-In,” The Guardian, Aug. 6, 2022, theguardian.com/​us-news/​2022/​aug/​06/​viktor-orban-cpac-far-right-us-trump/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In a 2022 Vanity Fair article: James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair, Apr. 20, 2022, vanityfair.com/​news/​2022/​04/​inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT nihilism of political leaders: Donald B. Ayer and Alan Charles Raul, “Naked Republican Hypocrisy Is Destroying Trust in Supreme Court: Reagan, Bush Lawyers,” USA Today, Oct. 12, 2020, usatoday.com/​story/​opinion/​2020/​10/​12/​republican-mcconnell-hypocrisy-destroying-supreme-court-column/​5966069002/.

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These days, “conservative” is no longer a word that can credibly be used to describe the GOP. For that matter, members of the New Right like to portray themselves as radicals and outsiders battling to bring down what they variously refer to as “the Cathedral” (Curtis Yarvin), “the regime” (J. D. Vance), “the Ministry of Truth” (Peter Thiel), or simply “the matrix.” In a weirdly surreal twist, many on today’s far right use the rhetoric associated with far-left student protesters in the 1960s: calling for the overthrow of the establishment and the destruction of the status quo, and calling out the threat they see posed by the FBI and the CIA.

The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age
by Tim Wu
Published 14 Jun 2018

The Trust Movement’s arguments were, in part, economic: Men like Rockefeller and Morgan simply took the monopoly as a superior form of business organization that was saving the economy from ruin. The U.S. and world economy had undergone terrible shocks in the 1890s, and hundreds of firms were thrown into bankruptcy. Many blamed “ruinous competition” for driving prices too low. In the same way that Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel today argues that monopoly “drives progress” and that “competition is for losers,” adherents to the Trust Movement thought Adam Smith’s fierce competition had no place in a modern, industrialized economy. Monopolists liked to portray themselves as part of a progressive movement, striving toward a better age, and justified their work using the then-fashionable ideology of “Social Darwinism” and the writings of its English exponent, Herbert Spencer.

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This could be a somewhat awkward undertaking for some of the firms who, as startups, had been committed to the old internet ideals of openness and chaos. But now it was all for the best: a law of nature, a chance for the monopolists to do good for the universe. The cheerer-in-chief for the monopoly form is Peter Thiel, author of Competition Is for Losers. Labeling the competitive economy a “relic of history” and a “trap,” he proclaimed that “only one thing can allow a business to transcend the daily brute struggle for survival: monopoly profits.” The big tech firms are a little more circumspect than Thiel. For Facebook, it is not trying to build a global empire of influence so much as “bringing the world closer together.”

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United States, 356 U.S. 1 (1958) (Black, J.). 17 “Shall the industrial policy of America”: “Competition,” Louis Brandeis, American Legal News, January 1913 at 5. 17 “bad history, bad policy, and bad law”: “The Political Content of Antitrust,” Robert Pitofsky, University of Pennsylvania Law Review 127 (1979): 1051. 18 “suppress or even destroy”: Board of Trade of City of Chicago v. United States, 246 U.S. 231 (1918) (Brandeis, J.). 21 “a kingly prerogative”: 21 Cong. Rec. 2457 (1889), statement of Sen. John Sherman. CHAPTER ONE 26 monopoly “drives progress”: “Competition Is for Losers,” Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 12, 2014. 27 “to clear the world of them”: Social Statics, Herbert Spencer, John Chapman, 1851. 28 “The American Beauty Rose”: The History of the Standard Oil Company, Ida M. Tarbell, McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904. 28 “arrest the wheels of progress”: Trusts, S.C.T.

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
by Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha
Published 14 Feb 2012

When PayPal went public in 2002 (one of only two companies to do so that year), it gave hope to a technology industry in recession. When eBay acquired the company for $1.5 billion, PayPal staked its claim as a great Silicon Valley success story. Yet the PayPal Plan A did not look anything like the company looks today. In 1998 programmer Max Levchin teamed with derivatives trader Peter Thiel to create a “digital wallet”—an encryption platform that allowed you to store cash and information securely on your mobile phone. That soon evolved to software that allowed you to send and receive digital cash wirelessly and securely via a Palm Pilot (the first of several iterations) so that two friends could split a dinner tab using their PDAs.

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Amazon, Boeing, UNICEF, and Whole Foods—to pick a handful of companies—are very different organizations, but they are all, ultimately, people organizations. People develop the technologies, write the mission statements, and stand behind the corporate logos and abstractions. People are the source of key resources, opportunities, information, and the like. For example, my long-term friendship with Peter Thiel, which started in college, is what connected me to PayPal. Without the relationship, Peter never would have called me with the life-changing opportunity. Likewise, without the alliance, I wouldn’t have referred Sean Parker and Mark Zuckerberg to Peter during Facebook’s initial financing. In alliances, resources and assistance flow both ways.

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But it’s our similar interests and vision that have made our collaborations so successful. We invested in Friendster together in 2002, at the dawn of social networking. In 2003 the two of us bought the Six Degrees patent, which covers some of the foundational technology of social networking. Mark then started his own social network, Tribe; I started LinkedIn. When Peter Thiel and I were set to put the first money into Facebook in 2004, I suggested that Mark take half of my investment allocation. As a matter of course, I wanted to involve Mark in any opportunity that seemed intriguing, especially one that played to his social networking background—it’s what you do in an alliance.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

The Hoover Tower points straight up.”17 The high-powered, high-profile Campbell gave his exit interview to a little student newspaper that was barely two years old and only published a few issues a year. The Stanford Review, however, was already making its mark as a self-styled voice of reason for Stanford’s conservative students. Founded in the late spring of 1987, the Review was the brainchild of a sophomore philosophy major named Peter Thiel. German-born and California-bred, a regional chess champion and J. R. R. Tolkien devotee, Thiel had arrived on campus as the battle of the Reagan library raged. For the remainder of his undergraduate years and as a Stanford law student immediately after, Thiel focused his considerable intellectual energies on the Review, making its libertarian-conservative views an inescapable feature of campus life as a fresh, even more polarizing battle erupted: the war over the undergraduate curriculum.

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The academic administrators steering the place in this era went on to become influential political advisors in the next. Stanford University’s stormy Reagan years became the stage on which the politics of the next-generation Valley were formed. As sharply polarized as Left and Right were on Stanford’s campus during this time, some common threads connected them. Both Peter Thiel and Terry Winograd were concerned about freedom of speech on campus. Both Glenn Campbell and Don Kennedy believed that Stanford scholars had an opportunity, and a responsibility, to contribute to politics and policy. Both the students crying out for a new, multicultural curriculum and the conservative elders who tut-tutted at the closing of the American mind agreed that the college years shaped a person’s trajectory for the rest of their lives.

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They snagged Ram Shriram, a former Netscaper now at Amazon, as an advisor; Shriram persuaded his boss Jeff Bezos to make a personal investment too. Wilson Sonsini became Google’s counsel. Very soon the search company had outgrown the garage and moved into more grown-up digs on University Avenue in Palo Alto. They now had six employees. Down the hall was Peter Thiel’s equally tiny Confinity, soon to be renamed PayPal. In June 1999 came a stunning deal: Brin and Page scored a cool $25 million in venture funding, split evenly between two of the Valley’s heaviest dot-com hitters, Kleiner Perkins’s John Doerr and Sequoia’s Michael Moritz. Bezos had advised them where to go for the money, and with confidence that bordered on arrogance, the two graduate students had pitted the VCs against one another in a bidding war.

Don't Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason
by Dave Rubin
Published 27 Apr 2020

Yes, you got that right: a professor at a university using her right to free speech to shut down an invited speaker. Amazingly, this sort of emotional outburst is becoming more and more common within the LGBT world. The Advocate’s treatment of openly gay tech maven Peter Thiel was another case of the left’s cancel culture. Some of its adherents blackballed him from the LGBT community for his support of Donald Trump (who’s also not a Nazi, even if you despise him). Their article titled “Peter Thiel Shows Us There’s a Difference between Gay Sex and Gay” was wildly homophobic, but the editors—who were once pioneers of the gay civil rights movement—couldn’t see this beyond their own agenda.

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He reminds us that, while we may not always agree with the ‘other,’ we need to LISTEN to them. Rubin has mastered the vital skills of listening and of asking questions that do not serve an ideological agenda.” —Eckhart Tolle, author of The Power of Now and A New Earth “Dave Rubin has been years ahead of the mainstream media, for years.” —Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and investor, author of Zero to One “Dave Rubin is one of the bravest, smartest people I know, as well as a tremendous television presence.” —Tucker Carlson, Fox News host and author of Ship of Fools “Dave Rubin is one of a kind. A truly great interviewer. Bright, curious, and funny.”

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If you’ve been watching The Rubin Report, you probably know that my intellectual journey from progressive to rediscovering what it means to be truly liberal has been a long one. But it’s also been facilitated by some of the world’s greatest contemporary thinkers, including Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell, Dennis Prager, Bret Weinstein, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christina Hoff Sommers, and Peter Thiel. They too came out of the political closet and helped me to see that tribalism is dead, and that diversity of thought is far more important than diversity for its own sake. Now, having gone through the coming out process twice, I’m imparting my wisdom to you. After you read this book, you’ll have no excuses left.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

The first is to defend the core business because it’s the status quo; the second is to defend yourself as an individual because there’s more ROI for you than for the organization. What makes traditional companies highly efficient at expansion and growth as long as market conditions remain unchanged is also what makes them extremely vulnerable to disruption. As Peter Thiel said, “Globalization is moving from one to N copying existing products. That was the 20th century. Now in the 21st century we move into a world where zero to one and creating new products will increasingly be a priority for companies due to the rise of different exponential technologies.” Whatever else they may be, big companies aren’t stupid.

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A quick but relevant side note here: We strongly recommend reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries as an accompaniment to this chapter, since we’ll be referring to it frequently. In fact, the best definition we’ve found for a startup comes from Ries: “A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” A second book we recommend is Peter Thiel and Blake Masters’ recent publication, Zero to One: Notes on Startups or How to Build the Future. This is perhaps the best time in the history of business to build a new enterprise. The confluence of breakthrough technologies, acceptance (and even celebration) of entrepreneurship, different crowdsourcing options, crowdfunding opportunities and legacy markets ripe for disruption—all create a compelling (and unprecedented) scenario for new company creation.

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What am I meant to do? Two more questions that can help speed the process of discovering your passion: What would I do if I could never fail? What would I do if I received a billion dollars today? It is not only about you as an entrepreneur, however. It is also about your employees. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel poses the following question as an effective way to test if a startup has an MTP that will attract not only friends, but also employees beyond your personal network who share your motivation: “Why would the 20th employee join your startup without the perks, [such as] a co-founder title or stock [options]?”

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet
by Arthur Turrell
Published 2 Aug 2021

Tirone, “Nuclear Fusion,” Bloomberg (2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/nuclear-fusion/2019/06/20/c6bd5682-938d-11e9-956a-88c291ab5c38_story.html. 13. “PayPal Billionaire Peter Thiel ‘Becoming Key Donald Trump Adviser,’ ” Independent (2017), http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/peter-thiel-donald-trump-key-adviser-technology-science-paypal-david-gelertner-steve-bannon-a7600471.html; “Peter Thiel’s Other Hobby Is Nuclear Fusion,” Bloomberg (2016), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-22/peter-thiel-s-other-hobby-is-nuclear-fusion. 14. “The Secretive, Billionaire-Backed Plans to Harness Fusion,” BBC News (2016), https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160428-the-secretive-billionaire-backed-plans-to-harness-fusion. 15.

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By 2019, the new fusion start-ups had received funding in excess of $1 billion.12 “An energy miracle is coming, and it’s going to change the world,” says Bill Gates, who has sunk some of his cash into one fusion start-up. PayPal founder, billionaire, and member of former President Trump’s inner circle Peter Thiel has done the same, investing $1.5 million in 2014.13 Other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs involved in fusion include Jeff Bezos, executive chairman of Amazon, and, before his death in 2018, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.14 Goldman Sachs has plowed money into an effort, Lockheed Martin has its own initiative, and even fossil fuel firms like Chevron are hedging their bets by investing in fusion.

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“Start-up” hardly seems appropriate for a firm that has been in the business of fusion since the 1990s. TAE has a device that fires the plasmas produced by two pinches into each other to create a ring of plasma that is briefly bound in magnetic fields, like a smoke ring in air. It’s an unusual scheme but one that is also being pursued by Helion Energy, a firm backed by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The big risk that TAE Technologies is taking is in the fusion reaction it’s trying to produce. While almost every other fusion firm is focusing on the easier deuterium and tritium reaction, TAE is trying to initiate reactions between the regular form of hydrogen (a proton) and a common isotope of boron.

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back
by Bruce Schneier
Published 7 Feb 2023

Gregory Conti and James Caroland (Jul-Aug 2011), “Embracing the Kobayashi Maru: Why you should teach your students to cheat,” IEEE Security & Privacy 9, https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/sp/2011/04/msp2011040048/13rRUwbs1Z3. 3But billionaire Peter Thiel found a hack: Justin Elliott, Patricia Callahan, and James Bandler (24 Jun 2021), “Lord of the Roths: How tech mogul Peter Thiel turned a retirement account for the middle class into a $5 billion tax-free piggy bank,” ProPublica, https://www.propublica.org/article/lord-of-the-roths-how-tech-mogul-peter-thiel-turned-a-retirement-account-for-the-middle-class-into-a-5-billion-dollar-tax-free-piggy-bank. 5I wish I could remember where: If anyone knows, please email me. 1.

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It’s how social media systems keep us on their platforms. In my story, hacking is something that the rich and powerful do, something that reinforces existing power structures. One example is Peter Thiel. The Roth IRA is a retirement account allowed by a 1997 law. It’s intended for middle-class investors, and has limits on both the investor’s income level and the amount that can be invested. But billionaire Peter Thiel found a hack. Because he was one of the founders of PayPal, he was able to use a $2,000 investment to buy 1.7 million shares of the company at $0.001 per share, turning it into $5 billion—all forever tax free.

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If we don’t learn how to control this process, our economic, political, and social systems will begin to fail. They’ll fail because they’ll no longer effectively serve their purpose, and they’ll fail because people will start losing their faith and trust in them. This is already happening. How do you feel knowing that Peter Thiel got away with not paying $1 billion in capital gains taxes? But, as I will demonstrate, hacking is not always destructive. Harnessed properly, it’s one of the ways systems can evolve and improve. It’s how society advances. Or, more specifically, it’s how people advance society without having to completely destroy what came before.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
by Roger McNamee
Published 1 Jan 2019

Homogeneity narrows the range of acceptable ideas and, in the case of Facebook, may have contributed to a work environment that emphasizes conformity. The extraordinary lack of diversity in Silicon Valley may reflect the pervasive embrace of libertarian philosophy. Zuck’s early investor and mentor Peter Thiel is an outspoken advocate for libertarian values. The third big change was economic, and it was a natural extension of libertarian philosophy. Neoliberalism stipulated that markets should replace government as the rule setter for economic activity. President Ronald Reagan framed neoliberalism with his assertion that “government is not the solution to our problem; it is the problem.”

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Into the void stepped angel investors—individuals, mostly former entrepreneurs and executives—who guided startups during their earliest stages. Angel investors were perfectly matched to the lean startup model, gaining leverage from relatively small investments. One angel, Ron Conway, built a huge brand, but the team that had started PayPal proved to have much greater impact. Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, Jeremy Stoppleman, and their colleagues were collectively known as the PayPal Mafia, and their impact transformed Silicon Valley. Not only did they launch Tesla, Space-X, LinkedIn, and Yelp, they provided early funding to Facebook and many other successful players.

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Three of Zuck’s friends joined the team, and a month later they launched TheFacebook at Columbia, Stanford, and Yale. It spread rapidly to other college campuses. By June, the company relocated from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Palo Alto, California, brought in Napster cofounder Sean Parker as president, and took its first venture capital from Peter Thiel. TheFacebook delivered exactly what its name described: each page provided a photo with personal details and contact information. There was no News Feed and no frills, but the color scheme and fonts would be recognizable to any present-day user. While many features were missing, the thing that stands out is the effectiveness of the first user interface.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

In early January 2019, it emerged that Netflix had pulled an episode of its popular comedy show Patriot Act in Saudi Arabia, after government officials complained about one of the actors on the show criticizing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for his role in the murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi and for the Saudi war atrocities in Yemen.20 Meanwhile, Big Tech is taking on the role of Big Brother right here in the United States, working with local, state, and national authorities to create what is starting to look a lot like a surveillance nation. Amazon sells facial recognition technology to the police. Palantir, the big data firm cofounded by PayPal entrepreneur Peter Thiel, works with the LAPD to target citizens in an alarming manner that might have been drawn from the dystopian thriller Minority Report.21,22 What else that data might be used for is anyone’s guess; the clandestine nature of it all makes it nearly impossible to track. But the result is that, little by little, American democracy has ceded a bit more ground to Big Tech

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The bottom line is that these companies have manipulated the system to ensure that they can continue to operate freely, without the burden of pesky government intervention. The result is that they all too often exist in a universe of their own, not just outside of national borders, but somehow transcending borders altogether. It is in this spirit that Palantir’s Peter Thiel and other powerful tech entrepreneurs and investors have suggested that California secede from the Union; Thiel once funded a plan for a network of floating islands that would operate outside of U.S. government jurisdiction, while he and other tech billionaires maintain hideaways in New Zealand

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I’m not denying that venture capital is often a necessary ingredient for innovation, or that it hasn’t enabled or supported the existence of many worthy enterprises that contribute positively to society and enhance all of our lives. But any time you have a group that is held so high on a pedestal—and swimming in so much wealth—it’s inevitable that at least a portion of those individuals are going to end up developing a bit of a God complex. Consider someone like Peter Thiel, one of the infamous “PayPal Mafia,” and among the first seed investors in Facebook, who went on to launch Palantir and the prominent VC firm Founders Fund. Thiel is a Trump supporter and libertarian who is critical of government and even education: Each year, he famously offers hundreds of thousands of dollars to encourage students to drop out of college and start companies instead.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

It is certainly true that not all dropouts start large, successful technology companies; it is also true that the point of education is not necessarily to raise everyone to start a large technology company. But among those who do, dropouts are not uncommon, and it is a pattern worth reflecting upon for a moment. Alongside that list’s anecdotal power, there are also deeper arguments about why faith in “more education” might be misplaced. The entrepreneur Peter Thiel offers the most provocative version of that case. He claims that higher education is a “bubble,” arguing that it is “overpriced” because people do not get “their money’s worth” but go to college “simply because that’s what everybody’s doing.” Thiel does not deny that those who are better educated tend to earn more on average, as we saw before.

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Take Michael Porter, the definitive business strategy guru of the last few decades, whose 1980s books Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage were on the shelves of all discerning corporate leaders. Those books guided readers toward nothing less than economic domination: first, find markets ripe for monopolizing (or create new ones); second, dominate and exclude others from these chosen markets. Today, the same advice is given even more forthrightly. “Competition is for losers,” wrote Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur, in the Wall Street Journal. “If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.”19 What, then, is the problem with an absence of competition? The economic argument advanced by competition authorities is that a monopoly in a given market means that our welfare is lower, both today and tomorrow.

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The US search engine advertising market is worth about $17 billion a year, whereas the total US advertising market is worth $150 billion a year. Even if Google ended up owning the entire market for search engine advertising in the country, it would still have less than 12 percent of the American advertising business. “From this angle,” writes Peter Thiel, “Google looks like a small player in a competitive world.”21 In short, finding answers to even the most basic questions of competition policy is not straightforward. And perhaps the biggest complication of all is that monopolies can be a very good thing. This may sound like economic sacrilege, but the early-twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter famously made just this case.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success
by Tom Eisenmann
Published 29 Mar 2021

In any case, given our penchant for attribution errors—that is, blaming our own failures on uncontrollable circumstances and others’ failures on their personal faults—we should interpret founders’ explanations for startup failure with care. While most investors blame bad jockeys for startup failure, some see slow horses as the main problem. For example, billionaire entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel says that “all failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.” Paul Graham, founder of the elite accelerator Y Combinator, likewise holds that having a compelling solution to a customer’s problem—a strong horse—is the key to success: “There’s just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want.

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With the first pattern (accounting for 19 percent of failures, according to the survey), the senior team had adequate experience and market knowledge but no capacity for sustained effort, so they threw in the towel prematurely. With the second pattern (accounting for 49 percent of failures), the managers were perceived to be “hapless amateurs, inadequate in every way.” The third pattern echoes Peter Thiel’s point: For 32 percent of the failures, management had adequate market knowledge but never found competitive advantage. If jockeys make all the difference, then some must be more skilled than others. There is some academic evidence for this. Research by my HBS colleagues Paul Gompers, Josh Lerner, and David Scharfstein and their former student Anna Kovner shows that 30 percent of serial entrepreneurs who were successful in their first venture succeeded in subsequent ventures, compared to 22 percent of serial entrepreneurs who failed in their first venture and 21 percent of first-time founders.

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The good news is that the solution to the missing-systems problem is simply to solve the missing-manager problem: Bring on board senior specialists who have experience with scaling startups that faced challenges similar to those now at hand—and who can make smart choices about when and how to add management systems. Passing the “Able?” portion of the RAWI test hinges on having the right kind of specialist leaders at the helm. CHAPTER 9 Moonshots and Miracles We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. —Peter Thiel, entrepreneur and investor We might not have flying cars, but Shai Agassi dreamt of a world where the roads were filled with electric ones. He founded the startup Better Place in 2007—before Tesla or Nissan had launched any all-electric models—with a bold vision: He would create a massive network of charging stations for electric vehicles.

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back
by Mark O'Connell
Published 13 Apr 2020

That same week, The New Yorker ran a piece about the superrich making preparations for a grand civilizational crack-up. Speaking of New Zealand as a “favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm,” Reid Hoffman, the founder of 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 a sprawling property in New Zealand, on the shores of Lake Wanaka, the apparent intention of which was to provide him with a place to retreat to should America become unlivable due to economic chaos, civil unrest, or some or other apocalyptic event.

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It was Anthony’s contention that if I was interested in the end of the world, I had to understand the relationship between his country and the Silicon Valley tech elite. He was also of the opinion that if I wanted to understand it, I had to go there. And so somewhere in the course of 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 my bags and I wandered the streets of downtown Auckland awhile. My jet lag had by then progressed into a kind of fugue state. I was operating on existential factory settings, reduced to the barest human functionality.

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(He had written some enthusiastic criticism on Denny’s work, and the two had started a correspondence, which eventually opened out onto the prospect of some kind of collaboration. Anthony characterized his own role in the project as an amalgamation of researcher, journalist, and “investigative philosopher, following the trail 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 was writing to accompany it, the show was a reckoning with the future that Silicon Valley techno-libertarians like Thiel wanted to build, and with New Zealand’s place in that future.

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job
by John Tamny
Published 6 May 2018

It’s either saved, directly invested in ways that put it in the hands of innovators, or spent on goods and services, giving more people the ability to match their work with their passion. Each dollar taxed away makes it marginally more expensive for the rich to invest their capital in risky new advances. Innovators need that capital because experimentation is very expensive. Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and one of the original investors in what became Facebook, knows the perils of investing in the ideas of the future. In his book Zero to One, he explains that “most venture-backed companies don’t IPO or get acquired; most fail, usually soon after they start.

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He even believes death itself can be cured.12 But experimentation is enormously expensive, and the disappearance of common killers like cancer and heart disease will require gigantic investments. More money provides more chances to fail expensively on the way to success. But what good are all of Peter Thiel’s investments in technology for those of us who want to marry work and passion but find technology terrifying? Just remember how technological advances have ushered in a more economically advanced society overall. We hear all the time that technology is a job killer, and it’s true that the automobile, computer, GPS, Wi-Fi, and smartphone have rendered plenty of old forms of work obsolete.

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Heppenheimer calls a “bottomless pot of money,” which he used to purchase control of Trans World Airlines in 1939.25 Telling those around him “I’ve got the money,”26 Hughes invested in what became the Lockheed Constellation, a fast plane with a pressurized cabin that could fly above the weather.27 Passenger travel by air became common thanks to inherited wealth backing risky ideas. Nowadays high-risk, high-reward investing is the preserve of venture capital. Since most start-ups fail, as Peter Thiel points out, we need those investors with the capacity to lose enormous sums before they land on the rare success story. Indeed, inherited wealth was particularly crucial to Silicon Valley’s rise. As Walter Isaacson recounts in The Innovators, “For much of the twentieth century, venture capital and private equity investing in new companies had been mainly the purview of a few wealthy families, such as the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Whitneys, Phippses, and Warburgs.”28 Venrock, the Rockefeller family’s venture capital vehicle, invested alongside Arthur Rock in Apple Computer.29 Technology is not the only field to benefit from the existence of inherited fortunes, of course.

Capitalism Without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 7 Nov 2017

Indeed, a significant part of the strategy of intangible-rich companies is combining and managing their intangibles in such a way as to minimize the spillovers and maximize the benefits they get from them. Someone who is unusually honest about the lengths businesses go to in order to stop others benefiting from their lovingly created intangibles is venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the so-called don of Silicon Valley’s PayPal Mafia. Thiel’s refreshingly candid book on entrepreneurship Zero to One makes it clear that the way to create very valuable start-ups is to create businesses that, as far as possible, have monopoly positions in big markets. In Thiel’s management philosophy, you create these defensible opportunities by investing in the right sorts of software, marketing, and networks of customers and suppliers (three classic intangibles) and by bringing them together in ways that competitors find hard to copy.

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Similarly, to satisfy their own investors, VC funds rely on home-run successes, made possible by the scalability of assets like Google’s algorithms, Uber’s driver network, or Genentech’s patents. Third, VC is often sequential, with rounds of funding proceeding in stages. This is a response to the inherent uncertainty of intangible investment. The nature of uncertainty in start-ups is that it tends to reduce over time. When Peter Thiel made the first external investment of $500,000 in Facebook in 2004, the company’s fortunes were considerably more uncertain than when Microsoft invested $240 million in 2007. Funding in rounds helps resolve uncertainty by working through the development of business in stages. For investors, it creates an “option value,” that is, a value to delaying follow-on investment until information is revealed.

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A third way that the new economy has turned out, perhaps not quite as expected, is what might be called a “rush for scale.” Alongside the small portfolio contractors and lean, networked businesses we see some behemoths: new multi-billion-dollar companies with big scale and bigger ambitions. As we have seen in chapter 5, the leading firms seem to have become even more leading: more profitable, more productive. Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, has written engagingly on these issues in his book Zero to One, stressing that commercial success is built on exploiting network effects and economies of scale: as he points out, Twitter can easily scale up but a yoga studio cannot. We shall argue that these seemingly contradictory changes all arise from the essential economic characteristics of intangible assets.

Immortality, Inc.
by Chip Walter
Published 7 Jan 2020

It’s tight quarters, but in the vitrified world, people don’t seem to much complain about the crowding. In 2016, of the 149 patients housed at Alcor, 37 were women; the other 112 were men. Another 1,116 had already signed on to join the current tenants at some future date, including people like Ray Kurzweil, PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler, and, of course, Ralph Merkle. The average age of the currently vitrified is 65. Hixon is also Alcor’s chief depositor. When a new patient arrives, he is the man who sees them to their next, but hopefully not final, resting place.

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Hariri called him an intellectual cupid. In the course of his many undertakings, he had made friends with just about every big wallet in Silicon Valley. Thus, in mid-2013, Diamandis sat down to brainstorm a board and put together a list of billionaires he thought might invest. Included were Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and Larry Page, Peter Thiel of PayPal fame, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, and Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Atlantic. That was the short list. Nine months later, in March 2014, Venter, Hariri, and Diamandis formed their triumvirate and announced the creation of Human Longevity, Inc., tapping the Valley’s deep pockets to pool a first round investment of $70 million.

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But the science mostly felt shallow, and there were still no big breakthroughs. None of these ventures had the financing of Calico or HLI, although interest in them was growing. Some efforts had the support of Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Research Foundation, the Buck Institute, or the occasional angel investor like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos or PayPal’s Peter Thiel. But these fell into the categories of mere millions, not hundreds of millions. Nevertheless, the new enterprises happily set out to spread the word to the media. All except one: Calico. Since its inception in 2013, Calico seemed to have vanished. Sure, there was the obligatory press release now and then, and clearly the company existed.

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World
by Adam Grant
Published 2 Feb 2016

as was Nelson Mandela: “Nelson Mandela, the ‘Gandhi of South Africa,’ Had Strong Indian Ties,” Economic Times, December 6, 2013, articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12-06/news/44864354_1_nelson-mandela-gandhi-memorial-gandhian-philosophy. Elon Musk . . . Lord of the Rings: Tad Friend, “Plugged In: Can Elon Musk Lead the Way to an Electric-Car Future?” New Yorker, August 24, 2009, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/plugged-in. Peter Thiel . . . Lord of the Rings: Julian Guthrie, “Entrepreneur Peter Thiel Talks ‘Zero to One,’” SFGate, September 21, 2014, www.sfgate.com/living/article/Entrepreneur-Peter-Thiel-talks-Zero-to-One-5771228.php. Sheryl Sandberg . . . A Wrinkle in Time: “Sheryl Sandberg: By the Book,” New York Times, March 14, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/17/books/review/sheryl-sandberg-by-the-book.html.

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Third, along with being less recklessly ambitious, settlers can improve upon competitors’ technology to make products better. When you’re the first to market, you have to make all the mistakes yourself. Meanwhile, settlers can watch and learn from your errors. “Moving first is a tactic, not a goal,” Peter Thiel writes in Zero to One; “being the first mover doesn’t do you any good if someone else comes along and unseats you.” Fourth, whereas pioneers tend to get stuck in their early offerings, settlers can observe market changes and shifting consumer tastes and adjust accordingly. In a study of the U.S. automobile industry over nearly a century, pioneers had lower survival rates because they struggled to establish legitimacy, developed routines that didn’t fit the market, and became obsolete as consumer needs clarified.

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With a proof of concept, but no working prototype, she had a chicken-and-egg problem: she needed funding to build a prototype, but her idea was so radical that investors wanted to see a prototype first. As the solo founder of a technology startup, with no engineering background, she needed allies to move forward. Three years later, I met Perry at a Google event. After landing $750,000 in seed money from Mark Cuban, Marissa Mayer, and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, her team had just finished its first functional prototype. It could power devices faster than a wire, at longer distances, and would be ready for consumers in two years. By the end of 2014, her company, uBeam, had accumulated eighteen patents and $10 million in venture funding. Perry took her place onstage in a lineup that included Snoop Dogg, a Nobel Prize winner, and former President Bill Clinton.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
by Bill McKibben
Published 15 Apr 2019

Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World (New York: Riverhead Books, 2014), p. 148. 2. Jason Pontin, “Silicon Valley’s Immortalists Will Help Us All Stay Healthy,” Wired, December 15, 2017. 3. Maya Kosoff, “Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People’s Blood,” Vanity Fair, August 1, 2016. 4. Maya Kosoff, “This Anti-Aging Startup Is Charging Thousands of Dollars for Teen Blood,” Vanity Fair, June 1, 2017. 5. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” cato-unbound.org, April 13, 2009. 6. Benjamin Snyder, “This Google Exec Says We Can Live to 500,” Fortune, March 9, 2015. 7. Katrina Brooker, “Google Ventures and Bill Maris’ Search for Immortality,” stuff.co.nz, March 11, 2015. 8.

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Steve Wozniak (cofounder of Apple) said that Steve Jobs (deity) considered Atlas Shrugged one of his guides in life.3 Elon Musk (also a deity, and straight out of a Rand novel, with his rockets and hyperloops and wild cars) says Rand “has a fairly extreme set of views, but she has some good points in there.”4 That’s as faint as the praise gets. Travis Kalanick, who founded Uber, used the cover of The Fountainhead as his Twitter avatar. Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, once launched a mission to develop a floating city, a “sea-stead” that would be a politically autonomous city-state where national governments would have no sway.5 Some of Silicon Valley’s antigovernment sentiment is old, or at least as old as anything can be in Silicon Valley.

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Genetics plays a part in determining who we are and how our lives proceed, but as Nathaniel Comfort, a professor of the history of biology at Johns Hopkins, points out, “Decent, affordable housing; access to real food, education, and transportation; and reducing exposure to crime and violence are far more important.”6 Consider the experience of the writer Johann Hari, invited to a conference organized by Peter Thiel on depression, anxiety, and addiction. He was amazed to find that most of the participants were convinced that such problems were caused by “malformations of the brain.” When it was his turn to speak, Hari said, “As your society becomes more unequal, you are more likely to be depressed.” Humans, he continued, “crave connection—to other people, to meaning, to the natural world.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

Phillips was laser focused on his entrepreneurship, too. He devoured online videos by Y Combinator head Sam Altman, and he imbibed Zero to One, the business-building tome of Silicon Valley’s archlibertarian icon Peter Thiel. “Peter Thiel’s book on entrepreneurship is brilliant,” he tells me. “The idea of, you gotta do something fundamentally better—it can’t be a little bit better. But I don’t mention the name Peter Thiel in certain places because I hate his politics.” Ideologically, in fact, Phillips had wandered all over the map, searching for a political home. “Six parties in six years,” he says. In college he’d dabbled with anarchism and libertarianism; he liked their intellectual rigor and shared their concern that people who amass centralized power typically abuse it.

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weary giants of flesh and steel: Hettie O’Brien, “The Floating City, Long a Libertarian Dream, Faces Rough Seas,” CityLab, April 27, 2018, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/04/the-unsinkable-dream-of-the-floating-city/559058/. “that freedom and democracy are compatible”: Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, accessed August 18, 2018, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. “that offer poor services”: Paul Bradley Carr, “Travis Shrugged: The Creepy, Dangerous Ideology Behind Silicon Valley’s Cult of Disruption,” Pando, October 24, 2012, accessed August 18, 2018, https://pando.com/2012/10/24/travis-shrugged.

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While a student, he founded not just one but three companies, and when the last one sold for $100,000, he packed his worldly possessions—mostly a pile of electronics—into a truck and drove with some friends to Silicon Valley. He crashed with a friend, and one day, wandered into a lecture on political freedom by Peter Thiel at the Stanford campus. Back then, Thiel was a lawyer and former Wall Streeter who’d studied philosophy and was a fervid libertarian. Levchin enjoyed the talk and met Thiel later to pitch his latest software ideas. He’d been writing ingenious encryption that ran on the weak chips of handheld PDAs like the PalmPilot, the hot tech of the day.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh
Published 14 Apr 2018

The insanity, in fact, was that we were allowing our users to accept credit card payments, sticking PayPal with the cost of paying 3 percent of each transaction to the credit card processors, while charging our users nothing. I remember once telling my old college friend and PayPal cofounder/CEO Peter Thiel, “Peter, if you and I were standing on the roof of our office and throwing stacks of hundred-dollar bills off the edge as fast as our arms could go, we still wouldn’t be losing money as quickly as we are right now.” We ended up solving the problem by charging businesses to accept payments, much as the credit card processors did, but funding those payments using automated clearinghouse (ACH) bank transactions, which cost a fraction of the charges associated with the credit card networks.

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Consider how Amazon expanded into new markets like AWS rather than simply honing its retail capabilities, or how Facebook has been able to adapt to the shift from a text-based social network accessed via desktop Web browsers to an image- and video-based social network accessed via smartphones (and soon, perhaps, VR). UNDERLYING PRINCIPLE #4: THE CONTRARIAN PRINCIPLE My friend Peter Thiel has written eloquently about the power of being a contrarian in his book Zero to One. Whenever I interview someone for a job, I like to ask this question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer.

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Distribution Google’s technology receives most of the credit for the company’s success, and it is impressive. However, this means that Google’s skillful use of the distribution growth factor is often overlooked. To go from “yet another search engine” to “the last search engine” (as my old friend Peter Thiel put it in his 2014 Stanford lecture “Competition Is for Losers”), Google had to leverage a series of existing networks and partners. For example, Google’s bold deal to power AOL’s search results helped the company grow its search business by orders of magnitude. Later, other distribution bets like the Firefox partnership, the acquisition of Android, and the creation of the Chrome browser all paid off and helped maintain Google’s distribution dominance.

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire
by Bruce Nussbaum
Published 5 Mar 2013

. $44.2 Billion,” Safe Haven, October 17, 2012, accessed October 20, 2012, http://www.safehaven.com/article/27361/ us-august-net-trade-deficit-reported-at-us442-billion. 235 Even in high tech: Michael Mandel, “Innovation Failure,” Mandel on Innovation and Growth, October 5, 2010, accessed October 21, 2012, http://innovationandgrowth.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/ innovation-failure/; Michael Mandel, discussions with the author, 2012. 235 A National Science Foundation report: Mark Boroush, “NSF Releases New Statistics on Business Innovation,” October 2010, accessed October 12, 2012, http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/ infbrief/nsf11300/. 235 At an Aspen Institute: TPI Aspen Forum, August 21 to 23, 2011, https://techpolicyinstitute.org/aspen2011/. 235 Peter Thiel, a cofounder: Rip Empson, “Max Levchin and Peter Thiel: Innovation in the World Today Is Between ’Dire Straits and Dead,’” TechCrunch, September 12, 2011, http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/12/ max-levchin-and-peter-thiel-innovation-in-the-world-today-is-between-dire-straits-and-dead/. 235 and we haven’t seen any new breakthroughs in energy: Ken Bossong, “Renewable Energy Provided 11% of Domestic Energy Production in 2010,” Renewable Energy World, accessed September 15, 2012, http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/ article/2011/04/ renewable-energy-provided-11-of-domestic-energy-production-in-2010. 235 We have all been feeling the ripple: Michael Mandel, “Why Isn’t the Innovation Economy Creating More Jobs?”

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With enough money to do a start-up, Zuckerberg hired Owen Van Natta from Amazon, and Van Natta was instrumental in increasing revenue and building out the company from twenty-six employees to hundreds. Then he fired Van Natta and hired Sheryl Sandberg, a veteran manager from Google, to help him scale Facebook to a global corporation. Along this journey, according to Blodget, Zuckerberg sought counsel from the likes of Peter Thiel, who was an early investor; Marc Andreessen, now a board member; and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman. None of this was easy for Zuckerberg, who was far more comfortable as a software programmer and product designer. But he pushed himself to find people who could teach him a wide variety of communication and business skills, which he used to further his vision.

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A National Science Foundation report released in September 2010, called the 2008 Business R&D and Innovation Survey (BRDIS), showed that only 9 percent of public and private companies engaged in either product or service innovation between 2006 and 2008. This is an extraordinary and unexpected fact. Because of the proliferation of cool gadgets like tablets and smart phones, many of us believe we’re living in an era of immense innovation—but we’re not. At an Aspen Institute Conference on technology in 2011, Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, said that except for big advances in computer-related areas, innovation has actually “stalled out.” There’s been little innovation in transportation and we haven’t seen any new breakthroughs in energy, with alternatives to hydrocarbons making up just a fraction of all energy production.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future
by Hal Niedzviecki
Published 15 Mar 2015

They have to do this, because in the tech sectors that increasingly dominate our perceptions, consensus is emerging: college is a big waste of time and money. Dale Stephens got his start when he was “selected out of hundreds of individuals around the world” to be a 2011 Thiel Fellow. The notion of the Thiel fellowship—a kind of unscholarship dreamed up and funded by PayPal founder, now billionaire venture capitalist, Peter Thiel—is exactly the kind of challenge that the university presidents are desperately trying to respond to. Thiel funds students not to go to university. Instead, those accepted into his program are moved to San Francisco and given money and advice in order to pursue their dream ideas in the form of start-up companies hell-bent on disruption.

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Any such device or technology is an automatic upgrade, an inherent net positive; breaking down institutions is a by-product of that, since institutions, whether they are educational, governmental or even corporate, slow down the individual, slow down the race to future. So we cut through the fat, empower the individual and create new anti-institution institutions capable of bringing about even faster cycles of tech upgrade. As Peter Thiel puts it: “There’s this alternate virtual world in which there’s no stuff, it’s all zeros and ones on a computer, you can reprogram it, you can make the computer do anything you want it to. Maybe that is the best way you can actually help things in this country.”47 Will the Tricorder work? Will it really solve a wide range of health care problems ranging from lack of access to doctors to the ordering of unnecessary tests?

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So how, I asked him, do we know that the XPrize model is actually the better way to stimulate research into applied technology? “Is there any other way?” Mark Winter asks me. “What are the other paths in front of us, show me an alternative path that would work as well. Give us a viable option. I have not seen it yet.” This is more than just impatience—it’s ideology. When Peter Thiel founded PayPal, he envisioned it as a way to disrupt, as George Packer writes in his book The Unwinding, “the ancient technology of paper money” and “create an alternate currency online that would circumvent government controls.” At PayPal meetings, Thiel revved up the troops by telling them that “PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before.”

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
by Max Fisher
Published 5 Sep 2022

“They all seem to be white male nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life,” John Doerr, a legendary tech investor, once said of successful founders, calling this the “pattern” he used to select investees. Likewise, Graham has said he looks for “nerds” and “idealists” with “a piratical gleam in their eye,” who “delight in breaking rules” and defying social niceties. “These guys want to get rich, but they want to do it by changing the world.” Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, had urged elevating antisocial contrarians. “Individuals with an Asperger’s-like social ineptitude seem to be at an advantage in Silicon Valley today,” he wrote in an influential book on startups. “If you’re less sensitive to social cues, you’re less likely to do the same things as everyone else around you.”

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The squiggle chart, as DiResta thought of it, with its promise of using free online services to attract as many users as possible with no profit plan, wasn’t some trick. It was what investors demanded. And nothing delivered on this model like social media. “You might look at these numbers and conclude that investors have gone insane,” Peter Thiel once wrote. But the payoffs could be astronomical. A $250,000 investment in Instagram, made in 2010, netted $78 million when Facebook bought the company two years later. If founders’ business plans turned out to be as silly as they’d looked to DiResta, that was fine. The losses were cheap, while the rare victory would make everybody rich.

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He cited one in particular: Myanmar, where he’d heard that Facebook already dominated locals’ access to news. There was, they told themselves, whether out of ideological fervor or financially motivated disinterest, no need to monitor or even consider the consequences, because they could only be positive. This was more than hubris. It drew on an idea, suffusing the Valley, that had originated with Peter Thiel, Facebook’s foundational investor: “zero to one.” It was a mandate, commercial and ideological, for companies to invent something so new that there was no market for it—starting at zero—and then control that market absolutely, a field with one entrant. “The history of progress is a history of better monopoly businesses replacing incumbents,” Thiel wrote.

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America
by George Packer
Published 4 Mar 2014

John Russo, “Integrated Production or Systematic Disinvestment: The Restructuring of Packard Electric” (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 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 Angeles: World Ahead Publishing, 2010). David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

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Clinton had banned top officials who left the administration from contacting the federal government for five years. The rule applied to Quinn but not to Connaughton, who 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 in his family’s apartment in Cleveland. Peter asked his father, “Where did the rug come from?” “It came from a cow,” his father said. They were speaking German, Peter’s first language—the Thiels were from Germany, Peter had been born in Frankfurt.

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The best students went on to Berkeley, Davis, or UCLA (a few made it to Stanford or the Ivies), the average ones went to San Francisco State or Chico State, and the burnouts and heads could always get a two-year degree at Foothill or De Anza. The tax revolt—Proposition 13, a referendum that would limit 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 in the school year of Saturday Night Fever seemed riotous and decadent. A lot of the kids had divorced parents. In Peter’s fifth-grade classroom, the teacher was a long-term substitute who lost all control.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Kirkpatrick, “Egyptian Revolt’s Leaders Count Their Mistakes,” New York Times, June 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/15/world/middleeast/egyptian-revolts-leaders-count-their-mistakes.html?pagewanted=all. 129 German-born investor Peter Thiel: some of the best reporting on Thiel includes Brian Caulfield and Nicole Perlroth, “Life After Facebook,” Forbes, February 14, 2011, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0214/features-peter-thiel-social-media-life-after-facebook.html; Jonathan Miles, “The Billionaire King of Techtopia,” Details, September 2011, http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201109/peter-thiel-billionaire -paypal-facebook-internet-success; George Packer, “No Death, No Taxes,” The New Yorker, November 28, 2011, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/28/111128fa_fact_packer; Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone, “Palantir, the War on Terror’s Secret Weapon,” Businessweek, November 22, 2011, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/palantir-the-vanguard-of-cyberterror-security-11222011.html. 129 a video on Palantir’s YouTube channel: see “Creating Transparency with Palantir,” uploaded July 5, 2012; available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?

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v=8cbGChfagUA&feature=plcp. 130 “because the first place most of us want to experiment”: Tabatha Southey, “A Billionaire’s Waterworld Takes Libertarianism to New Depths,” Globe and Mail, August 19, 2011, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/a-billionaires-waterworld-takes-libertarianism-to-new-depths/article548981. 130 “In our time, the great task”: Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/the-education-of-a-libertarian. 130 “the critical question then becomes”: ibid. 130 “in the late 1990s, the founding vision”: ibid. 130 PayPal revised how it deals: Cyrus Farivar, “PayPal Sets Down Stricter Regulations for File-Sharing Sites,” Ars Technica, July 11, 2012, http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/07/paypal-sets-down-stricter-regulations-for-file-sharing-sites. 131 “when seen through the lens of technology”: Peter H.

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The former are the technoescapists, who think that technology, exemplified by “the Internet,” can make politics obsolete; the latter are the technorationalists, who think that technology and “the Internet” can shrink what makes politics political and instead boost its technocratic dimension. Both are extremely dangerous. The best ambassador of the technoescapist camp is German-born investor Peter Thiel, who made his fortune with PayPal and was the first outside investor in Facebook. Thiel cuts a very odd figure: a self-proclaimed libertarian who bankrolled much of Ron Paul’s presidential campaign, he also chairs the board of Palantir, a leader in intelligence-gathering and data-mining solutions that mostly caters to the interests of America’s defense community—a community that devoted libertarians like Paul actually want to dismantle.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

, Our World in Data, accessed 10 November 2020, available at https://ourworldindata.org/us-life-expectancy-low Rosling, Hans, with Rosling, Ola, and Rosling, Anna Rönnlund (2018), Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, London: Sceptre Ross, Alex (2017), The Industries of the Future, London: Simon & Schuster Rotman, David (2019), ‘AI is reinventing the way we invent’, MIT Technology Review, accessed 26 March 2019, available at https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/02/15/137023/ai-is-reinventing-the-way-we-invent/ Roy, Avik (2012), Stifling New Cures: The True Cost of Lengthy Clinical Drug Trials, New York: Manhattan Institute Sand, Shlomo (2018), The End of the French Intellectual: From Zola to Houellebecq, London: Verso Sandberg, Anders, Drexler, Eric, and Ord, Toby (2018), ‘Dissolving the Fermi Paradox’, arXiv, 1806.02404 Sarewitz, Dan (2016), ‘Saving Science’, The New Atlantis, accessed 24 December 2019, available at https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/saving-science Sargent, John F. (2020), ‘Global Research and Development Expenditures’, Congressional Research Service, accessed 31 May 2020, available at https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44283.pdf Sautoy, Marcus du (2017), What We Cannot Know: From Consciousness to the Cosmos, the Cutting Edge of Science Explained, London: Fourth Estate Sautoy, Marcus du (2019), The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think, London: Fourth Estate Scannell, J., Blanckley, A., Boldon, H. et al. (2012), ‘Diagnosing the decline in pharmaceutical R&D efficiency’, Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Vol. 11, pp. 191–200 Scharf, Caleb (2015), The Copernicus Complex: The Quest for Our Cosmic (In)Significance, London: Penguin Scheu, René (2019), ‘PayPal founder and philosopher Peter Thiel: “The heads in Silicon Valley have aligned themselves”’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, accessed 9 April 2019, available at https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/peter-thiel-donald-trump-handelt-fuer-mich-zu-wenig-disruptiv-ld.1471818?reduced=true Schwab, Klaus (2017), The Fourth Industrial Revolution, London: Portfolio Penguin Schwartz, Peter (1991), The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, Chichester: John Wiley Senior, Andrew, Jumper, John, Hassabis, Demis, and Kohli, Pushmeet (2020), ‘AlphaFold: Using AI for scientific discovery’, DeepMind, accessed 5 February 2020, available at https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaFold-Using-AI-for-scientific-discovery Shambaugh, Jay, Nunn, Ryan, Breitwieser, Audrey, and Liu, Patrick (2018), The State of Competition and Dynamism: Facts about Concentration, Start-Ups, and Related Policies, Washington DC: The Hamilton Project Shaxson, Nicholas (2018), The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer, London: The Bodley Head Sheldrake, Rupert (2013), The Science Delusion: Freeing the Spirit of Enquiry, London: Coronet Shi, Feng, and Evans, James (2019), ‘Science and Technology Advance through Surprise’, arXiv, 1910.09370 Simonite, Tom (2014), ‘Technology Stalled in 1970’, MIT Technology Review, accessed 14 July 2019, available at https://www.technologyreview.com/2014/09/18/171322/technology-stalled-in-1970/ Singh, Jasjit, and Fleming, Lee (2010), ‘Lone Inventors as Sources of Breakthroughs: ‘Myth or Reality?’

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But in the face of perhaps the biggest challenge for seventy-five years, government, corporate and even personal thinking was often trapped by the models of the past, incapable of building those of the future on the fly. Despite all our technologies, businesses and knowledge, we are vulnerable. Entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel famously encapsulated the argument as ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ But there is more to it than that – in the words of David Graeber, it encompasses ‘a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in, a sense of a broken promise – of a solemn promise we felt we were given as children about what the adult world was supposed to be like’.5 This isn't just about flying cars and colonies on Mars, the tug of war between techno optimism and pessimism.

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The writer and executive Safi Bahcall talks of ‘loonshot’ business, say a small drug company or indie film crew, versus ‘franchises’ like big pharma companies and Hollywood studios.19 Franchise projects are entrenched blockbusters: the last Harry Potter, not the first; the iPhone XII, not the iPhone. Another analogue is what Peter Thiel calls ‘0-1’ businesses or ideas.20 Most businesses are ‘1-n’; they simply extrapolate possibilities from the kernel of an existing idea. In contrast, ‘0-1’ ideas exhibit something completely new, a ‘vertical’ or ‘intensive’ progress. It means searing originality, not copying or improving; the creation of new technology versus the globalisation of that technology.

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas
by Warren Berger
Published 4 Mar 2014

Drew Houston’s comments excerpted from his commencement speech at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 7, 2013; Brian Spaly quote from “How Entrepreneurs Come Up With Great Ideas,” Wall Street Journal Reports, April 29, 2013; Peter Thiel question from Trevor Gilbert, “Peter Thiel’s Pointed Questions to Ask Startups,” PandoDaily, April 19, 2012, http://pandodaily.com/2012/04/19/peter-thiels-pointed-questions-to-ask-startups/; Dave Kashen, “The Values-Driven Startup,” Gigaom.com, December 17, 2011, http://gigaom.com/2011/12/17/kashen-values-driven-startup/. 21 Ries believes one of the most . . . Ries’s question also appeared in my previously cited Fast Company post “The 5 Questions Every Company Should Ask Itself.”

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(and other entrepreneurial questions)20 Drew Houston, founder of the online storage service Dropbox, thinks all would-be entrepreneurs should try to answer the above question. “The most successful people are obsessed with solving an important problem, something that matters to them,” according to Houston. “They remind me of a dog chasing a tennis ball.” To enhance your prospects, “find your tennis ball—the thing that pulls you.” PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel believes entrepreneurs can find ideas to pursue by asking themselves, What is something I believe that nearly no one agrees with me on? If self-examination doesn’t work, try looking around: Brian Spaly, a serial entrepreneur in the apparel industry, advises, “Whenever you encounter a service or customer experience that frustrates you, ask, Is this a problem I could solve?”

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Do we want to take a shortcut on this, or do it right? What are we against? What if we asked people not to buy from us? How can we make a better experiment?, (Eric Ries’ central question) What is your tennis ball?, (Dropbox’s Drew Houston) What is something I believe that nearly no one agrees with me on?, (Peter Thiel’s question for startups) Is this a problem I could solve? Will this make people’s lives meaningfully better? How do companies get better at experimenting? What will we learn? What is our Petri dish? Where in the company is it safe to ask radical questions? Where, within the company, can you explore heretical questions that could threaten the business as it is—without contaminating what you’re doing now?

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017

Science 333 (6043) (August 5, 2011): 776–778. doi:10.1126/science.1207745. Spivack, Nova. “How Siri Works—Interview with Tom Gruber, CTO of SIRI.” Nova Spivack, January 6, 2010. http://www.novaspivack.com/technology/how-hisiri-works-interview-with-tom-gruber-cto-of-siri. Stelter, Brian. “Peter Thiel: Financing Lawsuits against Gawker Is About ‘Deterrence.’” CNN Money, May 26, 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/26/media/peter-thiel-hulk-hogan-gawker. Stein, Joel. “Baby, You Can Drive My Car, and Do My Errands, and Rent My Stuff…” Time 185 (4) (February 9, 2015): 32–40. Stephenson, Neal. In the Beginning ... Was the Command Line. 1st ed. New York: William Morrow, 1999.

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Meanwhile, editors at all of those places closely monitored Facebook (which, remember, is not a news organization) to see what news was getting traction with the digital public. News directors trying to decipher the Trending Topics algorithm were really peering into an editorial funhouse mirror.36 Later in 2016, yet another illustration of programmable culture and new ground rules for value erupted into the headlines when PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy by supporting a third-party lawsuit. Thiel argued this was “less about revenge and more about specific deterrence”—and his correct interpretation that as an algorithmic billionaire he had the power to censor a news organization whose salacious coverage he despised.37 The sea change in what counts does not stop with Wall Street or the news.

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In a rare moment of newsroom justice, the story was broken by the Gawker Media technology blog Gizmodo: Nunez, “Want to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of Journalists?”; for the instruction memo itself, see Thielman, “Facebook News Selection Is in Hands of Editors Not Algorithms, Documents Show.” 36. I borrow these lines from an editorial I wrote on the scandal: Finn, “Facebook Trending Story.” 37. Brian Stelter, “Peter Thiel.” 38. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. 39. Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian. 40. Miller, “I’m Maria Popova, and This Is How I Work.” 41. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. 42. Greenfeld, “Faking Cultural Literacy.” 43. This disparity has created its own arbitrage opportunities, like the Congress-Edits Twitterbot that announces each anonymous edit to Wikipedia made from IP addresses at the U.S.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

As this trend continues, we will see more and more of the economy orchestrated through decentralized, but centrally created and managed, networks. Capitalism ≠ Competition Today, the success of these platforms proves that capitalism is, in fact, compatible with centralization. Yet few people realize this. The resistance is largely a relic of Cold War–era thinking and outdated ideologies. PayPal founder and former CEO Peter Thiel describes the phenomenon in his 2014 book, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. “Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist breadlines,” Thiel said. “More than anything else, competition is an ideology—the ideology—that pervades our society and distorts our thinking.”16 In reality, he said, “capitalism and competition are opposites.”

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As part of an annual promotion (“Singles Day”), in 2015 it facilitated $14.3 billion in transactions in one day.14 The company has even inspired a phenomenon in China—so-called Taobao villages—where hundreds of towns that were once farming villages now orient their economic activity around selling products through Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace.15 As Peter Thiel suggests in his book Zero to One, platforms “give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world.” In other words, platforms perform a kind of economic magic, doing what the medieval alchemists could not. By facilitating exchanges, they create something from nothing.

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Once you’ve figured out what works and what doesn’t, you can worry about building out the fully featured, scalable software that you’ll need to run the platform long term. Our advice to potential platform entrepreneurs is to validate your idea quickly before you start building software. Let your users lead the way. 7 Let the Network Do the Work Sequencing markets correctly is underrated. —Peter Thiel, founder and former CEO of PayPal “Nothing can really prepare you for the latest online phenomenon.” That was how the New York Times’ Nick Bilton began a February 2010 article on the brief Internet phenomenon that was Chatroulette.1 The lead was accompanied by a photo of a man in a full-body cheetah costume.

Facebook: The Inside Story
by Steven Levy
Published 25 Feb 2020

Hoffman was eager to meet Zuckerberg, too, but was sensitive to criticism he’d gotten after his Friendster investment. People were saying that it wasn’t seemly for him to be funding his potential competitors. So Hoffman decided maybe someone else might lead the investment round. He suggested that they all meet in the office of his former PayPal colleague Peter Thiel. Hoffman figured that Thiel might be sufficiently impressed to lead the round. If not, Hoffman figured, he’d step up himself. Criticism or not, he wasn’t going to pass on this opportunity. Thiel was head of the Founders Fund, an investment firm he started after leaving the company that made his own fortune, PayPal.

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They found a rental house in Los Altos, not too far from the original Casa Facebook. The landlady took one look at Zuckerberg and asked how old he was. Twenty, he replied. “You think I’m going to rent you my million-dollar house?” she asked. “Yes,” said Zuckerberg. This time there was no zipline. Peter Thiel had instructed Zuckerberg to organize the shares for his co-founders and establish a schedule for their options to vest. Zuckerberg hadn’t even known what a vesting schedule was, but once he took on the tasks, he realized that Moskovitz should have a significant stake—and Eduardo Saverin was overrepresented.

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He’d made sure of that during the negotiations with the VCs. His own deal specified that even if he left Facebook, he would retain his percentage in the company, a cut that would eventually provide him a reliable standing in the Forbes Billionaires list. But it was Mark Zuckerberg who kept control, with the biggest stake of all. “Whether it’s Peter Thiel or Sean Parker, these people thought they were manipulating Mark,” says one early Facebook employee. “But Mark saw Sean as a useful tool to do the job that sucks the most—fundraising. In hindsight, it was genius that Mark convinced Parker to raise all the money for him.” 6 The Book of Change ZUCKERBERG CARRIED A notebook.

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street
by Jeff John Roberts
Published 15 Dec 2020

Two and a half years later, as he walked through the doors of Y Combinator, Brian was more fixated on bitcoin than ever. By now, he had developed a special insight of his own about the currency, one that he would soon deliver to millions of people. • • • In his startup bible, Zero to One, mercurial billionaire Peter Thiel talks about “open secrets”—business ideas that are just there for the plucking by those who are not afraid to challenge conventional thinking. Thiel gives the example of Airbnb, whose founders saw a latent market for empty rooms, and Uber, whose founders realized it was possible to replace taxis with a GPS signal and a smartphone app.

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“It was their first reality check. You can’t just transfer funds around the world without anti–money laundering controls,” she recalls. Brian and Fred did not accept the new oversight with grace. The pair, whether they knew it or not, had taken on the truculent approach of billionaire investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who had helped launch PayPal fifteen years earlier. Like Coinbase, PayPal was ahead of its time and, in Thiel’s words, was in a race between tech and politics. In such a race, lawyers and compliance officers only slowed you down. When an executive at PayPal told him it was time to hire a big legal team to guide them, Thiel—an attorney himself—shot down the plan.

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In one widely shared news story, a Korean mother in the city of Busan recounted how her twenty-year-old son took his life after months of trading cryptocurrencies. Even as amateur and small-time crypto buyers reeled, others greeted 2018 as if the 2017 party remained in full swing. The mercurial investor Peter Thiel revealed his Founder’s Fund had taken a $20 million position in bitcoin. Venture capitalists disclosed deals they had hatched at the height of the mania, including a $75 million investment by billionaire Tim Draper’s fund into Ledger, a company that makes crypto storage devices. ICOs had not gone completely out of style—the messaging app Telegram declared it would raise $500 million by selling its own tokens.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Published 15 Sep 2014

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 Penguin Random House Company, New York. www.crownpublishing.com CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC. Crown Business books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases for sales promotions or corporate use. Special editions, including personalized covers, excerpts of existing books, or books with corporate logos, can be created in large quantities for special needs.

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Special editions, including personalized covers, excerpts of existing books, or books with corporate logos, can be created in large quantities for special needs. For more information, contact Premium Sales at (212) 572-2232 or e-mail 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 685.11—dc23 2014006653 Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-8041-3929-8 eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-3930-4 Book design by Ralph Fowler / rlfdesign Graphics by Rodrigo Corral Design Illustrations by Matt Buck Cover design by Michael Nagin Additional credits appear on this page, which constitutes a continuation of this copyright page.

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Toyota Tumblr 27 Club Twitter, 5.1, 6.1 Uber Unabomber VCs, rules of “veil of ignorance” venture capital power law in venture fund, J-curve of successful, 7.1 vertical progress viral marketing Virgin Atlantic Airways Virgin Group Virgin Records Wagner Wall Street Journal Warby Parker Watson web browsers Western Union White, Phil Wiles, Andrew Wilson, Andrew Winehouse, Amy World Wide Web Xanadu X.com Yahoo!, 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 5.1, 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 fast and secure online commerce. In 2004 he made the first outside investment in Facebook, where he serves as a director. The same year he launched Palantir Technologies, a software company that harnesses computers to empower human analysts in fields like national security and global finance.

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power
by Jacob Helberg
Published 11 Oct 2021

After a brief stint at a New York nonprofit, I enrolled in the law school at Sciences Po in Paris. Within two months, I realized what drove me to America—and why I was not cut out for life at a law firm. I had received a summer associate offer to do international arbitration at a prominent white-shoe firm. It was the kind of place Peter Thiel, himself a lapsed lawyer, would later humorously describe by saying, “From the outside, everybody wanted to get in; from the inside, everyone wanted to get out.”5 In what felt like the biggest roll of the dice I’d made in my life, I turned down the law firm offer. And after a single semester, I dropped out of law school.

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* * * By sheer coincidence, I became a Googler the day before Donald Trump was elected president. The night of November 8, I watched the election returns with a small group at the offices of a friend’s tech firm. The pundits had predicted a slam dunk election for Hillary. Like most people who took Nate Silver’s projections as gospel, I believed them. Peter Thiel was just about the Valley’s lone voice predicting—and championing—Trump’s success. But as state after state unexpectedly went red for Trump, I became more and more concerned. I kept telling myself that Hillary could still win. I was still clinging to that slender hope at 11:40 p.m., when CNN flashed the banner headline “Clinton Calls Trump to Concede Election.”4 Most of my friends watched in disbelief.

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It’s one of the things that made Apple’s “Think Different” ad resonate so strongly, and why I found a home in the Valley myself. Like their DC counterparts, many technologists certainly are the product of elite educations. But a surprising number—following in the footsteps of Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Evan Spiegel, and Jack Dorsey—are college dropouts. Convinced that college is a waste for bright and creative thinkers, Peter Thiel has even started a fellowship program, offering $100,000 a year to twenty to thirty such dropouts.58 Legacy companies are seen less as businesses to be admired than laggards to be overtaken. The goals of each coast tend to be different as well. Washington—with the obvious exception of Donald Trump and his allies—has historically prioritized maintaining political and economic stability.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

Seasteading: “vote with your boat” Seasteading Institute, “Vote with Your Boat,” Seasteading.org, December 13, 2012, https://www.seasteading.org/​2012/​12/​new-promotional-video-vote-with-your-boat/. Peter Thiel: “not quite feasible” Maureen Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself,” New York Times, January 11, 2017, https://mobile.nytimes.com/​2017/​01/​11/​fashion/​peter-thiel-donald-trump-silicon-valley-technology-gawker.html. FEMA: “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid” Evan Osnos, “Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich,” New Yorker, January 30, 2017, http://www.newyorker.com/​magazine/​2017/​01/​30/​doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich.

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One noticeable thing about Trump’s contractor appointees is how many of them come from firms that did not even exist before 9/11: L1 Identity Solutions (specializing in biometrics), the Chertoff Group (founded by Bush’s Homeland Security director Michael Chertoff), Palantir Technologies (a surveillance/big data firm cofounded by PayPal billionaire and Trump backer Peter Thiel), and many more. Security firms draw heavily on the military and intelligence wings of government for their staffing. Under Trump, a remarkable number of lobbyists and staffers from these firms are now migrating back to government, where they will very likely push for even more opportunities to monetize the hunt for people President Trump likes to call “bad hombres.”

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Evan Osnos recently reported in the New Yorker that, in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street, the more serious high-end survivalists are hedging against climate disruption and social collapse by buying space in custom-built underground bunkers in Kansas (protected by heavily armed mercenaries) and building escape homes on high ground in New Zealand. It goes without saying that you need your own private jet to get there—the ultimate Green Zone. At the ultra-extreme end of this trend is PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, a major Trump donor and member of his transition team. Thiel underwrote an initiative called the Seasteading Institute, cofounded by Patri Friedman (grandson of Milton) in 2008. The goal of Seasteading is for wealthy people to eventually secede into fully independent nation-states, floating in the open ocean—protected from sea-level rise and fully self-sufficient.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason
by William Davies
Published 26 Feb 2019

And, as Arendt observed, if there is one thing most likely to convert engagement into enragement—more even than injustice—it is hypocrisy.18 It is sometimes questioned why 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 lawyer, the rich never claim to be speaking for anyone other than themselves. They make no claim to public status, and therefore they cannot be accused of hypocrisy.

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The cult of Napoleonic leaders, trusting their “nose” and shaping the world around them, now surrounds entrepreneurs more than it does military figures. Driving this cult of entrepreneurship was one of the most influential intellectual movements 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 and the Trump administration. He’s known for his outlandish ideas and futuristic schemes, including the notion that death may only be “optional,” once the body’s natural aging process can be properly understood and halted.

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Facebook and Google are now listed on the stock market, yet their founders retain majority shareholding rights. The family becomes the most important political and 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 discomforting for everyone, including the winners. Even truths and great triumphs are temporary—as Napoleon discovered. The “founders” and oligarchs who now dominate our economies feel this as deeply as anyone.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

Over the divide, AI optimists look forward to the Life That Will Be, as enthusiastically as any Bible-waver waiting for the Second Coming. Humankind will be released from: labour/misery/death/ monogamy (see Matthew 22:30)/childbearing/doubt/ADD YOUR OWN WISHLIST HERE. We will be free to live in space (the heavens). Time will be irrelevant. There is a twist, in that a number of big-time tech enthusiasts – Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates – also display apocalyptic anxiety about command and control. Will AI control us? Will we be pets? Or slaves? Will our last invention be our last hurrah? This is straightforward saved/damned-style thinking pattern. It’s old-fashioned. It’s unhelpful. The best tech, the smartest brains, the astonishing things that humans can invent – the rocket ship to Mars, the live-forever elixir – get us nowhere if we can’t evolve where it really matters: in our minds.

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It isn’t a good idea. But perhaps reaching the end of ourselves as biological entities will alter our goals. And, therefore, our fears. * * * The apostles of the AI future are eager to greet the end of the biological body (Ray Kurzweil, Max More), and an end to living on Planet Earth (Elon Musk, Peter Thiel). This has been criticised as the typical male Freedom Fantasy. A world without physical responsibilities where we leave our mess behind us. But really, it is just a version of Heaven – and as such we can’t be blamed for wanting it. I don’t agree that looking forward to a bio-enhanced or disembodied state of consciousness implies hatred or disgust with the body that we have – although it can mean that.

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Its aim is to reverse-engineer biology to increase both lifespan and healthspan. British computer scientist and biology PhD Aubrey de Grey runs his own not-for-profit organisation SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence). SENS researches new therapies to repair cellular and molecular damage. PayPal founder Peter Thiel contributes $600,000 a year to SENS, but de Grey used a multimillion-pound inheritance of his own to get things going. De Grey believes we are fatalistic about ageing – that it is not inevitable. It’s de Grey (quoted by Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus) who said that he believes the first person to live to 1,000 years old is already born.

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems
by Lauren Turner Claire , Laure Claire Reillier and Benoit Reillier
Published 14 Oct 2017

Platform ignition: proving the concept 103 7 Rishi Shah, 24 November 2010, www.gettingmoreawesome.com/2010/11/24/airbnbleverages-craigslist-in-a-really-cool-way/. 8 Dave Gooden, 31 March 2011, http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-becamea-billion-dollar-company/. 9 4 May 2012, Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 9 Notes Essay, http://blakemasters. com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-9-notes-essay. 10 By the time PayPal was acquired by eBay, 70% of all eBay auctions accepted PayPal payments, and roughly one in four closed auction listings were transacted using the payment service. VentureBeat, 27 October 2012, http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/27/ how-ebays-purchase-of-paypal-changed-silicon-valley/#8cV8y19jcBArQLfE.99. 11 G.

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Their approach very much matches the 5Ds described above, while we believe they would be a formidable force if they were to embrace the 5Es instead. 4 It is worth noting that in France, taxi licences are given for free by the government but subsequently traded by taxi drivers and taxi companies for substantial sums. 5 We agree with Peter Thiel when he says that markets where companies are able to gain market power based on their innovations are a lot more attractive than markets where undifferentiated companies compete on low margins to survive. See Peter Thiel, ‘Competition Is for Losers’, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014 (based on Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future). 6 Source: CNET, 9 December 2010, Greg Sandoval. https://www.cnet.com/uk/news/ blockbuster-laughed-out-at-netflix-partnership-offer/ 7 Recent research by Seth Benzell, Guillermo Lagarda and Marshall Van Allstyne from Boston University and MIT (12 July 2016) seems to suggest that firms adopting APIs become more profitable than those who don’t.

Reset
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 14 Aug 2020

Retrieved from https://robwipond.com/ref/RCMP%20ALPR%20PIA.pdf; Parsons, C. (2017, June 13). Who’s watching where you’re driving? Retrieved from https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/blog/20170613 Palantir technology “allows ICE agents to access a vast ‘ecosystem’ of data”: Biddle, S., & Devereaux, R. (2019, May 2). Peter Thiel’s Palantir was used to bust relatives of migrant children, new documents show. Retrieved from https://theintercept.com/2019/05/02/peter-thiels-palantir-was-used-to-bust-hundreds-of-relatives-of-migrant-children-new-documents-show/; MacMillan, D., & Dwoskin, E. (2019). The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm’s ties to ICE under attack by employees. Washington Post.

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It is but a short pivot, but one with ominous consequences, to turn the power of this vast apparatus away from consumer interests and towards nefarious political ends. Not surprisingly, we are now seeing the early glimpses of how social media–enabled psychological warfare will present itself, from Russian troll factories to the Dr. No–like antics of shady private intelligence companies funded by the likes of Trump ally and fellow billionaire Peter Thiel. Most of these operations are hidden in the shadows, protected by the secrecy conferred on them by black budgets and national security agencies. What glimpses we do get emerge in bits and pieces, thanks to investigative research, lawsuits, data breaches, or leaks. Probably the most well-known provider of these new types of commercial psy-op services is Cambridge Analytica, thanks to its prominent and controversial role in the U.K.

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* * * In January 2020, New York Times journalist Kashmir Hill broke the story of an obscure facial recognition AI start-up called Clearview AI.233 Invented by Hoan Ton-That, a young software developer among whose previous little-known accomplishments is “an app that let people put Donald Trump’s distinctive yellow hair on their own photos,” Clearview’s system works by mathematically matching photos of persons of interest to billions of online images the company has scraped from social media. (After Hill’s report, some platforms have banned Clearview AI from further harvesting — but the horses [images] have already left the barn [platform]). As a start-up, Clearview had the financial backing of, among others, Peter Thiel, a conservative ally of President Trump and an early investor in both Facebook and the data fusion company Palantir (precisely the type of ownership one needs if you want your product in front of potential security and intelligence clients). There were definitely some troubling details Hill unearthed about Clearview AI that suggested a serious lack of transparency and accountability right from the get-go.

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs
by Guy Raz
Published 14 Sep 2020

This is where friends and family come into play. Soliciting money from friends and family is sort of like an unofficial step between bootstrapping and scaling up with professional fundraising. It bridges the gap when doing everything yourself can only get you from zero to point-five (to twist a phrase from PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel) and you need money to take you the rest of the way to one. This is precisely what the Method and Away founders did to solve their early money problems. “We were getting five grand here, ten grand there, from every person that would give us money,” Adam Lowry said of the mix of loans and early investment he and Eric Ryan received from friends and family for Method.

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This is something that female and minority entrepreneurs have long had to contend with, whether it means breaking through glass ceilings or breaking down walls built by prejudice. All of which is to say, figuring out how to sneak in through the side door is not new ground you will have to break. A legion of resourceful geniuses have come before you. And what many of them have discovered is that the side door isn’t just less heavily guarded, it’s often bigger. Or, as Peter Thiel put it in a 2014 lecture at the Stanford Center for Professional Development titled “Competition Is for Losers,” “Don’t always go through the tiny little door that everyone’s trying to rush through. Go around the corner and go through the vast gate that no one’s taking.” A year earlier, in Chicago, without fully realizing it, this is precisely what Peter Rahal had begun to do with his idea for a minimalist Paleo protein bar.

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“But we would rather have a CrossFit customer in California than a local Chicago independent grocery store, because in the grocery store we’re among the sea of competition. Whereas in a CrossFit gym, we were by ourselves. RXBar was literally engineered and designed for that occasion. It was perfect.” It was his side door. Those niches—CrossFit, Paleo, and direct-to-consumer—which were then on the verge of exploding and truly becoming the kind of vast gate that Peter Thiel was talking about, were the combination that unlocked opportunity for Peter Rahal and allowed RXBar the chance to take root, to stand out, and to grow, before his direct competitors could notice and stamp him out. By that point, those competitors included major multinationals like General Mills and Nestlé, which had acquired Lärabar and PowerBar, respectively, and they could have easily shut him out by erecting any number of barriers to entry into the protein bar market.

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit
by Marina Krakovsky
Published 14 Sep 2015

Newman, “Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf’s Law,” Contemporary Physics 46 (2005): 323–51. 35.Patricia Cohen, “Richest 1% Likely to Control Half of Global by Wealth by 2016, Study Finds,” New York Times, January 19, 2015. 36.Taleb wrote that “In Extremistan, inequalities are such that one single observation can disproportionately impact the aggregate, or the total.” See Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007), 33. 37.Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 86. 38.Julianne Pepitone and Stacy Cowley, “Facebook’s First Big Investor, Peter Thiel, Cashes Out,” CNNMoney, August 20, 2012. 39.In the introduction to their book of interviews with 35 top VCs and angel investors (including Maples), Tarang Shah and Sheetal Shah observe that entrepreneurs who had founded successful companies “had a very strong intuition and access to asymmetric information” that enabled them to tap emerging opportunities.

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Andreessen and partner Ben Horowitz picked up much of their investment philosophy, probably including this idea, from investment advisor Andy Rachleff, a former partner at Benchmark Capital and founder of Wealthfront, a firm that uses technology to transform the investment advisory business.29 Rachleff, in turn, credits his “investment idol,” Howard Marks, with this framework.30 When the entrepreneur-turned-VC Peter Thiel asks, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” he is getting at the same sort of exceptionalism: the contrarian truth, something that is nonconsensus and right. Understanding that the biggest returns will come from nonconsensus ideas is only a first step, though, because it is very hard to figure out the “right” part.

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For example, according to a study released today, the 80 wealthiest individuals in the world collectively own $1.9 trillion—a total about equal to the “wealth” of all the people in the poorer half of the world.35 In The Black Swan, Taleb coined a memorable word to refer to such highly skewed distributions: they occur in “Extremistan,” where a single event or data point has a disproportionate impact on the total.36 Venture capital lives in Extremistan in that only about 15 start-ups out of several thousand vying for VC funding each year are responsible for the vast majority of profits: just one of those megahits—the next Google or Facebook or Twitter—will make you a monumental winner even if all your other investments lose money. Peter Thiel calls this “the biggest secret in venture capital,” writing in Zero to One. “The best investment in a successful fund equals or outperforms the entire rest of the fund combined.”37 Thiel’s $500,000 angel investment in Facebook in 2004 (before he became a VC) came to be worth more than $1 billion when Facebook went public in 2012,38 making it easier for him to take the kind of radical bets that we associate with eccentric billionaires.

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession exposed almost a decade’s worth of Western growth as an illusion, a diverse cast of economists and political scientists and other figures on both the left and the right have begun to talk about stagnation and repetition and complacency and sclerosis as defining features of this Western age: Tyler Cowen and Robert Gordon, Thomas Piketty and Francis Fukuyama, David Graeber and Peter Thiel, and many others. This book is, in part, an attempt to synthesize their various perspectives into a compelling account of our situation. But it also weaves the social sciences together with observations on our intellectual climate, our popular culture, our religious moment, our technological pastimes, in the hopes of painting a fuller portrait of our decadence than you can get just looking at political science papers on institutional decay or an economic analysis of the declining rate of growth.

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(Theranos was a pleasant fiction, but the Amazon effect is real.) But that surge, and its effect on our everyday lives, is still a blip compared with the cascade of changes between 1870 and 1970, and a letdown compared with what we dreamed about not so very long ago. The Silicon Valley tycoon Peter Thiel, another prominent stagnationist, likes to snark that “we were promised flying cars. We got 140 characters.” And even the people who will explain to you, in high seriousness, that nobody would really want a flying car can’t get around the basic points that he and Graeber, Steyn and Gordon are making.

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The decline in “the number and scale of controversial fringe sects” since the 1980s, historian of religion Philip Jenkins argued recently, is both “genuine and epochal,” and a bad sign for the vitality of the religious center—since such mad experiments on the fringes often indicate that more mainstream religions have a “a solid core of spiritual activism and inquiry.” And the religious torpor betokened by the decline of cults can be linked to intellectual torpor generally—the religious element in the culturewide feeling, to borrow from the pessimistic Peter Thiel, that there are fewer and fewer “secrets left to be discovered.” This torpor extends to skeptics and atheists as well. For all the excitement and debate in the mid-2000s around the so-called “new atheism,” their school was just about the least new thing under the sun, recycling arguments that were new and controversial in the eighteenth century, as though nothing had been written—including by atheists!

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

Reback told me this in 2016, before the election of Trump and the establishment of an even more pro-business, antiregulation regime in Washington. Some people have predicted that Google “may face antitrust scrutiny under Trump”21 because of Obama’s unhealthily close relations with the Mountain View company, particularly his friendship with its executive chairman, Eric Schmidt. But given Peter Thiel’s influential role in the Trump administration, especially as an advisor of the new regime’s tech policy, this seems extremely unlikely. Thiel, the libertarian multibillionaire investor who made one of his most successful counterintuitive bets when, alone in Silicon Valley, he backed Donald Trump for the presidency, is an outspoken supporter of monopolies.

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The self-policing strategy of the DeepMind coalition sounds similar to the goals of another idealistic Elon Musk start-up—OpenAI, a Silicon Valley–based nonprofit research company focused on the promotion of an open-source platform for artificial intelligence technology. Musk cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman, the thirty-one-year-old CEO of Y Combinator, Silicon Valley’s most successful seed investment fund. Launched in 2015 with a billion dollars raised by Silicon Valley royalty including the multi billionaires Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley–based OpenAI is run by a former Google expert on machine learning and staffed with an all-star team of computer scientists cherry-picked from top Big Tech firms. “What a time to be alive!” Altman says about a networked age in which what he calls “the merge” of humans and smart machines is actually happening.

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Whatever seductive promises their don’t be evil–style slogans make, there is no such thing as a moral for-profit company, inside or outside Silicon Valley. For better or worse, the aim of these private superpowers is to dominate markets, not share them. Their goal is their bottom line, not ethics. And yes, it’s also encouraging that powerful Silicon Valley investors like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel have contributed significant capital to an open-source AI platform that, we are promised, won’t be owned or operated by a single data silo. But, I’m afraid, there aren’t too many people in Silicon Valley quite as responsible as LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a relative paragon of civic virtue, who, during the 2016 American presidential election, promised to donate five million dollars of his own money to a veterans’ charity if Donald Trump publicly disclosed his taxes.

Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy
by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake
Published 4 Apr 2022

Although we do not often hear this critique from economists, it is widely cited by laypeople and by commentators in other academic disciplines who seem to share a belief that what goes on in today’s economy lacks the “realness” and authenticity that it should have and that it once had. The idea that the modern economy is unsatisfyingly fake is a recurrent theme in conservative critiques of modernity. We see it in investor Peter Thiel’s lament that “we wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Commentators make clear their belief that a lot of modern economic activity is somehow fake, inauthentic, or even fraudulent. This discontent became acute during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many Western countries found themselves short of ventilators and personal protective equipment and without the wherewithal to make them rapidly.

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The rationale for subsidy is partly one of spillovers and partly the belief that young people are capital constrained. The fifty-year expansion of universities around the world is a manifestation of the quantity theory of intangibles. There is of course a widespread critique of this expansion; we see it in Peter Thiel’s rationale for setting up the Thiel Fellowships to fund smart kids not to attend university, and in the United Kingdom’s 2018 review of postsecondary education. This critique holds that a lot of university education isn’t worthwhile for students, employers, or society. Liberal arts degrees are too generic, and the nature of the university funding system provides very weak incentives for universities and for students to teach and study genuinely worthwhile things.

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Two Political Problems None of these recommendations are particularly controversial, and most governments at least pay lip service to them. A left-leaning government might put more emphasis on government-set challenges, like the Green New Deal, and a right-leaning government might focus more on DARPA-style research and entrepreneurship. But the differences between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or John McDonnell, on the one hand, and Peter Thiel or Dominic Cummings, on the other, are smaller than the similarities. This would not have been the case a decade ago. But working out the approximate policy mix is not the most difficult challenge here. Executing these policies, and doing so effectively and at scale, requires a government to confront some important political questions and to challenge some vested interests.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
by Martin Ford
Published 13 Sep 2021

Vicarious’s robots have a remarkable ability to improve at their assigned tasks—getting measurably better within hours of their initial operation.25 The objective is to create robots capable of not just picking items from inventory shelves or bins, but to go beyond that and design machines with genuinely versatile manipulative ability, including functions such as sorting and packing items, replacing the workers who tend factory machines by feeding parts in and out and performing detailed assembly work. Vicarious has raised at least $150 million in venture funding and is backed by some of most prominent names in Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and—as you might have expected—Jeff Bezos. In parallel with its progress in artificial intelligence, Vicarious is also pursuing an innovative “robots as a service” business model, which may eventually prove to be disruptive across a range of industries. Rather than building or selling its own robots, Vicarious instead acquires industrial robots from companies like ABB, integrates them with its proprietary artificial intelligence software and then rents the robots out to companies in a way that’s roughly comparable to the way a temporary employment agency might place human workers.

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And the same is true of a myriad of other technologies distributed across virtually every aspect of modern life. The fact that all the remarkable progress in computing and the internet does not, by itself, measure up to the expectation that the kind of broad-based progress seen in earlier decades would continue unabated is captured in Peter Thiel’s famous quip that “we were promised flying cars and instead we got 140 characters.” The argument that we have been living in an age of relative stagnation—even as information technology has continued to accelerate—has been articulated at length by the economists Tyler Cowen, who published his book The Great Stagnation in 2011,64 and Robert Gordon, who sketches out a very pessimistic future for the United States in his 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth.65 A key argument in both books is that the low-hanging fruit of technological innovation had been largely harvested by roughly the 1970s.

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While this is admittedly a far cry from human-level AI, Kurzweil remains confident in his strategy, telling me that “humans use this hierarchical approach” and that ultimately it will be “sufficient for AGI.”36 Yet another path toward artificial general intelligence is being forged by OpenAI, a San Francisco–based research organization that was founded in 2015 with financial backing from, among others, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Linked-in co-founder Reid Hoffman. OpenAI was initially set up as a nonprofit entity with a mission to undertake a safe and ethical quest for AGI. The organization was conceived partly in response to Elon Musk’s deep concern about the potential for superhuman machine intelligence to someday pose a genuine threat to humanity.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions
by Temple Grandin, Ph.d.
Published 11 Oct 2022

“An Asymmetrical Relationship between Verbal and Visual Thinking: Converging Evidence from Behavior and fMRI.” NeuroImage, March 18, 2017. Ankum, J. “Diagnosing Skin Diseases Using an AI-Based Dermatology Consult.” Science Translational Medicine 12, no. 548 (2020): eabc8946. Baer, D. “Peter Thiel: Asperger’s Can Be a Big Advantage in Silicon Valley.” Business Insider, April 8, 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-aspergers-is-an-advantage-2015-4. Bainbridge, W. A., et al. “Quantifying Aphantasia through Drawing: Those without Visual Imagery Show Deficits in Object but Not Spatial Memory.” Cortex 135 (Feb. 2021): 159–72. Baron, S. “How Disney Gave Voice to a Boy with Autism.”

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“Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/index.html. “Augusta Savage.” Smithsonian American Art Museum. https://americanart.si.edu/artist/augusta-savage-4269/. Baer, D. “Peter Thiel: Asperger’s Can Be a Big Advantage in Silicon Valley.” Business Insider, April 8, 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-aspergers-is-an-advantage-2015-4/. Baron-Cohen, S., et al. “The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger’s Syndrome/High-Functioning Males and Females, Scientists and Mathematicians.” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 31, no. 1 (2001): 5–17.

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The social demands on software engineers mostly consist of collaborating with colleagues to build a product.” Matt McFarland writes in The Washington Post, “While full-blown Asperger’s syndrome or autism [holds] back careers, a smaller dose of associated traits appears critical to hatching innovations that change the world.” Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, suggests that the social environment favors uniformity and discourages daring entrepreneurship. In a profile on him in Business Insider, Thiel says that in Silicon Valley many of the successful entrepreneurs are on the spectrum, which “happens to be a plus for innovation and creating great companies.”

Inside the House of Money: Top Hedge Fund Traders on Profiting in a Global Market
by Steven Drobny
Published 31 Mar 2006

(See Figure 9.2.) 70 65 Dollars per Barrel 60 55 50 45 Long Oil Presentation 40 35 30 FIGURE 9.2 5 5 -0 -0 Oc t No v 5 5 -0 Se p 5 -0 l-0 Ju Au g 5 05 nJu 5 -0 ay M -0 5 Crude Oil Futures (WTI), 2004–2005 Source: Bloomberg. Ap r 05 -0 ar Fe b- M 04 05 nJa De c- 4 04 t-0 vNo Oc 4 4 -0 Se p 4 -0 Au g 04 l-0 n- Ju Ju 4 04 -0 ay - Ap r M 4 4 M ar -0 -0 -0 Ja n Fe b 4 25 190 INSIDE THE HOUSE OF MONEY DROBNY GLOBAL CONFERENCE REVIEW, APRIL 2004 Peter Thiel’s Favorite Trade: Long Long-Dated Oil Peter Thiel, of Clarium Capital Management, suggested buying shares in oil sand companies in Canada.The idea is to create a synthetic call option on long-term oil. The Canadian oil sand companies are high marginal cost oil producers whose valuation can be explosive if oil were to rise substantially over the next decade.

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The Family Office Manager: Jim Leitner (Falcon Management) 35 5. The Prop Trader: Christian Siva-Jothy (SemperMacro) 71 6. The Researcher: Dr.Andres Drobny (Drobny Global Advisors) 103 7. The Treasurer: Dr. John Porter (Barclays Capital) 133 8. The Central Banker: Dr. Sushil Wadhwani (Wadhwani Asset Management) 161 9. The Dot-Commer: Peter Thiel (Clarium Capital) 181 10. The Floor Trader:Yra Harris (Praxis Trading) 199 11. The Pioneer: Jim Rogers 217 12. The Commodity Specialist: Dwight Anderson (Ospraie Management) 241 vii viii CONTENTS 13. The Stock Operator: Scott Bessent (Bessent Capital) 269 14. The Emerging Market Specialist: Marko Dimitrijević (Everest Capital) 289 15.

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In regard to how the world adjusts to China, I think the economic adjustment will be easier than perhaps some of the political issues.As they become more powerful, there are various potential flashpoints and a lot of potential for friction, especially as they become more and more self-assertive, which I think they will. In Japan, things have clearly looked up, but they have stored up such huge problems. Perhaps what you’re going to have is a lot of inflation in Japan, which may be the only way they’ll come out of this mess. CHAPTER 9 The Dot-Commer Peter Thiel Former CEO and Cofounder of PayPal Clarium Capital San Francisco eter Thiel is bit of an enigma in global macro.Whereas some managers earn distinction because they are successful and secretive, Thiel is unusually open about all things related to his business, Clarium Capital Management, a San Francisco–based global macro hedge fund.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (Random House, 2008). 5. https://businessmanagement.news/2017/05/05/warren-buffet-would-rather-invest-in-your-idiot-nephew-than-with-mark-zuckerberg-or-jeff-bezos/. 6. https://www.ft.com/content/fd27245a-9790-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b. 7. https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-uncontested-3-pointers-1519595032. 8. http://gawker.com/322852/is-peter-thiel-silicon-valleys-godfather. 9. https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 10. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 2nd ed. (Dancing Unicorn Books, 2016). 11. http://consumerfed.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Overcharged-and-Underserved.pdf. 12. https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations-brief-history. 13. https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-formally-rules-comcasts-throttling-of-bittorrent-was-illegal/. 14.

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This gave them complete dominance in many areas of the supermarket shelf like ketchup. They tried to buy Unilever in 2017, which would have given them even more ownership of dominant brands, but Unilever turned them down. Alas, Kraft Heinz Unilever was not meant to be. If Warren Buffett is the embodiment of American capitalism, then billionaire Peter Thiel is Silicon Valley's Godfather.8 They could not be more different. Where Buffett is folksy and simple, Thiel is distant and philosophical. Buffett quotes the actress Mae West, while Thiel quotes French intellectuals like Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. Buffett is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, and Thiel is a libertarian who has procured a New Zealand passport so he can flee when the peasants with pitchforks come for Silicon Valley monopolies.

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Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian-born economics professor at Harvard, is generally remembered for coining the phrase “gale of creative destruction,” in praise of competition. It is ironic that economists and consultants see him today as the champion of disruptive startups, when in Schumpeter's view, if you wanted to search for progress, it would lead you to the doors of monopolies. Much like Peter Thiel, Schumpeter thought that perfectly competitive firms were inferior in technological efficiency and were a waste. Monopolies were more robust because, “a perfectly competitive industry is much more apt to be routed—and to scatter the bacilli of depression—under the impact of progress or of external disturbance than is big business.”10 Buffett and Thiel love monopolies, because when you're a monopolist, you become what economists call a “price maker.”

The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator, Silicon Valley's Most Exclusive School for Startups
by Randall Stross
Published 4 Sep 2013

The year after the Thiel Fellowship was announced, he contacted Stanford to teach a course in Stanford’s computer science department. It was approved for the spring 2012 quarter after due notice was taken by the Stanford faculty of “what he’s said in the past about the value of a university education,” said a Stanford faculty member. “Peter Thiel to Teach Stanford Class on Startups,” Tech Chronicles blog, San Francisco Chronicle, March 12, 2012, http://blog.sfgate.com/techchron/2012/03/12/peter-thiel-to-teach-stanford-class-on-startups/. 2. Justin Kan, “Drop Out. Or Don’t,” A Really Bad Idea blog, February 27, 2011, http://areallybadidea.com/drop-out-or-dont. 3. Justin Kan, “Selling Kiko,” A Really Bad Idea blog, February 21, 2011, http://areallybadidea.com/selling-kiko. 4.

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When Patrick Collison was asked what he thought about Graham’s point about the intimidating nature of a big problem, Collison politely dissented, arguing that what should be emphasized was that addressing a hard-to-solve problem is actually not as hard as everyone thinks: founders and employees alike are inspired to work harder than if they were taking on the mundane. Midsummer in 2010, the Collisons met with Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, who expressed some concern that Stripe was a “two-stage” rocket. “There’s all these fantastic things you can do at stage two, but it depends on a really good execution of stage one,” Collison recalled Thiel saying. Nonetheless, Thiel offered to invest. At the end of the summer, the Collisons completed a $2 million round raised from Thiel, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, Elon Musk—another PayPal founder—and a few others.

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As fatigue sets in, founders pack up and leave in twos and threes, headed home. 13 NEW IDEAS In the YC universe, business schools are deemed so useless that no one bothers to expend any energy in remarking upon their irrelevance to software startups. The only question relating to formal education that does draw attention is whether to finish or even go to college. In 2010, Peter Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal, announced the establishment of a new fellowship that would award twenty $100,000 grants to entrepreneurs under the age of twenty if they left college to pursue their ideas.1 As a debate spread across online forums about whether entrepreneurial young adults should bother with college, Justin Kan posted an essay on his personal blog in early 2011 about his own college experience at Yale.2 He tries his best to come up with an itemized list of knowledge and skills acquired at college that he is now using as a technology entrepreneur, but the list is pretty meager.

The Unusual Billionaires
by Saurabh Mukherjea
Published 16 Aug 2016

Exhibit 3: No divergence in returns at beginning of the portfolio* Source: Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, Ambit Capital research. *Distribution of actual returns of companies in our completed Coffee Can Portfolios at the beginning of the investment period. Exhibit 4: Some companies start outperforming others at mid-stage (after five years)* Source: Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, Ambit Capital research. *Distribution of actual returns of companies in our completed Coffee Can Portfolios after five-year period (mid-stage). Exhibit 5: One or two firms generate exponential returns at the end of the portfolio term (ten years)* Source: Peter Thiel’s Zero to One, Ambit Capital research.

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A professional investor will feel that he has a fiduciary responsibility to intervene if parts of the portfolio are underperforming. But Kirby’s counter-intuitive insight is that an investor will make much more money if he leaves the portfolio untouched. Thirty years after Kirby formalized the concept of CCP, the Silicon Valley–based venture capitalist and founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, provided a lucid explanation in his 2014 book, Zero to One, why leaving a portfolio untouched for long makes investors very rich. Thiel begins by talking about the Pareto Principle, conceptualized by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, which says that 80 per cent of the effects come from 20 per cent of the causes.

Golden Gates: Fighting for Housing in America
by Conor Dougherty
Published 18 Feb 2020

audible gasps in: City and County of San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Public Meeting, November 14, 2016, http://sanfrancisco.granicus.com/player/clip/26569?view_id=10&meta_id=526895. photo on Thiel’s: Anna Wiener, “Why Protestors Gathered Outside Peter Thiel’s Mansion This Weekend,” New Yorker, March 14, 2017, www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-protesters-gathered-outside-peter-thiels-mansion-this-weekend. full of headlines: Erika D. Smith, “Out with California’s NIMBYs and in with the YIMBYs,” Sacramento Bee, July 20, 2017, www.sacbee.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/erika-d-smith/article162699668.html. new day described: Peter Kremer, “State Sends a Signal in the Housing Crisis,” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1980.

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But the exchange was a neon example of why development politics were so contentious, and why housing could never really be as simple as a two-sided equation with some subsidies on one side and some development on the other. Sonja and David Campos had something of a makeup session a few months later. One night Sonja and Laura were sitting on Sonja’s couch looking at their phones when they came across an article about how Palantir Technologies, a big data firm backed by Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and libertarian Trump supporter, was building surveillance software that tracked phone logs and criminal records to help ICE find and deport people. As it happened, Sonja knew where Thiel lived. A few months earlier, when the idea of Donald Trump being president still seemed preposterous, she’d gone there to have breakfast and talk about a donation (Thiel agreed to give her some money, then recanted).

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A few months earlier, when the idea of Donald Trump being president still seemed preposterous, she’d gone there to have breakfast and talk about a donation (Thiel agreed to give her some money, then recanted). After reading the article, Sonja and Laura decided they’d rustle the growing list of contacts they’d amassed during the election and organize a group protest on Peter Thiel’s doorstep, and invite Campos to come along. And so it was that on a bright Saturday afternoon, Sonja, Laura, David Campos, and fifty other people gathered in front of Thiel’s nine-bedroom, $25 million house. “The reason we’re here is to call upon the people who are complicit in what Trump is trying to do,” Campos said, through a megaphone.

Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature
by Ben Mezrich
Published 3 Jul 2017

A youthful man was sitting next to her: short brown hair, deep-set blue eyes, wearing a suit over a white button-down shirt, open at the collar. Over the next several minutes, half a dozen people came up to him to shake his hand and try to engage him. It was obvious he was someone 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 for profit, in genetics and medical science for quite some time. The gathered entrepreneurs and scientists represented just a handful of those whose work Thiel found intriguing.

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Up to the point at which Thiel had stepped in, Church had been funding much of the project from his discretionary monies, along with funding from Revive & Restore. Thiel’s deep pockets, and their aligned interests, could help them get to the next stage. Luhan felt an excitement 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 own problem. And the answer wasn’t money. It was nature. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Late Spring 2013 77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR. At ten minutes past three in the morning, Bobby was still shaking sleep out of his eyes when Luhan burst into the lab, as usual moving like some sort of possessed sprite.

The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market
by Tobias E. Carlisle
Published 13 Oct 2017

We’ll look at the details of actual stock picks by billionaire deep-value investors: •Warren Buffett •Carl Icahn •Daniel Loeb •David Einhorn We’ll see the strategies of Buffett and his teacher, Benjamin Graham, and other contrarians, including: •billionaire trader Paul Tudor-Jones •venture capitalist billionaire Peter Thiele •global macroinvestor billionaire Michael Steinhardt •billionaire tail-risk hedger Mark Spitznagel I wrote this book so you can read it in a couple of hours. It’s written for my kids, family, and friends, for people who are smart but not stock-market people. That means it’s written in plain English.

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Schwager’s Market Wizards (1989), he said: I learned that even though markets look their very best when they are setting new highs, that is often the best time to sell. To some extent, to be a good trader, you have to be a contrarian. Paul Tudor Jones zigs when the market zags. Billionaire investor Peter Thiele draws this diagram to describe the “sweet spot” for his chosen stocks: Sweet Spot: A Good Idea That Seems Like a Bad Idea Source: Paul Graham, “Black Swan Farming,” September 2012, Available at http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html Thiele’s “sweet spot” is a good idea that seems like a bad idea to the crowd.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
by Martin Ford
Published 4 May 2015

Temp Attorneys Must Review 80 Documents Per Hour,” Business Insider, October 21, 2009, http://www.businessinsider.com/temp-attorney-told-to-review-80-documents-per-hour-2009–10. 58. Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers: Why Thinking in Numbers Is the New Way to Be Smart (New York: Bantam Books, 2007), p. 117. 59. “Peter Thiel’s Graph of the Year,” Washington Post (Wonkblog), December 30, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/30/peter-thiels-graph-of-the-year/. 60. Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Benjamin M. Sand, “The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks,” National Bureau of Economic Research, NBER Working Paper No. 18901, issued in March 2013, http://www.nber.org/papers/w18901. 61.

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Acceleration Versus Stagnation As information and communications technologies have advanced in their decades-long exponential march, innovation in other areas has been largely incremental. Examples include the basic design of cars, homes, aircraft, kitchen appliances, and our overall transportation and energy infrastructures, none of which, for the most part, have changed significantly since the middle of the twentieth century. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s famous comment—“We were promised flying cars, and instead what we got was 140 characters”—captures the sentiment of a generation that expected the future to be way cooler than this. This lack of broad-based progress stands in stark contrast to what a person who lived through the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth would have experienced.

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Robert Geraci, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, wrote in an essay entitled “The Cult of Kurzweil” that if the movement achieves traction with the broader public, it “will present a serious challenge to traditional religious communities, whose own promises of salvation may appear weak in comparison.”7 Kurzweil, for his part, vociferously denies any religious connotation and argues that his predictions are based on a solid, scientific analysis of historical data. The whole concept might be easy to dismiss completely were it not for the fact that an entire pantheon of Silicon Valley billionaires have demonstrated a very strong interest in the Singularity. Both Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google and PayPal co-founder (and Facebook investor) Peter Thiel have associated themselves with the subject. Bill Gates has likewise lauded Kurzweil’s ability to predict the future of artificial intelligence. In December 2012 Google hired Kurzweil to direct its efforts in advanced artificial intelligence research, and in 2013 Google spun off a new biotechnology venture named Calico.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
Published 19 Oct 2017

While DigiCash failed to become a household name, some players will resurface in our story, such as Nick Szabo, the father of “smart contracts,” and Zooko Wilcox, the founder of Zcash, both of whom worked at DigiCash for a time.5 Other attempts were made at digital currencies, payment systems, or stores of value after ecash, like e-gold and Karma. The former ran into trouble with the FBI for serving a criminal element,6 while the latter never gained mainstream adoption.7 The pursuit of a new form of Internet money drew the attention of present day tech-titans such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, both of whom had a hand in founding PayPal. Except for Karma, the problem with all these attempts at digital money was that they weren’t purely decentralized—one way or another they relied on a centralized entity, and that presented the opportunity for corruption and weak points for attack.

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The ensuing development of the Bitcoin software before launch mostly involved just two people, Satoshi and Hal Finney.13 Buterin also knew that while Ethereum could run on ether, the people who designed it couldn’t, and Ethereum was still over a year away from being ready for release. So he found funding through the prestigious Thiel Fellowship. Billionaire Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and was Facebook’s first outside investor, created the Thiel Fellowship to reward talented individuals who leave the traditional path of college and pursue immediate ways to make an impact in the world. Winners might conduct scientific research, create a startup, or find other ways to improve society and the world.

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In the past, this world was open only to the wealthy, but with new trends such as crowdfunding, token launches, and innovative regulation via the JOBS Act, opportunities exist for innovative investors of all shapes and sizes to get involved. Chapter 16 The Wild World of ICOs During the early tech days, innovators such as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Michael Dell became iconic figures who had turned ideas into multibillion-dollar businesses. Over the last decade, we’ve seen visionaries such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg do the same. These innovators changed the world because people believed in their visions, and these early believers invested money to turn their ideas into reality. While these investments brought great benefit, they were not based on altruism; initial investors were looking to get a sizable return on their risky investments.

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power
by Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Published 14 Sep 2020

The only VCs who seemed truly eager to meet the prince were those at the other end of the spectrum, the ambitious up-and-comers who also upset the prince’s entourage by boasting that they had an in with the Saudis. One was Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder of the data analytics firm Palantir who had worked with the successful VC Peter Thiel. Ahead of the visit, investors recall, Lonsdale told them he had Saudi investment, when in fact he had a modest sum from a son of the energy minister. It was far from a relationship with the kingdom’s government. Asked about the claim, Lonsdale said it was “not appropriate to share” the names of people whose money he managed and that he never boasted about having Saudi investment.

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“It seems in those societies many make money by peddling connections, versus building things or applying intellectual rigor,” he later said. But the more established VCs’ attitudes seemed to change at a dinner at the Fairmont Hotel atop San Francisco’s Nob Hill. “I need a bridge between Saudi and Silicon Valley. I need you to help our reforms,” Mohammed told a group that included Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, John Doerr, and Michael Moritz, titans of venture capital with decades of experience backing start-ups that turned into multi-billion-dollar corporations. As the prince saw it, the venture capital model could be scaled indefinitely. If they made huge returns on relatively modest investments, imagine how much they could make if he boosted their capital tenfold.

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Mohammed continued his visit, meeting executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Apple’s Tim Cook. He ate dinner with Jeff Bezos and was photographed with Google founder Sergey Brin wearing his Silicon Valley best: a blazer, dress shoes, and a button-down shirt tucked into dark jeans belted across his broad belly. He sat with Oprah Winfrey, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and the CEOs of Disney, Uber, and Lockheed. To Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor whose interview with Barack Obama years earlier led Mohammed to believe that the former president was supporting Iran over Saudi Arabia, the prince made a surprising pronouncement: He asserted that Israel had the right to exist, a first for a senior Saudi royal, and a huge shift for a kingdom that, as recently as 2012, published middle school textbooks that called Jews apes.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

But lacking a consensus on what is the “right” ratio, such legislation (much like say on pay) will hardly make a dent if it doesn’t address the root problem that firms are undemocratic. Barring mechanisms to provide outside constraints to executives setting their own pay, the monstrously unjust gap in earnings is unlikely to significantly narrow with market-friendly policies like these. The Road to Corporate Serfdom “Competition is for losers.” — Peter Thiel The corporate elite’s role in widening inequality in the Western world is only half of the story. In fact, according to one widely-cited economics paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis in 2018, it may only be one-third of the story. Using a mammoth database of workers’ income tax returns matched to employers for the entire US in the period of 1978–2013 (which nicely covers almost the entirety of the laissez-faire era), the authors concluded that around two-thirds of the rise in inequality in earnings during this period took place between firms rather than within them.18 This is a problematic conclusion for those hoping that merely changing the workings of the firm is enough to reduce inequality, but confirms the need for more systemic changes across the economy as a whole.

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Classic economics would say that if there’s a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital to capture some of that, and none of that has happened. That tells you there’s something wrong.21 Unsurprisingly, a large share of tech tycoons professes some degree of adherence to libertarianism. In some cases, like that of PayPal founder Peter Thiel (perhaps the most vocal libertarian of his cohort) the obsession with market fundamentalism made him become a staunch supporter of Trump, and he even served as part of his transition team. He remained a Trump advisor even after many of his tech colleagues, such as Elon Musk, abandoned the administration due to its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change.

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One particular group that has helped drive these narratives with the added respectability usually afforded to academics, public intellectuals, and established pundits is the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW), a group of self-proclaimed “renegade” thinkers which includes people like the aforementioned Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro, Sam Harris, “professor in exile” Bret Weinstein and his brother Eric Weinstein (who is the managing director of Peter Thiel’s investment fund), neocon Douglas Murray, and contrarian feminists Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia. The movement’s main outlets include the widely followed Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin podcasts, and the Australian online magazine Quillette. Although this motley crew comes from a range of ideological backgrounds, the common denominator is their anti-progressive leanings, and their claim to be among the few thinkers willing to challenge the leftist orthodoxies that allegedly dominate intellectual debate.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom)
by Adam Fisher
Published 9 Jul 2018

In ’93, there was a mention in the Economist that John Doerr, whoever that was, was having breakfast at Buck’s. Netscape had a lot of their early meetings at Buck’s. That was the most important thing that ever happened here, because it allowed all of us to go online seamlessly. Peter Thiel: So Netscape comes along in ’93 and things start to take off. Jamis MacNiven: In ’94, three TV crews came in. In ’95, 150 TV crews came in. Peter Thiel: It was Netscape’s IPO in August of 1995—over halfway through the decade!—that really made the larger public aware of the internet. It was an unusual IPO because Netscape wasn’t profitable at the time. They priced it at $14 a share.

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There was a nascent blogging world being built: just a handful of hand-rolled web-logs—this was before they were called blogs. Biz Stone: I was reading EvHead.com, and really impressed by the guy. Totally in sync philosophically with his thinking. I was completely sold on this idea that blogging was the true democratization of information. Peter Thiel: Launch parties became so important that someone put together an exclusive e-mail list that published rankings of the various parties going on that day. Patty Beron: So I had this website, SFgirl.com, and pretty much everybody in the tech community knew about it. We listed all the dot-coms, we had community forums where people involved in start-ups would come and discuss what was happening.

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Because they did something simpler and quicker and with less, and then I remember Sean got on the computer in my office, and he pulled up The Facebook, and he starts showing it to me, and I had never been able to be on it, because it’s college kids only, and it was amazing. People are putting up their phone numbers and home addresses and everything about themselves and I was like, I can’t believe it! But it was because they had all this trust. And then Sean put together an investment round quickly, and he had advised Zuck to, I think, take $500,000 from Peter Thiel, and then $38,000 each from me and Reid Hoffman. Because we were basically the only other people doing anything in social networking. It was a very, very small little club at the time. Ezra Callahan: By December it’s—I wouldn’t say it’s like a more professional atmosphere, but all the kids that Mark and Dustin were hanging out with are either back at school back East or back at Stanford, and work has gotten a little more serious for them.

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

on the website of tech magazine Wired took the opposite view, albeit without providing any evidence in support of the argument. For a broader critique of the sharing economy, see Tom Slee, What’s Yours Is Mine (London: OR Books, 2015). 12. Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. Chapter 9. How Markets Shape Us 1. Despite its fearsome reputation, Changi was among the better-run Japanese camps, with only 850 deaths among the 87,000 prisoners who passed through. 2. On Changi as heaven compared to other camps: Kevin Blackburn, “Commemorating and Commodifying the Prisoner of War Experience in South-east Asia: The Creation of Changi Prison Museum,” Journal of the Australian War Memorial 33 (2000), http://www.awm.gov.au/journal/j33/blackburn.asp. 3.

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That’s something they’re not interested in talking about to the public at large, or to their representatives in government. This leaves a bit of a paradox in the techno-utopian free-market narrative. A great entrepreneur will use technology to create a fantastic new market, then will use technology to set up market frictions to protect it. As entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “Competition Is for Losers.”12 Don’t get us wrong. We’re not faulting the market makers of Silicon Valley nor begrudging them for the profits they’ve generated and captured. But we are trying to point out some of the inconsistencies between the claims of pristine competition espoused by free-market zealots in general and the practicalities of making markets work.

Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy
by David Frum
Published 25 May 2020

Joshua Caplan, “Glenn Beck: ‘We Are Officially at the End of the Country’ If Trump Loses 2020,” Breitbart, March 19, 2019, https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/03/19/glenn-beck-we-are-officially-at-the-end-of-the-country-if-trump-loses-2020/ 9. Sarah Sanders, “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Sarah Sanders,” October 29, 2018, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/press-briefing-press-secretary-sarah-sanders-102918/. 10. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. 11. Ari Berman, “The Courts Won’t End Gerrymandering. Eric Holder Has a Plan to Fix It Without Them,” Mother Jones, July/August 2019, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/07/the-courts-wont-end-gerrymandering-eric-holder-has-a-plan-to-fix-it-without-them/. 12.

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The Trump supporters who hear that claim may not have believed that literally millions of illegal aliens voted. But they could easily believe that millions of people voted who should never have been accepted as voters in the first place. One of President Trump’s few supporters in the technology world, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, wrote in 2009: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Thiel explained, 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.10 Thiel—a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Law School who now heads a hedge fund—would seem the epitome of all that a Trump voter might resent.

The Smartphone Society
by Nicole Aschoff

When Federal Trade Commission staffers advocated bringing a similar lawsuit against Google in 2012, the FTC commissioners quickly overruled them.18 Jeremy Stoppelman, the CEO of Yelp (which competes with Google in providing ratings and reviews of local services), has long argued that Google abuses its power in search; Stoppelman insists that Obama regulators were uninterested in his warnings. Until quite recently, the word “monopoly” has not been negatively associated with tech. On the contrary, Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal, argued in Zero to One that competition is bad for capitalism—or at least, for profits. “Creative monopoly” is something to aspire to, something that brings success and innovation.19 A few years ago it would have been perceived as absurd to suggest that Facebook or Amazon should be regulated in a similar way to Vanderbilt’s railroads or Morgan’s steel.

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For example, tech titans marketize technologies developed by the military; according to the technology writer Peter Nowak it is nearly “impossible to separate any American-made technology from the American military.”69 The US government uses its influence in international institutions and its nearly eight hundred military bases abroad to open doors for US tech companies globally. As Robert McChesney notes, “The government is like a private police force for the Internet giants.”70 Tech titans also have ongoing and extremely lucrative tie-ups with US intelligence agencies: Google and Palantir (founded by the PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel) have deals with the CIA and the NSA, and the CIA is one of Amazon’s best customers; in 2013 it signed a ten-year, $600 million dollar cloud computing contract with the e-commerce giant. More important, just like the tech titans, the US government tracks, records, and stores every moment of our digital existence.

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It’s the best model for getting things done and bringing your vision to the world.”24 Zuckerberg’s sentiment echoes Electronic Frontier Foundation founding member John Perry Barlow’s oft-cited manifesto: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”25 Peter Thiel shares Zuckerberg’s and Barlow’s desire for autonomy and space to build new Utopias. He’s bankrolling Patri Friedman’s Seasteading Institute, whose aim is to build floating cities similar to oil rigs that would be anchored in international waters and so be free of the laws, regulations, and by extension, the norms and customs of landlubbers (Patri is the grandson of the neoliberal guru Milton Friedman).

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

support across the political spectrum: In addition to politicians such as Democratic Senator Ben Cardin (https://www.cardin.senate.gov/pct) and think tanks such as the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), advocates include high-tech figures such as Bill Gates (Tim Worstall, “Bill Gates Points to the Best Tax System, the Progressive Consumption Tax,” Forbes, March 18, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/03/18/bill-gates-points-to-the-best-tax-system-the-progressive-consumption-tax). to spot changes in skill demand: We are not alone suggesting this; see, e.g., World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report (January 2016), 24 and 29, http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Future _of_Jobs.pdf. “look to build a monopoly”: Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. choose the job they like: See also Van Parijs and Vanderborght, Basic Income, 165–169. CHAPTER 10: HUMAN CHOICE become “a CEO of a retail company”: Ryan Mac, “Stitch Fix: The $250 Million Startup Playing Fashionista Moneyball,” Forbes, June 1, 2016, www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/06/01/fashionista-moneyball-stitch-fix-katrina-lake/#54e798e859a2.

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These actions will help our society cope with the changes of data-driven adaptive automation. THIS APPROACH IS BASED ON THE BELIEF THAT COMPETITIVE markets are the key foundation of a healthy and prosperous society. This stands in stark contrast to assertions by people such as high-tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “competition is for losers” and that “if you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly.” Thiel’s answer makes sense—from the vantage point of a passionate monopolist. But Thiel is completely wrong when it comes to appreciating the basic economic principles of data-rich markets and their consequences.

I Hate the Internet: A Novel
by Jarett Kobek
Published 3 Nov 2016

Two years later, Million Fishes would be evicted. The building would be renovated. A tech startup called Bloodhound would move into the space. Bloodhound had received $3,000,000 in a round of venture capital funding led by Peter Thiel, who was a co-founder of PayPal, a billionaire weapons profiteer and an incompetent hedge fund manager. In addition to funding startups named after animals bred to hunt other animals, Peter Thiel wanted to build independent nation states on floating ocean platforms, where the citizens of these independent nation states would organize around the Objectivist principles of Ayn Rand. Million Fishes paid $5,000 a month in rent.

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Some of Ayn Rand’s better known followers included: Paul Ryan, the 2012 Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States of America. Vince Vaughn, a dough-faced actor who had starred in such hilarious comedies as The Watch, Couples Retreat, Four Christmases, The Internship, and Delivery Man. The Internship was a film about two adults who receive internships at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, a billionaire weapons profiteer and incompetent hedge fund manager who wanted to build independent nation states on floating ocean platforms. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, an unprofitable website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry. Ron Paul, a septuagenarian medical doctor and perennial Presidential protest candidate.

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You
by Sangeet Paul Choudary , Marshall W. van Alstyne and Geoffrey G. Parker
Published 27 Mar 2016

CHAPTER 5: LAUNCH 1. Eric M. Jackson, “How eBay’s purchase of PayPal changed Silicon Valley,” VentureBeat, October 27, 2012, http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/27/how-ebays-purchase-of-paypal-changed-silicon-valley/. 2. Blake Masters, “Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Class 2 Notes Essay,” Blake Masters blog, April 6, 2012, http://blakemasters.com/post/20582845717/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-2-notes-essay. Copyright 2014 by David O. Sacks. Reprinted by permission. 3. Eric M. Jackson, The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth (Los Angeles: WND Books, 2012). 4.

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Inspired by the early experiences of companies like AOL and Amazon, high-tech entrepreneurs and their cheerleaders in the media decided that the key to long-term success was growth at all costs—and many of them burned through millions of dollars in pursuit of that growth. Countless ambitious nerds in their twenties and early thirties were amassing giant fortunes—on paper, at least. In this tumultuous atmosphere, a pair of young entrepreneurs entered the exploding Internet arena. Thirty-one-year-old Peter Thiel was born in Germany and raised in California, where he became one of the country’s highest-ranked young chess players and went on to study philosophy and law at Stanford University. An avowed libertarian, Thiel helped found the Stanford Review, a conservative newspaper that challenged the university’s dominant liberal culture.

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This simplicity was in stark contrast to previous online payment mechanisms, which demanded multiple rounds of verification before an account could be set up, thereby discouraging early users. PayPal’s user-friendly, almost frictionless system attracted a significant initial base of consumers—though not enough, in itself, to make the platform attractive to the universe of online sellers. In a lecture he later gave at Stanford, Peter Thiel explained what happened next: PayPal’s big challenge was to get new customers. They tried advertising. It was too expensive. They tried BD [business development] deals with big banks. Bureaucratic hilarity ensued. … the PayPal team reached an important conclusion: BD didn’t work. They needed organic, viral growth.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
by Nathaniel Popper
Published 18 May 2015

Ross has not yet been tried on the charges in the Maryland indictment and has not been found guilty on any counts related to murder. CHAPTER 18 186“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more”: Eric Jackson, PayPal Wars (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2004). 187Thiel advocating for floating structures: “Peter Thiel Offers $100,000 in Matching Donations to TSI, Makes Grant of $250,000,” Sea-steading Institute, February 10, 2010, http://www.seasteading. org/2010/02/peter-thiel-offers-100000-matching-donations-tsi-makes-grant-250000/. 187aiming for the colonization of Mars: Adam Mann, “Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony,” Wired, November 26, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/11/elon-musk-mars-colony/.

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Much of this skepticism had the same root as the excitement, and that was Silicon Valley’s defining, and cautionary, experience with financial technology: PayPal. PayPal, of course, still existed, owned by eBay and run by Wences’s friend David Marcus. But what made people wary was not the current incarnation of PayPal, but instead the company’s early days, when it had ambitions to be something much bigger. PayPal had been founded back in 1998 by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, among others. Thiel was an avid libertarian, who had wanted to use Levchin’s cryptographic expertise to fulfill the Cypherpunks’ dream of sending money through encrypted channels, between private individuals and in particular between mobile devices like the PalmPilots of that time.

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This was a simple enough proposition, and the price of Bitcoin was rising fast enough that it attracted interest from venture capitalists who were still queasy about tying their firms to Bitcoin. Both of the founders of Andreessen Horowitz, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, signed up to put some of their own personal money into Balaji’s project, as did several of the original founders of PayPal, including Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Soon enough, Balaji was closing in on a $5 million fund-raising round. The Bitcoin arms race had begun. THE TYPE OF chip was not the only thing about Bitcoin mining that had changed since late 2010. Over the course of 2011 and 2012, more and more users were joining collectives that pooled their mining power.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Mirtaheri et al., ‘A Brief History of Web Crawlers’, in CASCON ’13: Proceedings of the 2013 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research (Toronto: IBM Corp., 2013), pp. 40–54. 29 Tim O’Reilly, ‘Network Effects in Data’, O’Reilly Radar, 27 October 2008 <http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/network-effects-in-data.html> [accessed 9 December 2020]. 30 West, Scale, p. 393. 31 Author’s analysis of various company disclosures. 32 ‘Amount of Original Content Titles on Netflix 2019’, Statista <https://www.statista.com/statistics/883491/netflix-original-content-titles/> [accessed 30 March 2021]; Gavin Bridge, ‘Netflix Released More Originals in 2019 Than the Entire TV Industry Did in 2005’, Variety, 17 December 2019 <https://variety.com/2019/tv/news/netflix-more-2019-originals-than-entire-tv-industry-in-2005-1203441709/> [accessed 30 March 2021]. 33 W. Brian Arthur, ‘Increasing Returns and the New World of Business’, Harvard Business Review, 1 July 1996 <https://hbr.org/1996/07/increasing-returns-and-the-new-world-of-business> [accessed 31 July 2020]. 34 Peter Thiel, ‘Competition Is for Losers’, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014 <https://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536> [accessed 9 October 2020]. 35 CogX, ‘Bringing Inclusive Financial Services to the World’, 15 June 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0YT4O4CWG4> [accessed 29 December 2020]. 36 C. K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel, ‘The Core Competence of the Corporation’, Harvard Business Review, 1 May 1990 <https://hbr.org/1990/05/the-core-competence-of-the-corporation> [accessed 27 August 2020]. 37 Elizabeth Gibney, ‘Google Revives Controversial Cold-Fusion Experiments’, Nature, 569(7758), 27 May 2019, p. 611 <https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-01683-9>. 38 ‘Apple Announces App Store Small Business Program’, Apple Newsroom, November 2020 <https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/11/apple-announces-app-store-small-business-program/> [accessed 29 December 2020]. 39 Austen Goslin, ‘Why Fortnite Is the Most Important Game of the Decade’, Polygon, 14 November 2019 <https://www.polygon.com/2019/11/14/20965516/fortnite-battle-royale-most-important-game-2010s> [accessed 29 December 2020]. 40 ‘Antitrust: Google Fined €1.49 Billion for Online Advertising Abuse’, European Commission, 20 March 2019 <https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_1770> [accessed 30 March 2021]. 41 Dimitrios Katsifis, ‘The CMA Publishes Final Report on Online Platforms and Digital Advertising’, The Platform Law Blog, 6 July 2020 <https://theplatformlaw.blog/2020/07/06/the-cma-publishes-final-report-on-online-platforms-and-digital-advertising/> [accessed 30 March 2021]. 42 Yoram Wijngaard, personal correspondence between Dealroom and the author, 30 March 2021. 43 Dashun Wang and James A.

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Entrepreneurs who understand blitzscaling, he said, approach their companies very differently to the older titans of industry. Companies that blitzscale emphasise growth over efficiency. Practically, this means throwing out the traditional manager’s rule book of optimising spending. Instead, aim for growth, even if it is expensive to do so. Peter Thiel, one of Hoffman’s co-founders at PayPal, also has an ideology that focuses on growth. In Thiel’s view, ‘competition is for losers’.34 He recommends instead that founders identify markets where they are substantially better than any existing competition – so they can gobble up market share in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few decades ago.

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That’s a Problem.’, Business Insider, 10 October 2020 <https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-ban-hearings-politicians-senators-know-nothing-about-tech-2020-10> [accessed 12 April 2021] Stoltenberg, Jens, ‘Nato Will Defend Itself’, Prospect Magazine, 27 August 2019 <https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/world/nato-will-defend-itself-summit-jens-stoltenberg-cyber-security> [accessed 12 March 2020] Tarnoff, Ben, ‘The Making of the Tech Worker Movement’, Logic Magazine, 4 May 2020 <https://logicmag.io/the-making-of-the-tech-worker-movement/full-text/> [accessed 3 April 2021] Thelen, Kathleen, How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004) <https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511790997> Thiel, Peter, ‘Competition Is for Losers’, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014 <https://online.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536> [accessed 9 October 2020] Thurner, Stefan, Peter Klimek and Rudolf Hanel, Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) <https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198821939.001.0001/oso-9780198821939> [accessed 19 July 2020] Tisné, Martin, ‘It’s Time for a Bill of Data Rights’, MIT Technology Review, 14 December 2018 <https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/12/14/138615/its-time-for-a-bill-of-data-rights/> [accessed 8 October 2020] Tufekci, Zeynep, ‘YouTube, the Great Radicalizer’, New York Times, 10 March 2018 <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/opinion/sunday/youtube-politics-radical.html> [accessed 18 October 2020] Turck, Matt ‘The Power of Data Network Effects’, Matt Turck [blog], 2016 <https://mattturck.com/the-power-of-data-network-effects/> [accessed 3 August 2020] UBS, The Food Revolution, July 2019 <https://www.ubs.com/global/en/ubs-society/our-stories/2019/future-of-food/_jcr_content/mainpar/toplevelgrid_1749059381/col1/linklist/link.1695495471.file/bGluay9wYXRoPS9jb250ZW50L2RhbS91YnMvZ2xvYmFsL3Vicy1zb2NpZXR5LzIwMTkvZm9vZC1yZXZvbHV0aW9uLWp1bHkucGRm/food-revolution-july.pdf> Van Reenen, John, and Christina Patterson, ‘Research: The Rise of Superstar Firms Has Been Better for Investors than for Employees’, Harvard Business Review, 11 May 2017 <https://hbr.org/2017/05/research-the-rise-of-superstar-firms-has-been-better-for-investors-than-for-employees> [accessed 2 September 2020] Van Reenen, John, Christina Patterson, Lawrence Katz, David Dorn and David Autor, ‘The Fall of the Labor Share and the Rise of Superstar Firms’, CEP Discussion Paper No. 1482, October 2019 <http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1482.pdf> van Zanden, J.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

“Uber vs. the Law (My Money’s on Uber).” Forbes. September 8, 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdiamandis/2014/09/08/uber-vs-the-law-my-moneys-on-uber/#50a69d201fd8. Chapter 7: Business and the Body 1. Satell, Greg. “Peter Thiel’s 4 Rules for Creating a Great Business.” Forbes. October 3, 2014. https://www.forbes.com/sites/gregsatell/2014/10/03/peter-thiels-4-rules-for-creating-a-great-business/#52f096f754df. 2. Wohl, Jessica. “Wal-mart U.S. sales start to perk up, as do shares.” Reuters. August 16, 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-walmart-idUSTRE77F0KT20110816. 3. Wilson, Emily.

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So, feeling lied to, the EU fined Facebook 110 million euros. This is tantamount to getting a $10 parking ticket for not feeding a meter that costs $100 every fifteen minutes. The smart choice: break the law. Chapter 7 Business and the Body IN THEIR BESTSELLING BOOKS, Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, Salim Ismaiel, and others argue that extraordinary business success requires scaling at low cost, achieved by leveraging cloud computing, virtualization, and network effects to achieve a 10x productivity improvement over the competition.1 But that explanation ignores a deeper dimension that has nothing to do with technology.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

On Apple’s valuation see Susanna Kim, “Apple Is World’s Most Valuable Company Again,” ABCNews.com, January 25, 2012, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2012/01/apple-is-worlds-most-valuable-company-again/. 30. David Brooks, “The Creative Monopoly,” New York Times, April 24, 2012, A23; and Ryan Mac, “Ten Lessons from Peter Thiel’s Class on Startups,” Forbes.com, June 7, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/06/07/ten-lessons-from-peter-thiels-class-on-startups/. 31. Slavoj Zizek describes this issue succinctly in his essay “Corporate Rule of Cyberspace,” InsideHigherEd.com, May 2, 2011, http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/05/02/slavoj_zizek_essay_on_cloud_computing_and_privacy. 32.

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Monopolies, contrary to early expectations, prosper online, where winner-take-all markets emerge partly as a consequence of Metcalfe’s law, which says that the value of a network increases exponentially by the number of connections or users: the more people have telephones or have social media profiles or use a search engine, the more valuable those services become. (Counterintuitively, given his outspoken libertarian views, PayPal founder and first Facebook investor Peter Thiel has declared competition overrated and praised monopolies for improving margins.30) What’s more, many of the emerging info-monopolies now dabble in hardware, software, and content, building their businesses at every possible level, vertically integrating as in the analog era. This is the contradiction at the center of the new information system: the more customized and user friendly our computers and mobile devices are, the more connected we are to an extensive and opaque circuit of machines that coordinate and keep tabs on our activities; everything is accessible and individualized, but only through companies that control the network from the bottom up.31 Amazon strives to control both the bookshelf and the book and everything in between.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons
Published 22 Oct 2018

Instead of geeky engineers, the industry draws hustlers, young guys who hope to get rich quick and who in a previous generation might have gone to work as bond traders on Wall Street. Previously, the kings of tech were the wizards who invented new products and built companies, like Hewlett and Packard, or Bill Gates at Microsoft, and Jobs and Wozniak at Apple. But now the power brokers include venture capitalists—like Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund, and Reid Hoffman of Greylock Ventures. They don’t actually run tech companies. They’re just investors. Nevertheless, their profession is depicted as glamorous, and they rank among the biggest celebrities in Silicon Valley. Wired once lionized Andreessen on its cover, calling him “The Man Who Makes the Future.”

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Rabois claims he worked for eighteen years straight without a break, and that others should do the same. In the 1990s, as a law student at Stanford, Rabois became notorious for an incident in which he screamed out homophobic slurs (“Faggot! Faggot! Hope you die of AIDS! Can’t wait until you die, faggot!”). Rabois’s friends Peter Thiel and David Sacks, who also went to Stanford and also worked at PayPal, and also have gone on to become enormously wealthy and influential tech oligarchs, in 1995 co-authored a book, The Diversity Myth, in which they defended Rabois. Thiel and Sacks decried the rise of “political correctness” and multiculturalism on campus.

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According to a 2017 article in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos titled “Doomsday Prep for the Super Rich,” the loaded have taken to stockpiling guns and food, gold bars and Bitcoin. Others have been building “boltholes”—armed compounds in places like faraway New Zealand, where they can ride out a catastrophe. Tech oligarch Peter Thiel owns a hideaway there and has even obtained Kiwi citizenship. “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in,” billionaire VC Reid Hoffman told Osnos.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

They produce extraordinary innovations and give people from all backgrounds a chance to better their lives. But free markets also have flaws. Because they offer the possibility to create so much wealth and inequality, people find ways to subvert the market itself. This problem may be an inevitable consequence of the workings of capitalism. Markets always generate unequal returns. And as Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, has admitted, every company’s goal is to be a monopoly. It then follows that successful companies will try to use their resources to eliminate the competition. They can be blocked in their attempts only if the political system can monitor them, and to do so, it must have some insulation from business.

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Indeed, in e-commerce and social networking, people often cannot quickly bring to mind the number two player to, say, Amazon or Facebook. In search, many know the name of Google’s nearest rival, Bing, because it is the pet project of another tech giant, Microsoft. But Google’s global market share is close to 90% and Bing’s is around 5%. Peter Thiel, the provocative tech entrepreneur and investor, admits with startling honesty that “competition is for losers.” The goal of every company, he notes, should be to create a monopoly. In the tech world, the winners have succeeded beyond any historical standard. The new force reshaping information technology is big data—which multiplies the advantages of size.

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For the smaller countries of Barbados and the Bahamas, that number exceeds 30%: World Travel & Tourism Council, “Economic Impact Reports,” https://wttc.org/Research/Economic-Impact. 156 boosted their productivity by 33%: Jason Douglas, Jon Sindreu, and Georgi Kantchev, “The Problem with Innovation: The Biggest Companies Are Hogging All the Gains,” Wall Street Journal, July 15, 2018. 156 Other research shows this trend growing: Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, “The Capex Conundrum and Productivity Paradox,” Global Investment Committee, November 2017, https://advisor.morganstanley.com/sandra-smith-allison-butler/documents/home-office/investing/The-Capex-Conundrum-and-Productivity-Paradox.pdf. 157 Google’s global market share: J. Clement, “Global Market Share of Search Engines 2010–2020,” Statista, June 18, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/. 157 “competition is for losers”: Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014. 157 totaling more than $1 trillion: JP Morgan Chase 2018 Annual Report, https://www.jpmorganchase.com/corporate/investor-relations/document/line-of-business-ceo-letters-to-shareholders-2018.pdf. 158 disproportionately to larger and better-connected companies: See an infographic from the Committee for a Responsible Budget, indicating that even though the CARES Act was trumpeted as a lifeline for Main Street, the act would roughly benefit large businesses and the airline industry as much as small businesses (http://www.crfb.org/blogs/visualization-cares-act).

Cloudmoney: Cash, Cards, Crypto, and the War for Our Wallets
by Brett Scott
Published 4 Jul 2022

When I was at Singularity University, Joe Lonsdale of Palantir visited to share entrepreneurial tips with the students. The corporation – named after a crystal ball from The Lord of the Rings – provides data surveillance technologies to the US military, CIA, NSA and FBI, and was co-founded by Lonsdale alongside PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Palantir emerged from PayPal, because the digital payments giant developed systems to automatically scan through its millions of customers to automate fraud detection, and Thiel then funded Lonsdale and a few others to apply the same model to national security. In addition to providing services to state authorities, however, Palantir rents itself out to major financial corporations like J.

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Here I watched a financial trader sit in a yoga pose, in ethnic dress, speaking with a blissful smile of the possibility of Blockchain as a spiritual financial revolution. In keeping with horseshoe politics, as the far-right blends in ideas associated with hippies those poles meet, and vice versa. Peter Thiel (of PayPal and Palantir) has a fund that invests in Urbit, psilocybin companies and a Bitcoin mining company that claims that Bitcoin will help solve climate change through its huge energy consumption. Go figure. There are many tribes imagining their own version of cyber-Kowloon, including one that has escaped our attention so far.

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Sherlock Holmes and the Strange Case of the Data Ghost Christian evangelist Meghan O’Gieblyn argues that Singularity stories: Meghan O’Gieblyn, ‘God in the machine: my strange journey into transhumanism’, Guardian, 18 April 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/18/god-in-the-machine-my-strange-journey-into-transhumanism Thiel then funded Lonsdale and a few others to apply the same model to national security: See Peter Waldman, Lizette Chapman & Jordan Robertson, ‘Palantir Knows Everything About You’, Bloomberg Businessweek, 19 April 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/ Palantir rents itself out to major financial corporations like J. P. Morgan: Waldman et al (see above). HSBC’s interactions with its 39 million customers, for example, have generated some 150 petabytes of data: See HSBC’s Josh Bottomley discuss these figures at CogX 2019 https://youtu.be/boxy3llT-00?

Vassal State
by Angus Hanton
Published 25 Mar 2024

In the first decade of this century, Paul Allen was locked in a battle with Oracle Corporation’s Larry Ellison to see who could build the bigger yacht. After Allen had commissioned the 416-foot Octopus, Ellison asked the dockyard building his boat, Rising Sun, to add an extension, bringing it to 452 feet in length.5 The frontiers these tech titans seek to tame are not merely mechanical, however. Peter Thiel, who founded PayPal with Elon Musk, has invested millions to assess the viability of building new societies on the oceans, outside the jurisdiction of any government, a concept known as ‘seasteading’. Thiel, Bezos and the Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have each also pumped millions into technology ventures designed to combat ageing and to try to ‘solve death’.

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The BBC reported extensively on whether Musk paid too much, on the will-he-won’t-he takeover process and on whether he was employing enough content moderators.37 The real story, at least in the UK, should be why the ‘town square’, which sits at the heart of British political life, is owned and controlled – and reportedly manipulated – from California. Peter Thiel, founder of both PayPal and Palantir, has set up the Founders Network, where entrepreneurs offer each other support.38 Thiel says: ‘If you’re a founder starting a company you always want to aim for monopoly and you always want to avoid competition.’ He adds: ‘You want to be a one-of-a-kind company, where it’s the only one in a small ecosystem.’39 Founders in Silicon Valley have created hundreds of such companies, and the British are usually only invited into their ecosystems as paying guests.

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v=oME2I09Pzpg&ab_channel=TheWorldUncovered. 36 Ali Montag, ‘Jeff Bezos’ first desk at Amazon was a door with four-by-fours for legs – here’s why it still is today’, CNBC Make It [website] (23 January 2018), https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/23/jeff-bezos-first-desk-at-amazon-was-made-of-a-wooden-door.html. 37 ‘Elon Musk: no change to Twitter moderation policy yet’, BBC News [website] (29 October 2022), https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-63428848. 38 ‘How to create a pitch deck in one day’, Founders Network [website], https://foundersnetwork.com/blog/how-to-create-a-pitch-deck-in-one-day/. 39 ‘Competition is for losers with Peter Thiel (how to start a startup 2014: 5)’ [video], YouTube [website] (22 March 2017), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k&ab_channel=YCombinator. 40 Marc Andreessen, ‘Why software is eating the world’, Andreessen Horowitz [website] (20 August 2011), https://a16z.com/why-software-is-eating-the-world/. 41 ‘Seven ways platform workers are fighting back’ [PDF], TUC [website], p. 3, https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/2021-11/PlatformEssaysWithPollingData2.pdf. 42 Robert Booth, ‘Gig economy threatens government finances, says May adviser’, Guardian [website] (30 November 2016), https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/30/gig-economy-threatens-government-finances-says-may-adviser. 5.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

The perfect investment will quickly anneal into an impermeable and unchallengeable position, by nature a monopoly in its domain. Competition in a traditional sense might appear, but it will never achieve more than a token status. (I use the term monopoly here not in the legal sense, as in antitrust law, but in the vernacular Silicon Valley sense. For instance, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and a foundational investor in Facebook, taught students in his Stanford course on startups to find a way to create “monopolies.”) Candy The primary business of digital networking has come to be the creation of ultrasecret mega-dossiers about what others are doing, and using this information to concentrate money and power.

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There are legendary professors and we scramble to recruit their graduating students. But it’s also considered the height of hipness to eschew a traditional degree and unequivocally prove yourself through other means. The list of top company runners who dropped out of college is commanding: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Mark Zuckerberg, for a start. Peter Thiel, of Facebook and PayPal fame, started a fund to pay top students to drop out of school, since the task of building high-tech startups should not be delayed. Mea culpa. I never earned a real degree (though I have received honorary ones). In my case poverty played a role, as it did for many others.

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The idea is that the amazing lift you get from starting a ’net-based business that can become huge in just a few years is the fore-echo of something far more profound that you will be able to achieve almost as quickly. Soon technological prowess will make the cleverest hackers not only immortal but immortal superheroes. Earlier, I noted that Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and an investor in Facebook, teaches a class at Stanford in which he advocates that students not think in terms of competing in a marketplace, but in terms of defining a position they can “monopolize.” This is precisely the idea of the Siren Server. It is a given that in Silicon Valley no one wants to suffer the indignity of sharing a market with competitors.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
by Nir Eyal
Published 26 Dec 2013

“Twitter ‘Tried to Buy Instagram before Facebook.’” Telegraph (April 16, 2012), http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/9206312/Twitter-tried-to-buy-Instagram-before-Facebook.html. 4. Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice (New York: Ecco, 2004). 5. Blake Masters, “Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Class 2 Notes Essay,” Blake Masters (April 6, 2012), http://blakemasters.com/post/20582845717/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-2-notes-essay. 6. R. Kotikalapudi, S. Chellappan, F. Montgomery, D. Wunsch, and K. Lutzen, “Associating Internet Usage with Depressive Behavior Among College Students,” IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 31, no. 4 (2012): 73–80, doi:10.1109/MTS.2012.2225462. 7.

The Flat White Economy
by Douglas McWilliams
Published 15 Feb 2015

That’s a fall of nine per cent. At the same time, there has been a huge rise in the number of people getting on their bikes – 176 per cent more since 2000.”17 But the significant danger of at least serious injury must be a discouragement to many potential cyclists. Clothing According to Business Insider, Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and one of Silicon Valley’s key venture capitalists, “hates suits”. While he cautions that there are “no absolute and timeless sartorial rules,” Thiel says that, “in Silicon Valley, wearing a suit in a pitch meeting makes you look like someone who is bad at sales and worse at tech.”

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London has 29 inches of rainfall annually, Amsterdam has 31 www.skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=349393 16. amsterdamize.com/2011/11/21/bicycle-cultures-are-man-made 17. www.newscientist.com/article/dn24636-despite-the-deaths-cycling-in-london-is-getting-safer.html#.VETGl_nF-So 18. www.businessinsider.com/peter-thiel-ama-2014–9#ixzz3GflCaosA 19. www.esquire.co.uk/culture/features/5720/the-silicon-roundabout 20. The article attributes the phrase Silicon Roundabout to a tweet from software developer Matt Biddulph working out of Moo.com in July 2007. 21. www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/nov/01/google-new-london-headquarters 22.

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It)
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 4 Apr 2018

On iTunes, for example, 0.00001 per cent of tracks accounts for a sixth of all sales, while the bottom 94 per cent sell fewer than one hundred copies each.3 I suppose that’s technically a long tail, but it’s a very thin one.* Everyone in Silicon Valley knows all this, of course. They talk about the benefits of free markets, while at the same time betting the venture capital on monopolies. Peter Thiel – the founder of PayPal and probably the most influential of all the Silicon Valley tech investors – says he only puts money in companies that have monopoly potential. Some tech firms run at short-term loss, kept afloat by venture capital on a ‘growth before profit’ philosophy, as they chase market domination.

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Antonio isn’t the only tech entrepreneur wondering if we’re clicking our way to dystopia. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and an influential investor told the New Yorker in 2017 that around half of all Silicon Valley billionaires have some degree of what he called ‘apocalypse insurance’. PayPal co-founder and influential venture capitalist Peter Thiel recently bought a 477-acre bolthole in New Zealand and became a Kiwi national. Others discuss survivalism tactics in secret Facebook groups: helicopters, bomb-proofing, bitcoin, gold. It’s not all driven by fears about technology – terrorism, natural disasters and pandemics also feature – but much of it is.

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
Published 24 Apr 2017

Molly Young, “Be Bossy: Sophia Amoruso Has Advice for Millennials and a Bone to Pick With Sheryl Sandberg,” New York magazine, The Cut (blog), May 26, 2014, nymag.com/thecut/2014/05/sophia-amoruso-nasty-gal-millennial-advice.xhtmll. 12. Blake Masters, “Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup—Class 9 Notes Essay,” Blake Masters blog, May 4, 2012, blakemasters.com/post/22405055017/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-9-notes-essay. 13. Awan, “Lessons Learned from Growing LinkedIn.” 14. Brian Balfour, “5 Steps to Choose Your Customer Acquisition Channel,” Coelevate (blog), May 21, 2013, coelevate.com/essays/5-steps-to-choose-your-customer-acquisition-channel. 15.

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Marketers commonly make the mistake of believing that diversifying efforts across a wide variety of channels is best for growth. As a result, they spread resources too thin and don’t focus enough on optimizing one or a couple of the channels likely to be most effective. Most often it’s better, as Google founder and CEO Larry Page has said, to put “more wood behind fewer arrows.” Or as Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal, Palantir, and the first outside investor in Facebook, tells start-up founders, “It is very likely that one channel is optimal. Most businesses actually get zero distribution channels to work. Poor distribution—not product—is the number one cause of failure. If you can get even a single distribution channel to work, you have great business.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race
by Tim Fernholz
Published 20 Mar 2018

It was an attitude he had developed as an entrepreneur in the early days of the internet boom. Not many had thought that a new way of paying for goods and services on the internet was necessary in 1999. But Musk and the other members of the so-called PayPal Mafia—many of whom, like the investors Peter Thiel and Luke Nosek, would also back SpaceX—were not deterred. Once they had built their simple tool for exchanging money safely over the emerging consumer web, other entrepreneurs found ways to use it. The ability to exchange money online became the basis for a whole new economy. When the auction site eBay paid $1.5 billion for PayPal in 2002, Musk’s share of the proceeds provided him with the fortune to find new markets—including in space.

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The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In 2001, Musk was at loose ends. He had sold his advertising start-up, Zip2, to Compaq two years earlier, for more than $300 million, earning a $22 million payout. PayPal, the online payment company that emerged from a merger between Musk’s next venture—an “online bank” called X.com—and Peter Thiel’s financial start-up Confinity, was now a booming success. But Musk had been forced out as CEO of the combined company after just a year, following clashes with other executives. Whatever the conflict, he remained a PayPal adviser, and the company’s biggest investor. And then, at age thirty, he reset his life.

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By 2008, however, despite the NASA contract, SpaceX still needed another injection of serious capital to get its rocket into the sky. No bucks, no Buck Rogers. Unlike Rocketplane Kistler, which had turned to Wall Street, Musk could look to friendly investors with far bigger appetites for risk. He turned to his former partner at PayPal, Peter Thiel. Thiel had parlayed his own newly minted wealth into new investments, including a bet against the US housing market. He also founded, with other veterans of PayPal’s start-up days, a start-up-backed venture called Founders Fund. It was run by high-level entrepreneurs, for high-level entrepreneurs, inspired by Thiel’s personal investment in a then-nascent social network called Facebook.

Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America
by Christopher Wylie
Published 8 Oct 2019

He’d learned about it from an unusually well-connected SCL intern named Sophie Schmidt—the daughter of Eric Schmidt, a billionaire and then executive chairman of Google. A few months earlier, as she was finishing up her internship, she’d introduced Alexander to some of the executives at Palantir. Co-founded by Peter Thiel, a well-known venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who was also an independent director of Facebook, Palantir was a massive venture-capital-funded company that undertook information operations for the CIA, the National Security Agency, whose mission is to analyze signals intelligence and data for national security purposes, and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart to the NSA.

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As a self-anointed prophet, Bannon wanted a tool to peer into the future of our societies. And with what Bannon called Facebook’s God’s-eye view of each and every citizen, he could work to find the dharma for every American. In this way our research became almost spiritual for him. Nix, Bannon, and Mercer were all fascinated with Palantir, Peter Thiel’s data-mining firm, whose name comes from the crystal ball, or all-seeing eye, from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. At the time, it seemed to me that these men wanted to create their own private Palantir by investing in SCL. Imagine the possibilities for an investor like Mercer: Predict the future of what people will buy and not buy, in order to make more money.

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Throughout history, the powerful have used social memory and collective forgetting as a powerful weapon to crush dissent and correct their preferred histories to shape the realities of the present. And if we want to understand why these technology companies behave this way, we should listen to the words of those who built them. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist behind Facebook, Palantir, and PayPal, spoke at length about how he no longer believes “that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And in elaborating his views on technology companies, he expounded on how CEOs are the new monarchs in a techno-feudal system of governance.

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
by Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Jul 2023

Binance: Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, “Why users are pushing back against the world’s largest crypto exchange,” Washington Post, April 1, 2022. 92 crypto took off in China . . . to avoid capital controls: Karen Yeung, “Cryptocurrencies help Chinese evade capital and currency controls in moving billions overseas,” South China Morning Post, August 26, 2020. 92 Binance has . . . no headquarters: Patricia Kowsmann and Caitlan Ostroff, “$76 Billion a Day: How Binance Became the World’s Biggest Crypto Exchange,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2021. 100 Peter Thiel, the arch-capitalist: Abram Brown, “Peter Thiel Pumps Bitcoin, Calls Warren Buffett A ‘Sociopathic Grandpa,’ ” Forbes.com, April 7, 2022. 102 “In Miami we have big balls”: Daniel Kuhn, “The Meaning of Miami’s Castrated Bitcoin Bull,” CoinDesk, April 8, 2022. 103 It was Brock Pierce: Interview with Brock Pierce, Bitcoin 2022 (Miami, FL), April 7, 2022. 106 Eric Adams. . . . in the form of Bitcoin: Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, “The Embarrassment of New York’s Next Mayor Taking His Paychecks in Bitcoin,” Slate, November 5, 2021. 109 O’Leary was particularly bullish: Adam Morgan McCarthy, “‘Spigots of capital’ will flood into crypto once policy and regulation are set, ‘Shark Tank’ investor Kevin O’Leary predicts,” Markets Insider (Insider.com), April 7, 2022. 109 Mario Gomez and Carmen Valeria Escobar: Interviews with Mario Gomez and Carmen Escobar, Bitcoin 2022 (Miami, FL), April 9, 2022.

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I reached out to Jeremy, a director of photography I knew, and threw together a three-man crew: two cameras plus a sound guy. The plan was to assemble in Miami on April 6 to film my interactions with the ringmasters of the crypto set, along with some average conference attendees. The general attitude was that anything could end up being good material, so keep filming. ° ° ° Peter Thiel, the arch-capitalist fifty-four-year-old cofounder of PayPal, was throwing one-hundred-dollar bills from the main stage, trying to signify their unimportance. When members of the crowd rushed to grab them, Thiel appeared shocked. “I thought you guys were supposed to be Bitcoin maximalists!” Raging against the “finance gerontocracy”—which, of course, had helped to make him very rich—Thiel derided legendary investor Warren Buffett as the “sociopathic grandpa from Omaha.”

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

You can always get bandwidth by declaring yourself a utopian; and you can always get bandwidth by mourning the downward trend lines for some pressing social issue—however modest the trend itself may be. But declaring that things are slightly better than they were a year ago, as they have been for most years since at least the dawn of industrialization, almost never makes the front page. Consider this observation from the entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel, published in National Review: When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s, technological progress has fallen short in many domains. Consider the most literal instance of non-acceleration: We are no longer moving faster. The centuries-long acceleration of travel speeds—from ever-faster sailing ships in the 16th through 18th centuries, to the advent of ever-faster railroads in the 19th century, and ever-faster cars and airplanes in the 20th century—reversed with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, to say nothing of the nightmarish delays caused by strikingly low-tech post-9/11 airport-security systems.

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My original post on air safety and subsequent coverage of the US Airways crash ran on the website BoingBoing; the first post can be found at http://boingboing.net/2009/01/14/for-once-news-about.html. William Langewiesche’s Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the Miracle on the Hudson gives a thorough account of the Airbus 320 design and its role in the Hudson landing. Peter Thiel’s “The End of the Future” appeared in the October 3, 2011, issue of National Review. High school dropout rates and college enrollment: Between 1988 and 2008, the high school dropout rate for the United States declined from 14.6 to 9.3. (Source: “Trends in High School Dropout and Completion Rates in the United States: 1972–2008”; http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2011/2011012.pdf.)

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

Kripal, Esalen: America and the Religion of No Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). This vision still motivates the development of artificial intelligence Erik Davis, Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Berkeley: North Atlantic, 2015). Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “Peter Thiel and the Cathedral,” Patheos.com, June 24, 2014, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inebriateme/2014/06/peter-thiel-and-the-cathedral/ (accessed January 10, 2018). 71. One Bay Area startup harvests the blood of young people Maya Kosoff, “This Anti-aging Start-up Is Charging Thousands of Dollars for Teen Blood,” Vanity Fair, June 2017. Then, say the chief scientists at the world’s biggest internet companies Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (London: Penguin, 2005).

Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman
Published 17 Mar 2015

It also employs Ray Kurzweil, the chief promoter of the Singularity, a belief that machines will soon become self-aware, or that we will somehow combine with them, or upgrade our brains to the cloud—something amazing, we just don’t know what yet. In short, this is an industry in which such far-fetched thinking is de rigueur. Some of these people actually believe they will live forever. Peter Thiel, a PayPal cofounder and major early investor in Facebook (and another Rand disciple), has derided the inevitability of death as an “ideology” while plowing millions into companies that might, as he said, “cure aging.” Google’s own forays into life-extension research, through a biotech subsidiary called Calico, reflects its belief that it can solve death—at least for a paying few.

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An important part of identity, as it’s long been understood, is that we act differently in different situations. We put on different roles, we code-switch. We might speak differently with our parents than we would with our children or a coworker or someone we’re flirting with at a bar. At the risk of slipping into something hazily postmodern, there is no single “self.” But don’t tell that to Peter Thiel. The Facebook investor has said that Myspace was “about being someone fake on the Internet; everyone could be a movie star.” With Myspace’s demise and Facebook’s subsequent ascension, Thiel told a reporter, “The real people have won out over the fake people.” Social-media companies have worked hard to equate authenticity with being “real,” and having a single identity, a single log-in associated with your real name and all of your social-media accounts, with being a safe and good citizen of the social web.

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Former Facebook employee and venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya agrees, telling an interviewer: “Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter.” (Palihapitiya is also a supporter of FWD.us, Zuckerberg’s political lobbying organization.) Others, such as libertarian PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, would like to do away with government entirely; he has donated nearly $2 million to the Seasteading Institute, which hopes to build floating cities unencumbered by the trappings of government. Balaji Srinivasan, an entrepreneur and founder of a genetic-testing start-up, has called for “Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit” from “the paper belt,” his term for traditional sovereign governments.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

We are still awaiting the productivity gains we were assured would result from the digital economy. With the exception of most of the 1990s, productivity growth has never recaptured the rates it achieved in the post-war decades. ‘You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,’ said Robert Solow, the Nobel Prize-winning economist. Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire, who has controversially backed Donald Trump, put it more vividly: ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters [Twitter].’ That may be about to change, with the acceleration of the robot revolution and the spread of artificial intelligence. But we should be careful what we wish for.

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But there are gaping holes in this pleasant reverie. The digital revolution is still in its infancy, yet we are already throwing our toys out of the pram. As political societies, we are further away from plausible solutions than when the digital revolution began. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, it is taking place in a hyper-democratic world. Peter Thiel was right, of course; Twitter cannot be compared to the invention of printing, or flying cars. Yet he was also wrong. We live in a world where everyone with a grievance wields more digital power in the palm of their hand than the computers that sent Apollo 14 into orbit. The Industrial Revolution was unleashed on undemocratic – or in the case of Britain and the US, semi-democratic – societies.

The Passenger
by AA.VV.
Published 23 May 2022

On the other hand the Bay Area’s understanding of food was greatly influenced by the hippie movement, whose members believed in living in close contact with nature, a way of life that is still a key part of California culture. In his fight against time and his illness, Steve Jobs not only wanted his new office in the “spaceship” to be ready but he wanted the kitchen to be up and running, and it had to be under the management of an Italian chef. Peter Thiel, the legendary founder of a number of tech empires, including PayPal, has an Italian chef who prepares mysterious concoctions for him based on seeds. (It is known that he intends to live for ever, or at least to the age of 120.) At one point, during a series of dinners for San Francisco startuppers and venture capitalists – an even more vital and prestigious category of people, henceforth VCs – I noticed that the people around me had started speaking in low voices as though they were confiding something to each other.

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Digging Deeper READING Mark Arax “A Kingdom From Dust” The California Sunday Magazine, January 2018 Rosecrans Baldwin Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles MCD, 2021 Chiara Barzini Things That Happened Before the Earthquake Doubleday, 2017 Paul Beatty The Sellout Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016 (USA) / Oneworld, 2016 (UK) David Carle Introduction to Fire in California University of California Press, 2021 Elaine Castillo America Is Not the Heart Viking, 2018 (USA) / Atlantic, 2018 (UK) Max Chafkin The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power Penguin, 2021 (USA) / Bloomsbury, 2021 (UK) Ash Davidson Damnation Spring Scribner, 2021 (USA) / Tinder Press, 2021 (UK) Natashia Deón The Perishing Counterpoint, 2021 Joan Didion Where I Was From Knopf, 2004 (USA) / HarperPerennial, 2004 (UK) Conor Dougherty Golden Gates: The Housing Crisis and a Reckoning for the American Dream Penguin, 2021 Bret Easton Ellis White Knopf, 2019 (USA) / Picador, 2019 (UK) John Freeman (ed.)

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

He points to science fiction writer Neal Stephenson, who worries that the internet, far from spurring a great burst of industrial creativity, may have put innovation “on hold for a generation.” Fox also cites economist Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we’re living in a time of innovation stagnation. He might also have mentioned tech powerbroker Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we’ve entered a technological “desert.” Thiel blames the hippies. “Men reached the moon in July 1969,” he wrote in “The End of the Future,” a 2011 National Review article, “and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost.”

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I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out: What is the effect on society? What’s the effect on people? Without having to deploy it into the normal world. And people who like those kinds of things can go there and experience that. It’s not only Page. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk dream of establishing Learyesque space colonies, celestial Burning Mans. Peter Thiel is slightly more down to earth. His Seasteading Institute hopes to set up floating technology incubation camps on the ocean, outside national boundaries. “If you can start a new business, why can you not start a new country?” he asks. In a speech last fall at the Y Combinator Startup School, venture capitalist Balaji Srinivasan channeled Leary when he called for “Silicon Valley’s Ultimate Exit”—the establishment of a new country beyond the reach of the U.S. government and other allegedly failed states.

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It particularly suits the interests of those who have become extraordinarily wealthy through the labor-saving, profit-concentrating effects of automated systems and the computers that control them. It provides our new plutocrats with a heroic narrative in which they play starring roles: Recent job losses may be unfortunate, but they’re a necessary evil on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation by the computerized slaves that our benevolent enterprises are creating. Peter Thiel, a successful entrepreneur and investor who has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers, grants that “a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs.” But, he hastens to add, “it would have the benefit of freeing people up to do many other things.”

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

r=US&IR=T 18 “Want to Succeed in Life? Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission”, Bill Murphy, Inc. January 2016, https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/9-words-to-live-by-its-always-better-to-beg-forgiveness-than-ask-permission.html 19 “Competition Is for Losers,” Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, September 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 20 “Antitrust Procedures in Abuse of Dominance,” European Commission, August 2013, https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/procedures_102_en.html. 21 “If You Want to Know What a US Tech Crackdown May Look Like, Check Out What Europe Did,” Elizabeth Schulze, CNBC, June 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/how-google-facebook-amazon-and-apple-faced-eu-tech-antitrust-rules.html. 22 “Why San Francisco's Homeless Population Keeps Increasing,” Associated Press, May 2019, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-homeless-population-in-san-francisco-is-skyrocketing-2019-05-17. 23 “A Decade of Homelessness: Thousands in S.F.

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Creation of new companies had fallen to an all-time low, and some start-ups responded to the lack of opportunities by simply wanting to get bought by one of the dominant firms. That stifled not just competition but innovation, and it created a mono-culture harmful to all kinds of fresh and diverse perspectives. For Big Tech firms, however, acting as oligopolist or even monopolist was not just not a problem but something to strive for. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and an early outsider investor in Facebook, made that case powerfully in a 2014 editorial. Wall Street Journal editors headlined it: “Competition Is for Losers.”19 Of Google, he wrote: A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world.

Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed With Alcohol
by Holly Glenn Whitaker
Published 9 Jan 2020

But They’re Trying,” BuzzFeed News, September 25, 2018, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/hanifabdurraqib/botham-jean-amber-guyger-police-brutality; Charles Mudede, “Fox News Attempted to Demonize Unarmed Black Man Killed by Dallas Cop in His Own Apartment,” Stranger, September 14, 2018, https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/09/14/32327223/fox-news-attempted-to-demonize-unarmed-black-man-killed-by-dallas-cop-in-his-own-apartment; Thomas Barrabi, “Marijuana Stock Backed by Peter Thiel Surges on US Import Approval,” Fox Business, September 19, 2018, https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/marijuana-stock-backed-by-peter-thiel-surges-on-us-import-approval. 320women have been sold whiskey: Rupert Steiner, “Whiskey Giant Pernod Ricard Winning Over Women as Sales Roar,” Market Watch, February 12, 2019, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/whiskey-giant-pernod-ricard-winning-over-women-as-sales-soar-2019-02-12; Pierre Andersson, Global Hangover: Alcohol as an Obstacle to Development (Sweden: IOGT-NTO International Institute, 2008), 23–33. 320It’s the relationships: “Alcohol Beverage Industry Economic Impact,” https://fourloko.com/alcohol-beverage-economic-impact/; R.

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This all comes into view when you stand back, but can also be seen when you zoom in, say, on Fox News, where in the same week it broadcast a story criminalizing Botham Jean (a black man murdered in his own home by his white cop neighbor) for having a small amount of pot in his home, and another story glorifying Peter Thiel (a rich white man) for his $12 billion stake in Tilray, a pot company. Over the past seven years, a picture has developed for me, not unlike one of those FBI evidence boards with the red string connecting all the crime bosses. It’s not just the way women have been sold whiskey as our power suit, or how the citizens of Low-to Middle-Income Countries are targeted by Big Alcohol and ritually sacrificed for profit.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

r=US&IR=T 18 “Want to Succeed in Life? Ask for Forgiveness, Not Permission”, Bill Murphy, Inc. January 2016, https://www.inc.com/bill-murphy-jr/9-words-to-live-by-its-always-better-to-beg-forgiveness-than-ask-permission.html 19 “Competition Is for Losers,” Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, September 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 20 “Antitrust Procedures in Abuse of Dominance,” European Commission, August 2013, https://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/procedures_102_en.html. 21 “If You Want to Know What a US Tech Crackdown May Look Like, Check Out What Europe Did,” Elizabeth Schulze, CNBC, June 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/07/how-google-facebook-amazon-and-apple-faced-eu-tech-antitrust-rules.html. 22 “Why San Francisco's Homeless Population Keeps Increasing,” Associated Press, May 2019, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-homeless-population-in-san-francisco-is-skyrocketing-2019-05-17. 23 “A Decade of Homelessness: Thousands in S.F.

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Creation of new companies had fallen to an all-time low, and some start-ups responded to the lack of opportunities by simply wanting to get bought by one of the dominant firms. That stifled not just competition but innovation, and it created a mono-culture harmful to all kinds of fresh and diverse perspectives. For Big Tech firms, however, acting as oligopolist or even monopolist was not just not a problem but something to strive for. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, and an early outsider investor in Facebook, made that case powerfully in a 2014 editorial. Wall Street Journal editors headlined it: “Competition Is for Losers.”19 Of Google, he wrote: A monopoly like Google is different. Since it doesn't have to worry about competing with anyone, it has wider latitude to care about its workers, its products and its impact on the wider world.

The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values
by Brian Christian
Published 5 Oct 2020

Egan, Axiomatic. 2. Elon Musk, interviewed by Sarah Lacy, “A Fireside Chat with Elon Musk,” Santa Monica, CA, July 12, 2012, https://pando.com/2012/07/12/pandomonthly-presents-a-fireside-chat-with-elon-musk/. Not only was the car uninsured, but Peter Thiel was not wearing a seat belt. “It was a miracle neither of us were hurt,” says Thiel. See Dowd, “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself.” 3. This is discussed in greater detail in Visalberghi and Fragaszy, “Do Monkeys Ape?” 4. Romanes, Animal Intelligence. 5. Visalberghi and Fragaszy, “Do Monkeys Ape?” See also Visalberghi and Fragaszy, “‘Do Monkeys Ape?’

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“If he can distinguish good from evil, nothing will force him to act otherwise than as knowledge dictates, since wisdom is all the reinforcement he needs.”73 PART III Normativity 7 IMITATION I was six years old when my parents told me that there was a small, dark jewel inside my skull, learning to be me. —GREG EGAN1 Watch this. —ELON MUSK TO PETER THIEL, IMMEDIATELY BEFORE LOSING CONTROL OF AND CRASHING HIS UNINSURED $1 MILLION MCLAREN F12 In English, we say that to imitate something is to “ape” it, and we’re not the only ones; this seemingly arbitrary linguistic quirk appears again and again across languages and cultures. The Italian scimmiottare, French singer, Portuguese macaquear, German nachäffen, Bulgarian majmuna, Russian обезьянничать, Hungarian majmol, Polish małpować, Estonian ahvima: verbs for imitation and mimicry, again and again, have their etymologies rooted in terms for primates.3 Indeed, the simian reputation for being a great imitator, not just in etymology but in science, goes back a century and a half at the minimum.

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Doshi-Velez, Finale, and Been Kim. “Towards a Rigorous Science of Interpretable Machine Learning.” arXiv Preprint arXiv:1702.08608, 2017. Douglass, Frederick. “Negro Portraits.” Liberator 19, no. 16 (April 20, 1849). http://fair-use.org/the-liberator/1849/04/20/the-liberator-19–16.pdf. Dowd, Maureen. “Peter Thiel, Trump’s Tech Pal, Explains Himself.” New York Times, January 11, 2017. Drăgan, Anca D., Kenton C. T. Lee, and Siddhartha S. Srinivasa. “Legibility and Predictability of Robot Motion.” In 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 301–08. IEEE, 2013. Dressel, Julia, and Hany Farid.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 28 Jan 2020

In fact, our ire at this lack of delivery has become a meme unto itself. At the turn of the last century, in a now famous IBM commercial, comedian Avery Brooks asked: “It’s the year 2000, but where are the flying cars? I was promised flying cars. I don’t see any flying cars. Why? Why? Why?” In 2011, in his “What Happened to the Future?” manifesto, investor Peter Thiel echoed this concern, writing: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Yet, as should be clear by now, the wait is over. The Flying Cars Are Here. And the infrastructure’s coming fast. While we were sipping our lattes and checking our Instagram, science fiction became science fact.

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A half-dozen companies are now involved in this effort, producing about a dozen drugs that obliterate zombie cells, delaying or alleviating everything from frailty and osteoporosis to cardiological dysfunction and neurological disorder. Backed by investments from Jeff Bezos, the late Paul Allen, and Peter Thiel, Unity Biotechnology is one of the most interesting of these. They’ve developed a way to identify, then kill senolytic cells, or at least they’ve developed a way that works in mice. But it really works. Periodic treatments from midlife forward both extend lifespan by 35 percent and keep the mouse healthier along the way.

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Mannick, “mTOR Inhibition Improves Immune Function in the Elderly,” Science Translational Medicine, December 2014. drug called metformin: Nir Barzilai, “Metformin as a Tool to Target Aging,” Cell Metabolism, June 14, 2016. 23(6): pp. 1060-1065, See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5943638/. Jeff Bezos, Paul Allen, and Peter Thiel, Unity Biotechnology: See: https://unitybiotechnology.com. extend lifespan by 35 percent: Jan M van Deursen, “Senolytic Therapies for Healthy Longevity,” Science 364, no. 6441 (May 2019): 636–637. Samumed: Osman Kibar, author interview, 2018. See also: https://www.samumed.com/default.aspx. Backed by a $12 billion valuation: Brian Gormley, “Drugmaker Samumed Closes $438 Million Round at $12 Billion Pre-Money Valuation,” Wall Street Journal Pro, August 6, 2018.

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House
by Michael Wolff
Published 5 Jan 2018

He was charming and full of flattery; he focused on you. He was funny—self-deprecating even. And incredibly energetic—Let’s do it whatever it is, let’s do it. He wasn’t a tough guy. He was “a big warm-hearted monkey,” said Bannon, with rather faint praise. PayPal cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel—really the only significant Silicon Valley voice to support Trump—was warned by another billionaire and longtime Trump friend that Trump would, in an explosion of flattery, offer Thiel his undying friendship. Everybody says you’re great, you and I are going to have an amazing working relationship, anything you want, call me and we’ll get it done!

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Rosenstein, of course, perhaps with some satisfaction, understood that he had delivered what could be a mortal blow to the Trump presidency. Bannon, shaking his head in wonder about Trump, commented drily: “He doesn’t necessarily see what’s coming.” 17 ABROAD AND AT HOME On May 12, Roger Ailes was scheduled to return to New York from Palm Beach to meet with Peter Thiel, an early and lonely Trump supporter in Silicon Valley who had become increasingly astonished by Trump’s unpredictability. Ailes and Thiel, both worried that Trump could bring Trumpism down, were set to discuss the funding and launch of a new cable news network. Thiel would pay for it and Ailes would bring O’Reilly, Hannity, himself, and maybe Bannon to it.

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Less volubly, Bannon was telling people something else: he, Steve Bannon, was going to run for president in 2020. The locution, “If I were president . . .” was turning into, “When I am president . . .” The top Trump donors from 2016 were in his camp, Bannon claimed: Sheldon Adelson, the Mercers, Bernie Marcus, and Peter Thiel. In short order, and as though he had been preparing for this move for some time, Bannon had left the White House and quickly thrown together a rump campaign organization. The heretofore behind-the-scenes Bannon was methodically meeting with every conservative leader in the country—doing his best, as he put it, to “kiss the ass and pay homage to all the gray-beards.”

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old
by Andrew Steele
Published 24 Dec 2020

Sha et al., ‘Safety, tolerability, and feasibility of young plasma infusion in the plasma for Alzheimer symptom amelioration study: A randomized clinical trial’, JAMA Neurol. 76, 35–40 (2019). DOI: 10.1001/jamaneurol.2018.3288 ageless.link/d33ozp One colourful outfit called Ambrosia … Zoë Corbyn, ‘Could “young” blood stop us getting old?’, Guardian (2 February 2020) ageless.link/mv4fhr Rumours that Peter Thiel … Jeff Bercovici, ‘Peter Thiel is very, very interested in young people’s blood’, Inc. (2016) ageless.link/wmadgf … [young plasma] didn’t make them live any longer Dmytro Shytikov et al., ‘Aged mice repeatedly injected with plasma from young mice: A survival study’, Biores. Open Access 3, 226–32 (2014). DOI: 10.1089/biores.2014.0043 ageless.link/4vrkko … young plasma … improve liver function in old mice … Anding Liu et al., ‘Young plasma reverses age-dependent alterations in hepatic function through the restoration of autophagy’, Aging Cell 17 (2018).

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Since then it – and modified versions which glow in other colours, with delightful names like mCherry, T-Sapphire and Neptune – have become indispensable tools in biology. Their distinctive glow under a microscope renders what could otherwise be very complex experiments – like determining which mouse two basically identical-looking cells came from – incredibly simple. *Rumours that Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, was interested in the procedure culminated in a storyline about anti-ageing transfusions making it into satirical sitcom Silicon Valley. *By way of comparison, an average human has about five litres – several thousand times more, which is basically in proportion to the weight difference between us and mice.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Hyper-libertarian technologists James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age (New York: Touchstone, 1997). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT A bonfire of public services Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009, www.cato-unbound.org/​2009/​04/​13/​peter-thiel/​education-libertarian. See Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State (1729 publishing, 2022), for a more thoughtful take on how technological constructs might supersede the nation-state. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter 12: The Dilemma England’s population Niall Ferguson, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (London: Allen Lane, 2021), 131.

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Renaissance is great; unceasing war with tomorrow’s military technology, not so much. For many people working in or adjacent to technology, these kinds of radical outcomes are not just unwelcome by-products; they’re the goal itself. Hyper-libertarian technologists like the PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel celebrate a vision of the state withering away, seeing this as liberation for an overmighty species of business leaders or “sovereign individuals,” as they call themselves. A bonfire of public services, institutions, and norms is cheered on with an explicit vision where technology might “create the space for new modes of dissent and new ways to form communities not bounded by historical nation-states.”

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

Demand doesn’t exist in a vacuum, after all; it’s the product of a constant negotiation, determined by a country’s laws and institutions, and, of course, by the people who control the purse strings. Maybe this is also a clue as to why the innovations of the past 30 years – a time of spiraling inequality – haven’t quite lived up to our expectations. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” mocks Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley’s resident intellectual.16 If the post-war era gave us fabulous inventions like the washing machine, the refrigerator, the space shuttle, and the pill, lately it’s been slightly improved iterations of the same phone we bought a couple years ago. In fact, it has become increasingly profitable not to innovate.

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See: Tony Schwartz and Christine Poratz, “Why You Hate Work,” The New York Times (May 30, 2014). http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/opinion/sunday/why-you-hate-work.html?_r=1 15. Will Dahlgreen, “37% of British workers think their jobs are meaningless”, YouGov (August 12, 2015). https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/12/british-jobs-meaningless 16. Peter Thiel, “What happened to the future?” Founders Fund, http://www.foundersfund.com/the-future 17. William Baumol, “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive,” Journal of Political Economy (1990), pp. 893-920. 18. Sam Ro, “Stock Market Investors Have Become Absurdly Impatient,” Business Insider (August 7, 2012). http://www.businessinsider.com/stock-investor-holding-period-2012-8 19.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

As the biographer Ron Chernow writes, “America’s most famous financier was a sworn foe of free markets.” Such arguments are increasingly familiar in Silicon Valley. It’s the premise of a whole shelf of books on strategy. (Sample title: Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy.) The most important prophet of the new monopoly is an investor named Peter Thiel. He isn’t just any investor. His successes include PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, and SpaceX, an almost unrivaled record of sniffing out winners before they become chic, which suggests a deeper understanding of technology and its trajectory. Thiel can be a wildly idiosyncratic thinker, which has justly earned him opprobrium in recent years.

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“Money is not the greatest of motivators”: Linus Torvalds, Just for Fun (HarperCollins, 2001), 227. “Competition means strife”: Tim Wu, The Master Switch (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 8. “America’s most famous financier”: Ron Chernow, The House of Morgan (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 54. “We preach competition”: Peter Thiel, Zero to One (Crown Business, 2014), 35. “transcend the daily brute struggle”: Thiel, 32. “The big technology markets actually tend to be winner take all”: Alexia Tsotsis, “Marc Andreessen On The Future Of Enterprise,” TechCrunch, January 27, 2013. CHAPTER TWO: THE GOOGLE THEORY OF HISTORY at times, he struggled to breathe: Larry Page, University of Michigan commencement address, May 2, 2009.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

Recent research indicates that upper-class people are less likely to feel compassion toward others and much more likely to feel that their greed is justified by their station in life.10 “Wealth gives rise to a me-first mentality,” as the psychologist Dacher Keltner puts it, and the greed it rationalizes “undermines moral behavior.”11 PayPal’s billionaire co-founder Peter Thiel, for example, gives significant amounts to nonprofit groups, but much of that money goes to push his pro-business right-wing political agenda.12 And when corporations enter the public sphere, even high-tech ones, it is to advance their commercial interests directly or indirectly. Our society looks the way it does in the United States to no small extent because this is how they wish it to.

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This is the natural path of [capitalist] industrialization: invention, propagation, adoption, control. . . . Openness is a wonderful thing in the nonmonetary economy. . . . But eventually our tolerance for the delirious chaos of infinite competition finds its limits.”75 As PayPal founder and billionaire Peter Thiel now tells students attending his lectures at Stanford, the moral of the story is that it is time to grow up and accept the new monopoly system. Competition is overrated, even destructive, and capitalism works better with a handful of monopolists “doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity.

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Google, in particular, was being pressed by the FTC over whether “Google has abused its dominance by manipulating its search results, making it less likely that competing companies or products will appear at the top of a results page.”80 In much economic theory, such monopolies should either be publicly owned or, at the very least, heavily regulated to prevent abuses, especially as they often tend to monopolize crucial public functions.81 If they can be effectively reformed into competitive industries, that route should be considered too, though—for the reasons mentioned above, and as Wired’s Chris Anderson and monopoly enthusiast Peter Thiel would agree—the monopolistic pressures in this sector makes that mostly unrealistic. The free-market option does not compute. André Schiffrin, founder of The New Press, suggests that the option of public ownership is a debate we should be having about Google.82 The World Wide Web has thrived in the public domain; why not Internet search?

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

If you get bored by all those who just repeat the conventional wisdom about the economy and how it evolves, pick any work from these economic thinkers and you will immediately be reinvigorated: David Autor, Tyler Cowen, Deirdre McCloskey, Malcolm Gladwell, David Graeber, Deepak Lal, Joel Mokyr, Matt Ridley, Richard Sennett, Robert Solow, Lawrence Summers, Peter Thiel, and Martin Wolf. Their works have contributed to our thinking for this book. Likewise, there are many successful investors and entrepreneurs whose thinking about innovation and business creation have inspired us. Innovation happens through entrepreneurship and it is impossible to grasp innovation without understanding the business motivations behind it.

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The time and money of regulation If regulatory resistance to innovation is strong in business sectors that are comparatively less regulated, such as car sales and online services, imagine then the effects of regulation in energy, pharmaceuticals, neuroscience, medical technology, and other sectors with more complicated regulations. Investor Peter Thiel has contrasted two different regulatory worlds and how the various regulatory approaches feed different innovative outcomes. In the “world of bits,” regulation has for some time had a “light touch,” while “the world of atoms” has been burdened by the heavy hand of regulation. The difference helps to explain why in the past decades there has been so much more innovation in software than in physical things.

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The broad wave of deregulation did not affect all sectors equally. The actual flow of the economy carried the hallmark of regulation rather than reflecting natural changes among consumers and producers. Reforms generally motivated companies to focus their energy on horizontal expansion and vertical specialization. Or, to use Peter Thiel’s mathematical imagery: companies were not incentivized to move from “zero to one” (to bring something new to the market) but to go “from 1 to n” (to expand volumes on the product and resource base they already possessed).43 Together with the shift in economic structure – from industry to services – product market reforms reoriented the way companies compete and how much importance they place on contestable innovation.

Buy Now, Pay Later: The Extraordinary Story of Afterpay
by Jonathan Shapiro and James Eyers
Published 2 Aug 2021

Facebook, in its early stages, may have fitted this description: people all around the world were signing up, but there was no clear pathway for it to monetise the social network it was creating. The mantra of ‘ubiquity first, profits later’, which had propelled many a venture-backed start-up to untold riches, could apply here, too. Find the Moat quoted Silicon Valley doyen and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, who wrote, ‘Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works.’ Afterpay not only had customers but fans who rhapsodised about how it was changing their lives by allowing them to buy things immediately without having to sign up for a credit card while still allowing them to defer repayment.

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That’s because he believed ICM’s shares may have been made available to hedge funds to borrow—and when those shares were sold by the original owner, they had to be returned, forcing the short-sellers to close their position. Finally, Letts made a comparison to another company that had been involved in a seemingly eternal tussle with hedge funds and had elicited emotions that professional share-market traders are trained to suppress: Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors. Musk, along with Peter Thiel, belonged to the ‘PayPal mafia’, having founded the groundbreaking payments company to solve the problem of the lack of trust between two strangers transacting online. Musk had taken his fortune and rolled the dice on what his disciples believed were humanity-altering ventures: launching cheap rockets into space, and accelerating the use of electric cars by building models that people actually wanted to drive.

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The combination of rising sales and expanding multiples put a proverbial rocket under the share price.14 But supporters would have to stomach another round of volatility, driven by the emergence of new competition in the United States, while consumer groups were again raising their heads above the parapet. Max Levchin, who co-founded PayPal alongside Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, had created Affirm in 2012 out of his incubator, HVF. In early 2014, he decided to make Affirm his full-time job. It had partnered with more than a thousand US retailers by July 2017, the company said. But its product was built on charging customers interest; its pitch centred on better transparency on charges, and the fact that it didn’t charge late fees.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
by Cathy O'Neil
Published 5 Sep 2016

On the company web page: Website ZestFinance.​com, accessed January 9, 2016, www.​zestfinance.​com/. A typical $500 loan: Lohr, “Big Data Underwriting.” ten thousand data points: Michael Carney, “Flush with $20M from Peter Thiel, ZestFinance Is Measuring Credit Risk Through Non-traditional Big Data,” Pando, July 31, 2013, https://​pando.​com/​2013/​07/​31/​flush-​with-​20m-​from-​peter-​thiel-​zestfinance-​is-​measuring-​credit-​risk-​through-​non-​traditional-​big-​data/. one of the first peer-to-peer exchanges, Lending Club: Richard MacManus, “Facebook App, Lending Club, Passes Half a Million Dollars in Loans,” Readwrite, July 29, 2007, http://​readwrite.​com/​2007/​07/​29/​facebook_​app_​lending_​club_​passes_​half_​a_​million_​in_​loans.

The Switch: How Solar, Storage and New Tech Means Cheap Power for All
by Chris Goodall
Published 6 Jul 2016

That is not a credible business plan. And indeed some of the oil chiefs are aware of it. In September 2015 Shell’s CEO said that solar would become the ‘dominant backbone’ of the energy system. If even Shell is saying this, the arguments for THE SWITCH are truly irrefutable. In a recent book, the founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel, wrote that ‘most peoples throughout history have been pessimists’. He might have added that pessimistic cultures such as ours find it difficult to deal with intractable problems, such as turning away from carbon-based energy. But now, I would argue, we can become optimists about our ability to address climate change at the same time as providing sufficient energy.

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In addition, this is a process that is economical with regards to energy; up to 90 per cent of the electricity going in is regained in the discharge phase, a figure close to the best batteries. The Lightsail approach is simple, efficient and extremely elegant. These characteristics will have been helpful in appealing to its roster of prestige investors including Bill Gates and Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder whose quote on the innate pessimism of most cultures ended the introduction to this book. In the spirit of Thiel’s comment about the importance of optimism, I’ll just say that the financial attractiveness of Lightsail’s approach remains still to be seen, but I can see that the underlying simplicity of its technology could mean a very low cost in future years.

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It
by Mark Thomas
Published 7 Aug 2019

When the hope of aid for those falling behind is based primarily upon appeals to private individuals and charitable bodies, it will be more important than it has been in the twentieth century that the recipients of charity appear to be morally deserving to those voluntarily dispensing the charity. The only barrier to making this happen is that the law would have to change, and both the UK and the US are democracies, at least for now. Market fundamentalists view democracy as tyranny Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, stated in 2009: ‘I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.’12 He explained his reasons: The higher one’s IQ, the more pessimistic one became [after leaving college] about free-market politics – capitalism simply is not that popular with the crowd… For those of us who are libertarian in 2009, our education culminates with the knowledge that the broader education of the body politic has become a fool’s errand.

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Distinguished followers of these writers include some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet:20 Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple; the Koch brothers, one the chairman and the other the EVP of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the US21; Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp; Politicians Donald Trump,22 Rex Tillerson, Ron and Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan in the US, and Daniel Hannan and Sajid Javid in the UK; Pay-Pal co-founder, Peter Thiel and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. These are serious people. And they wield untold influence. Politicians respond to this influence. It is easy for a politician to attack people on benefits; it is very risky for them to attack wealthy tax-avoiders. It is easy to propose cuts in public spending; it requires enormous courage to propose an increase.

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us
by James Ball
Published 19 Aug 2020

There is a twist worth noting at this stage, though, which is that VCs aren’t quite as much of a bubble as they can seem. It’s easy to think of VC as its own world with its own (arguably toxic) culture, and in many ways it is: most of the top VCs are the internet entrepreneurs of the last generation. Marc Andreessen was a co-founder of Netscape, then became a top VC funding Facebook, Skype, Twitter, and more. Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal, then became Facebook’s first outside investor, and now funds much more. There are many others we could name. But they are not only investing their own money – they might well be investing yours, as Brian O’Kelley, an advertising tech executive and investor (who speaks at length next chapter), notes.

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Given the well-advertised working conditions for their employees – lots of autonomy, huge salaries, great perks – even internal dissent is rare. The senior staff and the boards that the top CEOs surround themselves with, Bell concludes, are a lot like them. And it shows, she says, citing Mark Zuckerberg again as an example. ‘He has a governance panel on his board which is Peter Thiel [PayPal co-founder and VC], Marc Andreessen [Opera co-founder and VC] and Reid Hoffman [LinkedIn co-founder and VC],’ she says. ‘You have three extremely rich white men, who’ve all made their money from similar areas and all of them have an incredibly narrow view of the world, who are Facebook’s governance.’

Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game
by Walker Deibel
Published 19 Oct 2018

The businesses weren’t glamorous—metal fabricating shops, car dealerships, local newspapers—but they looked fun, and I could see the value they provided to our town. As I grew older, I learned to appreciate the distinction between launching a startup and running a small business. They both have their appeal, but lately people seem to be over-hyping the former and deeply underappreciating the latter. A CONTRARIAN PERSPECTIVE Billionaire investor Peter Thiel is fond of asking people, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Walker shares a fantastic answer in Buy Then Build: ambitious entrepreneurs should buy an existing company and use it as a platform to build value, rather than start a business from scratch. There are three primary reasons: 1.

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More likely, it’s somewhere in the middle. A nice, “good” company with some aspects of stability and some of risk, but the goal is to define an acquisition target by the growth opportunity it provides. It’s a little understood fact that Elon Musk bought PayPal when his own similar startup X.com, well, failed. Peter Thiel came with the acquisition and later ran PayPal as CEO. Tesla, as well. Although he is now considered a founder, the company was started by two others and grown very effectively by Musk. Gary Vaynerchuk took over his parents’ liquor store. Seeing an opportunity to sell wine online took revenues from $3 million to $60 million by applying his online marketing skillset to the unique opportunity offered to him by the platform that was available.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
by Ashlee Vance
Published 18 May 2015

“I think the probability of us discovering another top-one-hundred-type invention gets smaller and smaller,” Huebner told me in an interview. “Innovation is a finite resource.” Huebner predicted that it would take people about five years to catch on to his thinking, and this forecast proved almost exactly right. Around 2010, Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and early Facebook investor, began promoting the idea that the technology industry had let people down. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” became the tagline of his venture capital firm Founders Fund. In an essay called “What Happened to the Future,” Thiel and his cohorts described how Twitter, its 140-character messages, and similar inventions have let the public down.

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The whole idea was to shift away from slow-moving banks with their mainframes taking days to process payments and to create a kind of agile bank account where you could move money around with a couple of clicks on a mouse or an e-mail. This was revolutionary stuff, and more than 200,000 people bought into it and signed up for X.com within the first couple of months of operation. Soon enough, X.com had a major competitor. A couple of brainy kids named Max Levchin and Peter Thiel had been working on a payment system of their own at their start-up called Confinity. The duo actually rented their office space—a glorified broom closet—from X.com and were trying to make it possible for owners of Palm Pilot handhelds to swap money via the infrared ports on the devices. Between X.com and Confinity, the small office on University Avenue had turned into the frenzied epicenter of the Internet finance revolution.

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From new kinds of energy storage systems to electric cars and solar panels, the technology never quite lived up to its billing and required too much government funding and too many incentives to create a viable market. Much of this criticism was fair. It’s just that there was this Elon Musk guy hanging around who seemed to have figured something out that everyone else had missed. “We had a blanket rule against investing in clean-tech companies for about a decade,” said Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and venture capitalist at Founders Fund. “On the macro level, we were right because clean tech as a sector was quite bad. But on the micro level, it looks like Elon has the two most successful clean-tech companies in the U.S. We would rather explain his success as being a fluke.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

Over the past four decades, economic theory and evidence have laid waste to claims that most markets are by and large competitive and the belief that some variant of the “competitive model” provides a good, or even adequate, description of our economy.1 Perhaps long ago, the picture of innovative, if ruthless, competition, of myriad firms struggling to better serve consumers at lower costs, provided a good description of the American economy. But today we live in an economy where a few firms can rake in massive amounts of profits for themselves and persist unchecked in their dominant position for years and years. Our new tech leaders have ceased even paying lip service to competition—Peter Thiel, for a short while one of Trump’s advisers and one of the great Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, put it bluntly: “competition is for losers.”2 Warren Buffet, one of the country’s wealthiest men and smartest investors, also understood this well. In 2011 he told the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission3: The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power.

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We trust them to get us back our money when we want it and we trust them not to cheat us when we buy complex financial products from them. Again and again, our bankers have shown that they are not trustworthy, thereby undermining the functioning of the entire economy. The bankers’ shortsightedness led them to abandon any pretense of “reputation.” But just as Peter Thiel had declared that competition is for losers, so Lloyd Blankfein, the head of Goldman Sachs, made it clear that the reputation for honesty and trustworthiness—what had traditionally been viewed as a bank’s most important assets—was a quaint relic of the past. Goldman Sachs had created a security that was designed to fail.

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Information economics, game theory, and behavioral economics have all had profound effects on how we think about the economy. The irony was that the critique of standard competitive model was in full force just as the model’s influence expanded in the eras of Carter, Reagan, and succeeding presidents, showing the importance of lags in knowledge—and perhaps of ideology and interests. 2.Peter Thiel, “Competition Is for Losers,” Wall Street Journal, Sept. 14, 2014. 3.A commission established by Congress to investigate the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. 4.Interview with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, May 26, 2010. Buffett was a major shareholder in Moody’s, one of the three dominant credit rating agencies.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are
by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
Published 8 May 2017

In other words, while people were joining in a big public uproar over how unhappy they were about seeing all the details of their friends’ lives on Facebook, they were coming back to Facebook to see all the details of their friends’ lives. News Feed stayed. Facebook now has more than one billion daily active users. In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, says that great businesses are built on secrets, either secrets about nature or secrets about people. Jeff Seder, as discussed in Chapter 3, found the natural secret that left ventricle size predicted horse performance. Google found the natural secret of how powerful the information in links can be.

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, Amazon, Wikipedia, Tencent QQ, Google India, and Twitter. 153 In the early morning of September 5, 2006: This story is from David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010). 155 great businesses are built on secrets: Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: The Crown Publishing Group, 2014). 157 says Xavier Amatriain: I interviewed Xavier Amatriain by phone on May 5, 2015. 159 top questions Americans had during Obama’s 2014: Author’s analysis of Google Trends data. 162 this time at a mosque: “The President Speaks at the Islamic Society of Baltimore,” YouTube video, posted February 3, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
by Tyler Cowen
Published 27 Feb 2017

To the rebel in each of us ACKNOWLEDGMENTS For useful comments, edits, and discussion, the author would like to thank most of all Tim Bartlett and Michael Rosenwald and Teresa Hartnett, but also Bryan Caplan, Yana Chernyak, Carrie Conko, Natasha Cowen, Michelle Dawson, Veronique de Rugy, Jason Fichtner, David Gordon, Kevin and Robin Grier, Robin Hanson, Garett Jones, Daniel Klein, Randall Kroszner, Edward Luce, Megan McArdle, Stephen Morrow, John Nye, Jim Olds, Hollis Robbins, Daniel Rothschild, Reihan Salam, Alex Tabarrok, Peter Thiel, and surely some number of others whom I have neglected or forgotten unjustly. 1. THE COMPLACENT CLASS AND ITS DANGERS Disruption has been the buzzword of the decade. And it’s true that there have been some significant changes afoot, from the wiring of the whole world to the coming of unprecedented levels of multiculturalism and tolerance.

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If I think of my own life, I’ve simply stopped taking most local car trips between 4 and 7 p.m., mostly because of pressures from traffic. I end up staying at home and clicking on Amazon and waiting for the packages to arrive. One final way of thinking about progress, sometimes stressed by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel, is to ask whether the era of grand projects is mostly over. In the twentieth century, American grand projects included the Manhattan Project, which was highly successful, and cemented an era of Pax Americana. Two other grand projects were winning World War II and, starting in the 1950s, construction of the interstate highway system, both examples of thinking big and changing the world permanently on a large scale.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era
by James Barrat
Published 30 Sep 2013

I’d heard about so-called stealth companies that are privately held, hire secretly, never issue press releases or otherwise reveal what they’re up to. In AI, the only reason for a company to be stealthy is if they’ve had some powerful insight, and they don’t want to reward competitors with information about what that their breakthrough is. By definition, stealth companies are hard to discover, though rumors abound. PayPal founder Peter Thiel funds three stealth companies devoted to AI. Companies in “stealth mode” however, are different and more common. These companies seek funding and even publicity, but don’t reveal their plans. Peter Voss, an AI innovator known for developing voice-recognition technology, pursues AGI with his company, Adaptive AI, Inc.

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Over two days, a roster of speakers preach to about a thousand members of the choir about the Singularity big picture—its impact on jobs and the economy, health and longevity, and its ethical implications. Speakers at the 2011 summit in New York City included science legends, like Mathematica’s Stephen Wolfram, Peter Thiel, a dot-com billionaire who pays tech-savvy teens to skip college and start companies, and IBM’s David Ferrucci, principal investigator for the DeepQA/Watson Project. Eliezer Yudkowsky always speaks, and there’s usually an ethicist or two as well as spokespeople for the extropian and transhuman communities.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath
by Nicco Mele
Published 14 Apr 2013

In a particularly stunning finding, only 19% of college and university presidents think that the American college system is the best in the world.11 Our college and university presidents don’t think our system is exceptional, and many of them think it is getting worse. One prominent tech entrepreneur, Peter Thiel, finds higher education so much of a dead-end that he has offered to pay promising smart high school kids not to attend college. Thiel cofounded the online payment juggernaut PayPal and was an early investor and mentor for two Silicon Valley heavyweights, Facebook and Palantir. Each year, he picks twenty people under twenty years old and gives them $100,000 to stay out of school for two years and focus on building their start-ups.

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Harry Lewis, Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006), 8. 5. http://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2011/03/18/a-harvard-education-isnt-as-advertised 6. http://www.demos.org/publication/great-cost-shift-how-higher-education-cuts-undermine-future-middle-class 7. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/when-it-comes-to-e-mailed-political-rumors-conservatives-beat-liberals/2011/11/17/gIQAyycZWN_story.html 8. http://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Family/2012/0617/Bachelor-s-degree-Has-it-lost-its-edge-and-its-value 9. http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634 10. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1993/survey-is-college-degree-worth-cost-debt-college-presidents-higher-education-system 11. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1993/survey-is-college-degree-worth-cost-debt-college-presidents-higher-education-system 12. http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2011/tc20110524_317819.htm 13. http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education/ 14. http://ocw.mit.edu/about/newsletter/archive/2011-10/ 15. http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/19/khan-academy-triples-unique-users-to-3-5-million/ 16. http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/01/31/udacitys-model/ 17. http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2008/04/the-great-unbundling-newspapers-the-net/ 18. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/the-great-unbundling-of-the-university/251831/ 19. http://www.centerforcollegeaffordability.org/uploads/ForProfit_HigherEd.pdf 20. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-10-19/apollo-fourth-quarter-profit-sales-top-analysts-estimates-1-.html 21. http://nber.org/papers/w18201 22. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/07/why-the-internet-isnt-going-to-end-college-as-we-know-it/259378/ 23. http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/Contributors.php?

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard
Published 19 Apr 2018

“On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone … You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one.”21 Barlow started the libertarian Electronic Frontier Foundation, which today defends hackers, because of debates he had on the WELL. Then came Peter Thiel. Thiel, another libertarian Stanford grad—who founded PayPal, was an early investor in Facebook, and founded the CIA-backed big data firm Palantir—is frank about his hostility toward gender equality and government. In a 2009 Cato Unbound essay, Thiel writes, “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.”

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Management Science 54, no. 9 (September 2008): 1529–1543. doi:10.1287/mnsc.1080.0884. Tesla, Inc. “A Tragic Loss,” June 30, 2016. https://www.tesla.com/blog/tragic-loss. Thiel, Peter. “The Education of a Libertarian.” Cato Unbound (blog), April 13, 2009. https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. Thrun, S. “Winning the DARPA Grand Challenge: A Robot Race through the Mojave Desert,” 11. IEEE, 2006. https://doi.org/10.1109/ASE.2006.74. Thrun, Sebastian. “Making Cars Drive Themselves,” 1–86. IEEE, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1109/HOTCHIPS.2008.7476533. Tufte, Edward R. 2001.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx
Published 4 Jul 2022

But since the maturation of digital communications technologies, and the internet in particular, a common view has set in that innovation has seemed to slow down. Now there are plenty of new apps and derivative consumer products, but the type of discoveries of the twentieth century seem to have become much rarer. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel has voiced these concerns many times, and his firm, Founders Fund, once subtitled its manifesto, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” in reference to Twitter. Thiel acknowledged the importance of the state’s role in funding basic research in the past, but argued it cannot be replicated in the present.

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Understanding the Silicon Valley Worldview 1 Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Penguin Books, 2020, p. 7. 2 Ibid., p. 15. 3 AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, Harvard University Press, 1996. 4 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 75–6. 5 Tom Wolfe, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” Esquire, December 1983, Classic.esquire.com. 6 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. 31. 7 Ibid., p. 73. 8 Ibid., p. 76. 9 Ibid., p. 14. 10 Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology,” Science as Culture 6:1, 1996, imaginaryfutures.net. 11 Saxenian, Regional Advantage, p. 90. 12 O’Mara, The Code, p. 214. 13 Ibid., p. 226. 14 Peter Thiel, “The End of the Future,” National Review, October 3, 2011, Nationalreview.com. 15 Tom Simonite, “Technology Stalled in 1970,” MIT Technology Review, September 18, 2014, Technologyreview.com. 16 David Graeber, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” The Baffler 19, March 2012, Thebaffler.com. 17 O’Mara, The Code, pp. 90–1. 18 Tim Maughan, “The Modern World Has Finally Become Too Complex for Any of Us to Understand,” OneZero, November 30, 2020, Onezero.medium.com. 19 Ibid. 20 Senator Gore, speaking on S. 1067, 101st Congress, 1st sess., Congressional Record 135, May 18, 1989, S 9887. 21 Daniel Greene, The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, MIT Press, 2011. 22 Madeline Carr, US Power and the Internet in International Relations: The Irony of the Information Age, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, p. 58 (author’s emphasis). 23 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 194. 24 John Perry Barlow, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” February 8, 1996, Eff.org. 25 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, p. 209. 26 Ibid., p. 222. 27 Ibid. 28 Mariana Mazzucato, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs.

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World
by James Ball
Published 19 Jul 2023

In a sense the idea that there’s an elite running the show is something almost of us believe to some extent – not least because it’s at least partly true. In the UK, for example, only 7 per cent of people are privately educated, but 59 per cent of Liz Truss’s first cabinet were. Top journalists and top politicians are often married to one another. The ultra-rich know and socialise with each other – PayPal founder and billionaire Peter Thiel knows billionaire and former PayPal CEO Elon Musk, who socialises with Google founder Larry Page, and so on. But the reality of it being a small world at the top is transformed into a conspiracy theory that they are actively conniving and running the show as a cabal of some sort. It’s a theory that is perhaps oddly more reassuring than the idea that everything is just random, and everyone is fumbling their way through life.

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Sean Michaels, ‘Taking the Rick’, www.theguardian.com, 19 March 2008. 18. The 4channers here were more correct than the music and movie companies. Once legal streaming became available and affordable, few people bothered to pirate any more. 19. Trouble often started on Gawker, to such an extent that Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel funded a Hulk Hogan lawsuit to bankrupt the site, likely as revenge for it outing him as gay years earlier. There is a good movie about the whole thing: Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press (dir. Brian Knappenberger, 2017). 20. Don’t take my word for it – see for yourself here: Tom Cruise Scientology Video, www.youtube.com/watch?

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

Katrina Brooker, ‘Google Ventures and the Search for Immortality’, Bloomberg, 9 March 2015, accessed 15 April 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/google-ventures-bill-maris-investing-in-idea-of-living-to-500. 28. Mick Brown, ‘Peter Thiel: The Billionaire Tech Entrepreneur on a Mission to Cheat Death’, Telegraph, 19 September 2014, accessed 19 December 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11098971/Peter-Thiel-the-billionaire-tech-entrepreneur-on-a-mission-to-cheat-death.html. 29. Kim Hill et al., ‘Mortality Rates among Wild Chimpanzees’, Journal of Human Evolution 40:5 (2001), 437–50; James G. Herndon, ‘Brain Weight Throughout the Life Span of the Chimpanzee’, Journal of Comparative Neurology 409 (1999), 567–72. 30.

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Using an American football analogy, Maris explained that in the fight against death, ‘We aren’t trying to gain a few yards. We are trying to win the game.’ Why? Because, says Maris, ‘it is better to live than to die’.27 Such dreams are shared by other Silicon Valley luminaries. PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel has recently confessed that he aims to live for ever. ‘I think there are probably three main modes of approaching [death],’ he explained. ‘You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.’

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

They use economies of scale to drive smaller and less efficient companies out of business. They use efficiencies of production to reduce their demand for labor. They happily exploit political connections to expand more quickly than their rivals and to resist competition. “All failed companies are the same,” Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal, explains in Zero to One (2014), “they failed to escape competition.”6 Creative destruction cannot operate without generating unease: the fiercer the gale, the greater the unease. Settled patterns of life are uprooted. Old industries are destroyed. Hostility to creative destruction is usually loudest on the left.

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America’s current generation of entrepreneurs is refashioning civilization just as fundamentally as the robber barons did. They are gripped by the same “madness of great men” that gripped the robber barons. Sergey Brin wants to grow meat from stem cells. Elon Musk wants to “reinvent” railways by shooting passengers down hermetically sealed tubes. Peter Thiel of PayPal proclaims that “the great unfinished task of the modern world is to turn death from a fact of life to a problem to be solved.” These great revolutions may well lay the foundations of improved prosperity just as the steel and petroleum revolutions did in the nineteenth century. Fracking is putting a downward pressure on oil and gas prices for both consumers and business.

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Michael Haines, ed., “Vital Statistics,” in Population, vol. 1 of Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition, 388. 4. Richard S. Tedlow, Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001), 427. 5. Ibid., 200. 6. Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Start-ups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 34. 7. Ibid., 387. 8. Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 270–71. 9. Stanley Lebergott, Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 82. 10.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

Vicarious claims to have succeeded, and its first Turing test demonstrations appear to back up its claim.76 How would such a technology be deployed or monetized? Vicarious doesn’t need to worry about that just yet. As a flexible purpose corporation, Vicarious can work with the long-term, big picture, experimental approach required to innovate in a still-emerging field such as AI. Although investors including Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel have invested $56 million in the company, the flexible purpose structure prevents them from exerting the sort of pressure to get to market that venture capitalists typically put on their investments. The company can’t be forced to sell out or to abandon scientific curiosity for commercial viability.

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They thought they were engineering a new technology, when they were actually engineering a reallocation of capital. That’s why digital entrepreneurs who do win often end up becoming the next generation of venture capitalists. Everyone from Marc Andreessen (Netscape) to Sean Parker (Napster) to Peter Thiel (PayPal) to Jack Dorsey (Twitter) now runs venture funds of his own. Facebook and Google, once startups themselves, now acquire more businesses than they incubate internally. With each new generation, firms and investors leverage the startup economy more deliberately, or even cynically. After all, a win is a win.

The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community
by Marc J. Dunkelman
Published 3 Aug 2014

George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen recently argued that innovation in the United States has actually stagnated, noting that we’ve picked the low-hanging fruit of technologies produced by previous generations and are burning through the competitive advantages those breakthroughs bestowed on today’s economy.30 Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and a powerful figure in the world of venture capital, has sounded a similar alarm, arguing that whatever advances Silicon Valley has spurred of late have been cancelled out by America’s failure to make progress on other technological and scientific fronts.31 No fair assessment can blame the stagnation of American innovation entirely on the structure of American community.

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.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 15–16. 26Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, 22, 31–32, 63–68. 27Safford, Why the Garden Club Couldn’t Save Youngstown, 83, 92–95. 28Locke, Remaking the Italian Economy, 134. 29Michael Mandel, “The Failed Promise of Innovation in the U.S.,” Bloomberg Businessweek, June 3, 2009. 30Tyler Cowen, The Great Stagnation (New York: Dutton, 2011). 31http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20096067-281/peter-thiel-thinks-tech-innovation-has-stalled/. 32Edward Glaeser, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). 33Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 34Elsa Brenner, “In Westchester County, the Platinum Mile Is Reinvented, Again,” New York Times, January 3, 2012. 35Charles V.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

If opportunity refers to conditions that are favorable to the achievement of success and happiness, then America has always supplied those conditions in spades: the freedom to think, choose, and produce—and the chance to live among other producers, whose ever-growing sum of knowledge, wealth, and achievements magnifies what we can achieve. In America, we have the opportunity to work with entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Mark Cuban—or to become one of them. We have the opportunity to use new technologies pioneered by innovators like Steve Jobs and Peter Thiel—and to create our own. We have the opportunity to gain access to capital from banks, venture capitalists, and other investors—and to become a capitalist. We have the opportunity to take advantage of the services of first-rate doctors, electricians, home builders, and chefs—and to become first-rate in whatever field we choose.

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Talent is the currency of Silicon Valley, and individuals there use their talent to move us forward, pioneering revolutionary achievements in social media, big data, personalized health care, biotechnology, smartphones, mobile commerce, cloud technology, and 3D printing, to name just a few. Silicon Valley is the place creators like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Peter Thiel go to make a fortune by inventing the future. What made it all possible? No doubt there are many forces at work, but one enormous factor is the extent to which the government has kept its hands off the Valley. Perry Piscione points out the benefits of “the lack of heavy government regulation that would typically favor the interests of established banks, companies, and labor unions” over young upstarts.36 People are free to act on their ideas and compete on ability, without having to wade through a minefield of government permissions before launching their ventures.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil
by Hamish McKenzie
Published 30 Sep 2017

The resulting company was PayPal. Musk’s tenure as CEO of the merged entity was short-lived. After ten months in the job, he took a two-week trip to meet prospective investors and have a vacation in Sydney, Australia, with Justine, whom he had married in January 2000. While he was away, Confinity’s founders, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, staged a coup and convinced the board to remove Musk from the position. Officially, the falling-out centered on a disagreement about which software to use as the technology platform, but personality differences also came into play. Musk could be difficult to work with, Levchin said.

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For instance, PayPal is well known in the Valley for producing a number of high performers who left the company to start, join, or invest in others. The so-called PayPal Mafia includes Reid Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn; Max Levchin, whose most recent of several start-ups is the financial services company Affirm; Peter Thiel, a Facebook board member and President Trump–supporting venture capitalist who cofounded “big data” company Palantir; Jeremy Stoppelman, who started reviews site Yelp; Keith Rabois, who was chief operating officer at Square and then joined Khosla Ventures; David Sacks, who sold Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion and later became CEO at Zenefits; Jawed Karim, who cofounded YouTube; and one Elon Musk.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

Although scientists in growing numbers are discontented with Data Brain solutions to ongoing theoretical concerns, the ethos of Big Data AI is now firmly entrenched in science and culture generally. Ironically, as general intelligence is supposed to be emerging from AI and its applications to scientific research, it’s noticeably downplayed in the roles of scientists. Billionaire tech entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel remarked recently that innovations seem to be drying up, not accelerating.1 Tech startups once dreamed of the next big idea to woo investors in the Valley, but now have exit strategies that almost universally aim for acquisitions by big tech companies like Google and Facebook, who have a lock on innovation anyway, since Big Data AI always works better for whoever owns the most data.

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See Stefan Thiel, “Why the Human Brain Project Went Wrong—and How to Fix It,” Scientific American, October 1, 2015. Also Ed Yong, “The Human Brain Project Hasn’t Lived Up to Its Promise,” The Atlantic, July 22, 2019. 12. Yong, “The Human Brain Project Hasn’t Lived Up.” Chapter 18: The End of Science? 1. Peter Thiel, interviewed by Eric Weinstein on “The Portal” podcast, Episode #001: “An Era of Stagnation & Universal Institutional Failure,” July 19, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM9f0W2KD5s&t=1216s. 2. Ibid. 3. Norbert Wiener, Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 4.

The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Sep 2019

The attitude of late enlightenment thinkers towards economic justice invites sneers today, waved off as nonsense that good conservatives and ‘classical liberals’ should unite in opposing, lest politics become too charged. ‘I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian,’ the California investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel proclaims.25 Thiel’s simplistic attitude to political conflict is so widespread that people seem astonished to learn enlightenment thinkers didn’t share it, especially Smith, who writes at length about the inevitability of conflict between classes and nations, necessitating prudent legislators to intervene in different ways.

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‘Canadian mining firms worst for environment, rights: Report’ (The Toronto Star, 19 October). 24 M. Patterson, 2016. ‘How the U.S. violates international law in plain sight’ (America: The Jesuit Review, October 24). 25 P. Thiel, 2009. ‘The education of a libertarian’ (Cato Unbound, April 13). https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian. 26 Smith, Wealth of Nations. Ed. Spencer, 454. 27 M. Watson, 2017. ‘Historicising Ricardo’s comparative advantage theory, challenging the normative foundations of liberal international economy.’ New Political Economy 22(3): 257–272, 259. 28 https://larspsyll.wordpress.com/2017/04/19/david-ricardo-and-comparative-advantage-a-bicentennial-assessment/. 29 Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans, The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity (London: Random House, 2007), 47. 30 Eugene Wendler, Friedrich List (1789–1846): A Visionary Economist with Social Responsibility (Heidelberg: Springer, 2015), 4; see also David Levi-Faur, 1997.

Against the Web: A Cosmopolitan Answer to the New Right
by Michael Brooks
Published 23 Apr 2020

Whatever else is true about all this, what matters most is that Bret and his brother Eric Weinstein are here with us now, pushing the right-wing “classical liberal” pablum of the IDW. In a world where the left was just a little bit better at acting strategically, Bret might well still be teaching biology at a nice hippie liberal arts college, while Eric quietly did whatever it was that he did for billionaire ghoul Peter Thiel. Instead, we have the Weinsteins to thank as much as anyone for the birth of the IDW brand. Bret’s narrative about Evergreen is one of these guys’ founding myths, and Eric is the one who came up with the absurd self-aggrandizing label “Intellectual Dark Web” in the first place. Bret’s former colleague, Professor Nancy Koppelman, summarizes his post-Evergreen success in a Medium post entitled “Bret Weinstein’s Second Act”: Before the events that led to his resignation from Evergreen his twitter page had few subscribers; now there are over 160,000.

The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality
by Blake J. Harris
Published 19 Feb 2019

“But yes. Why?” “Come on . . . you’re brilliant.” “I don’t take the choice lightly. It has a lot of thought in it.” “I’ll stay out of it,” Iribe said, “but Trump is bad news.” “He could be,” Luckey conceded. “I just think Hillary would be worse. And there are quite a few people who agree. Including Peter Thiel. Happy to discuss in person . . .” About twenty minutes later, Mitchell came by in person to ask Luckey if he really was planning to vote for Trump. “Yes,” Luckey told him. “Dude,” Mitchell replied. “I thought you were smarter than that.” Chapter 42 Nimble August 2016 “THIS CAN WORK,” LUCKEY TOLD JASON RUBIN DURING ONE OF SEVERAL POWWOWS the two had in August.

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Xoxo As with Nimble America’s original announcement earlier that day, Yiannopoulos’s post was largely met with anger and annoyance, ranging from comments like “Fuck off with the money grab” to “Love you Milo but you’re hardly ever here except when it helps you and nobody else.” The NimbleRichMan post, however, was better received, inspiring many members of the community to speculate on his identity (and whether or not he really existed). Several theories were thrown out—Peter Thiel, being the most popular, but Elon Musk and Carl Icahn were also in the mix. Ultimately, however, community members seemed less interested in who this individual was than why, if he really were a member of the 0.001 percent, he felt compelled to hide his identity. That seemed cowardly. Why wouldn’t he proudly step forward as a Trump supporter?

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The Daily Beast, September 22, 2016. 4.Dash, Anil (@anildash). “One reason every political hashtag on Twitter is filled with racist trolls? The founder of Oculus is funding them.” Twitter. September 22, 2016, 6:15 PM PST. 5.Dash, Anil (@anildash). “This guy, @PalmerLuckey, put some of his billion FB dollars toward explicitly funding white supremacy. Peter Thiel approved the acquisition.” Twitter. September 22, 2016, 6:18 PM PST. 6.Pyle, Hunter. “Can I Be Fired for My Political Beliefs or Activities in California?” Hunter Pyle Law. August 30, 2018. 7.Menegus, Bryan. “Palmer Luckey, Millionaire Founder of Oculus Rift, Loves Donald Trump and Dates a Gamergater.”

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs
by Reid Hoffman , June Cohen and Deron Triff
Published 14 Oct 2021

The whole idea is to generate enormous early momentum behind your idea—before anyone else can steal your thunder. Achieving escape velocity If you start fast enough out of the gate, you may be able to not only outpace your competition—but leave them behind altogether. That’s the philosophy of one of PayPal’s co-founders, Peter Thiel. Peter is a controversial figure in Silicon Valley, known for his provocative statements and unpredictable politics. But his track record as an entrepreneur and an investor is undeniable—and rooted in an extreme “seize the initiative” approach. Peter doesn’t believe in beating the competition, he believes in escaping it altogether—either by entering an emerging field with no natural competitors or by moving so quickly and decisively that competitors have no hope of catching up.

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But if you stay with that business model for too long, your company won’t survive. This was true of PayPal. Our early promise to pay customers $10 for adding a friend to the platform was an easy, effective way to build out our early user base. But our burn rate was tens of millions of dollars each month as a result. Eventually, it got so expensive that co-founder Peter Thiel wanted to scrap the entire incentive (even though it was his idea in the first place) in order to keep costs down. But eventually we found a way to keep that sparkly, eye-catching promise intact. We just had to dim the sparkles a bit. We still gave users and their friends that gift of $10 each, but to get it, they had to give us a little more: They would have to enter their credit card, validate their bank account, and load fifty bucks into their new PayPal account.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
by Jia Tolentino
Published 5 Aug 2019

Born in 1991, to parents who were real estate developers, he spent nine months at Bucknell before getting accepted to a startup accelerator and then dropping out to found a nonsense company called Spling. (Crunchbase describes it as a “tech-driven ad platform helping brands increase media engagement and marketing revenue by optimizing their content presentation.” This was 2011, when it was still possible to say that sort of thing straight-faced; it was the year that Peter Thiel, the libertarian venture capitalist and Facebook founding board member who once wrote that women’s suffrage had compromised democracy, started offering $100,000 fellowships to dropout entrepreneurs.) In 2013, McFarland founded Magnises, a company that charged upwardly mobile millennials a suspiciously modest $250 a year for VIP event tickets and access to a clubhouse.

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I’ve been working multiple jobs simultaneously since I was sixteen, and I have had an exceptionally lucky professional life, and, like a lot of Americans, I still think of employer-sponsored health insurance as a luxury: a near-divine perk that, at thirty, I have had for only two years in my career—the two years that I was working at Gawker, which was sued into the ground by the dropout-loving, suffrage-hating, Trump-supporting billionaire Peter Thiel. In the current economy, for most students, colleges couldn’t possibly deliver on providing hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of anything. Wages aren’t budging, even though corporate profits have soared. The average CEO now makes 271 times the salary of the average American worker, whereas in 1965, the ratio was twenty-to-one.

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story
by Billy Gallagher
Published 13 Feb 2018

So he planned to start at college campuses, insular communities in which the Clinkle team could get every business signed up before launch. So, like Facebook before it, Clinkle would launch college by college and dominate these campus networks before opening up to the broader world. In the spring of 2012, Clinkle design chief Rob Ryan was a teaching assistant for a class on campus called CS 183: Startup. Peter Thiel, perhaps the crucial member of the PayPal Mafia as the company’s cofounder, taught students “how to build the future.” The course was so popular that Thiel and one of his students, Blake Masters, eventually published a book, Zero to One, based on the class and Masters’ notes.1 Thiel told the teaching assistants that they each had one golden ticket: an opportunity to pitch him their startup idea for venture capital funding.

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For example, take Sequoia Capital, Silicon Valley’s premier venture capital firm, founded in 1972 far before VC became sexy, with investments in Apple, Google, Oracle, PayPal, and a litany of others. In 2011, Sequoia invested $8 million in the messaging app WhatsApp. Over the next three years, Sequoia led two more rounds of funding in WhatsApp, investing $60 million in the company. When WhatsApp sold to Facebook in February 2014 for $19 billion, Sequoia earned roughly $3 billion. With Peter Thiel on board, Lucas Duplan set out to lure other investors. He succeeded wildly; his investors would include Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Intel, Intuit, Qualcomm cofounder Andrew Viterbi, and Salesforce founder and CEO Mark Benioff. VMWare cofounder Diane Green and her husband and fellow VMWare cofounder Mendel Rosenblum invested in Clinkle after teaching Lucas at Stanford.

The Infinite Machine: How an Army of Crypto-Hackers Is Building the Next Internet With Ethereum
by Camila Russo
Published 13 Jul 2020

If he had known all these people would be there, he would have brought his crew from Toronto. The last couple of days had been a roller coaster for Vitalik. Just two days before, it was announced that he, at the age of twenty, was one of the winners of PayPal cofounder and billionaire investor Peter Thiel’s fellowship. That meant he’d get a grant of $100,000 to work on Ethereum. The award was the final push for him to decide what he already had been thinking—he wouldn’t go back to college. But now he was feeling betrayed and confused, with different factions of the group lobbying him to take their side.

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After college, they wanted to try their own hand at running a company, and between 2005 and 2011 they, together with other cofounders, built two startups geared toward smartphone games, Mytopia and Particle Code, and sold them both. After that, Galia worked as an entrepreneur in residence at Trinity Ventures, one of the oldest VC firms in Sand Hill Road, and became a venture partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. In 2012 Galia moved to Tel Aviv to be a bridge for Founders Fund and the technology that was coming out of Israel. There she discovered Bitcoin and how developers were starting to think about building different layers and applications on top of it. That journey led her to the works of Bernard Lietaer, an economist who championed alternative currencies before Bitcoin was even invented and advocated for the idea that communities can benefit from creating their own parallel, local currency.

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class
by Joel Kotkin
Published 11 May 2020

Controllers like those at Facebook and Twitter seek to “curate” content on their sites, or even eliminate views they find objectionable, which tend to be conservative views, according to former employees.35 Algorithms intended to screen out “hate groups” often spread a wider net, notes one observer, since the programmers have trouble distinguishing between “hate groups” and those who might simply express views that conflict with the dominant culture of Silicon Valley.36 That managers of social media platforms aim to control content is not merely the perception of conservatives. Over 70 percent of Americans believe that social media platforms “censor political views,” according to a recent Pew study.37 With their quasi-monopoly status, Facebook and Google don’t have to worry about competing with anyone, as the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel observes, so they can indulge their own prejudices to a greater extent than the businesses that might be concerned about alienating customers.38 With their tightening control over media content, the tech elite are now situated to exert a cultural predominance that is unprecedented in the modern era.39 It recalls the cultural influence of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, but with more advanced technology.

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“The rise to power of net-based monopolies coincides with a new sort of religion based on becoming immortal,” writes Jaron Lanier.30 Potentially the most radical and far-reaching of the emerging creeds, transhumanism is a distinctly secular approach to achieving the long-cherished religious goal of immortality.31 The new tech religion treats mortality not as something to be transcended through moral actions, but as a “bug” to be corrected by technology.32 Although it sounds a bit like a wacky cult, transhumanism has long exercised a strong fascination for the elites of Silicon Valley. Devotees range from Sergei Brin, Larry Page, and Ray Kurzweil (of Google) to Peter Thiel and Sam Altman (Y Combinator). Kurzweil celebrates new technologies that allow for close monitoring of brain activity.33 Y Combinator is developing a technology for uploading one’s brain and preserving it digitally.34 The aim is to “develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence.”35 In some ways, transhumanism seems natural for those who hold technology above all other values.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

The company's leadership is unloved and popularly perceived as selfish, petulant, and uncommitted (as reflected in the company's IPO problems, the David Fincher movie, a hundred Sean Parker jokes, a smirking Eduardo Saverin defecting to Singapore to avoid paying his taxes, and the contrarian public persona of early funder Peter Thiel). There are, however, many other examples of network closure that deliver very different effects (Apple's own take on the walled garden is discussed below) not the least of which is the model provided by China's portfolio of social media properties like Renren, Sina Weibo, Tencent/QQ, and others.

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Is Situationist cut-and-paste psychogeography reborn or smashed to bits by Minecraft? What binds the hyperlibertarian secessionism of the Seasteading Institute, which would move whole populations offshore to live on massive ships floating from port to port unmolested by regulation and undesired publics (Facebook funder Peter Thiel is a key funder) with Archigram's Walking City project from 1967, which plotted for Star Wars Land Walker–like city machines to get up and amble away to greener pastures as needed? For that matter, as models of programmable planets and embryonic Matrioshka brains, how should we weigh Cisco/NASA's Planetary Skin, which, as we know, would blanket the globe's epidermal crust with ubiquitous physical sensors, on one hand, and the Death Star, on the other?

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Further, the original version of the photograph showed the continent of Africa with the tip of the Cape of Good Hope facing “up” and so putting the occluded areas Europe and the United States “below” Africa in perspective. There is no north or south in space, but the public versions of the photo inverted this perspective to a north-up map orientation restoring a completely artificial natural order. 12.  On Peter Thiel's thesis see “Technology Stalled in 1970,” MIT Technology Review, September 18, 2014, http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled-in-1970/. 13.  See my “We Need to Talk About TED” editorial published by The Guardian, December 30, 2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted. 14. 

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite
by Duff McDonald
Published 24 Apr 2017

Chandler, “The Competitive Performance of US Industrial Enterprises since the Second World War,” Business History Review 68 (Spring 1994). 16Cruikshank, A Delicate Experiment, p. 242 17Zeff, “The Contribution of the Harvard Business School to Management Control, 1908–1980,” p. 183. 18HBS course catalog, 1946–47, p. 31. 19Zeff, “The Contribution of the Harvard Business School to Management Control, 1908–1980,” p. 189. 20Ibid. Chapter 13: The Venture Capitalist: Georges Doriot 1“Peter Thiel on Creativity: Asperger’s Promotes It, Business School Crushes It,” BloombergView, October 7, 2014, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014–10–07/peter-thiel-criticizes-harvard-business-school-praises-aspergers. 2Spencer E. Ante, Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2008), Introduction. 3Harry Goldberg, “All Aboard for the New Business Era,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 10, 1932. 4Ante, Creative Capital, p. 5Ibid. 6Ibid. 7Jeffrey L.

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If the original intent of Control had been to shift the use of accounting and statistical data from a look at the past to a means of charting a course into the future, by the 1970s, scores of HBS graduates had pulled it back into the present, using the concepts they had learned in Control in order to paint a better picture of today. 13 The Venture Capitalist: Georges Doriot When Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal turned venture capitalist, was publicizing his 2014 book for aspiring entrepreneurs, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, his handlers included stops at a number of the nation’s premier business schools, including Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. There was, of course, irony in the decision, given Thiel’s well-known opinion of the value of MBAs: “Never hire an MBA; they will ruin your company.”

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Thomas Perkins and Frank Caufield, two cofounders of the legendary venture capital firm that bears their names, were HBS grads. And then there is HBS professor Georges Frederic Doriot, one of the founders of the modern venture capital industry, the latest stampede into which included the likes of Peter Thiel himself. In that, Thiel is like many of those MBAs that he so likes to criticize: the follower who has convinced himself that he is leading instead. A wiry five feet, ten inches with a thin mustache that Peter Sellers might have worn, Georges Doriot had a career at the Harvard Business School cut across four decades, from his time as an MBA student in the mid-1920s all the way through to his retirement in 1966.

The Industries of the Future
by Alec Ross
Published 2 Feb 2016

Ripple Labs maintains the global ledger, and its servers automatically monitor the transactions to ensure against fraud. In turn, Ripple Labs plans to distribute about 50 billion of these 80 billion ripples throughout the network to reward people for building up the network. The rest will be used to fund the company. Ripple is backed by Marc Andreessen’s VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund. Most Silicon Valley figures push back whenever another cryptocurrency is mentioned. Investor Chamath Paliyipatiya believes Bitcoin will continue to dominate the space. “I don’t want to comment on other currencies because they’re all irrelevant,” he says. “It’s about Bitcoin, so we should talk about Bitcoin.”

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Home for me isn’t a place but rather a feeling—a feeling best felt when near family or with close friends.” Today Sheel is the youngest venture capitalist with a senior role at a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm. His brother, Sujay, matriculated at Harvard as a 15-year-old and stayed for five semesters before accepting a Thiel Fellowship. The fellowship, set up by PayPal Mafia alum Peter Thiel, gives young college students $100,000 to drop out of college and focus on entrepreneurship. Sujay moved out west and became the chief operating officer of Hired.com (an online marketplace where companies compete for engineering talent) and a vice president at a mobile entertainment network. He recently decided to go back to school to finish up an environmental science and public policy degree at Harvard.

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever
by Robin Wigglesworth
Published 11 Oct 2021

An intense, cerebral man in his early fifties, with short dark hair and the weary tone of a Cassandra whose fate is to never have his prophecies believed, Green first rose to prominence in geekier corners of the finance industry after making a killing on betting against the volatility-linked exchange-traded products that blew up in February 2018.2 At the time he worked at Thiel Macro, a hedge fund run by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley investor. Green is now chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management—ironically a provider of active, options-based ETFs—but has made alerting people to what he thinks are the dangerous vagaries of passive investing his mission.3 Green reckons that Wallace’s “This Is Water” parable is the perfect metaphor to describe passive investing’s now all-encompassing effect on markets and his industry.

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John Coumarianos, “How a Dividend ETF Was Bitten by the Index It Mimics,” Barron’s, January 24, 2020. 21. Jason Zweig, “The Stock Got Crushed. Then the ETFs Had to Sell,” Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2020. CHAPTER 17: THIS IS WATER 1. Sam Levine, “David Foster Wallace’s Famous Commencement Speech Almost Didn’t Happen,” Huffington Post, May 24, 2016. 2. Miles Weiss, “Peter Thiel Had $244 Million Bet on Volatility Jump at Year-End,” Bloomberg, February 16, 2018. 3. Michael Green, “Policy in a World of Pandemics, Social Media and Passive Investing,” Logica Capital Advisers, March 26, 2020. 4. Brian Scheid, “Top 5 Tech Stocks’ S&P 500 Dominance Raises Fears of Bursting Bubble,” S&P Global Market Intelligence, July 27, 2020. 5.

Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall
by Zeke Faux
Published 11 Sep 2023

I crossed the marble floors and passed through a glass door into the yard, where I saw a long table of preppy men and women who looked like they had wandered in from a different party. I took a seat at one end and told the people sitting next to me about my crypto reporting. One of the men across the table was an aide for the PayPal founder and investor Peter Thiel, who had become a major donor to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Thiel had delivered a speech at the conference that day in which he called Warren Buffett a “sociopathic grandpa” for doubting Bitcoin. He did not tell the audience that the venture capital firm he co-founded, Founders Fund, had recently sold off the vast majority of its crypto holdings.

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Paul created an NFT of a photo of the project, and, according to his website, Originals.com, sold it for about $87,000. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Chapter Three: Doula for Creation a young Bitcoiner named Dev: Not his real name or his real hometown. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT sold off the vast majority: Tabby Kinder and Richard Waters, “Peter Thiel’s Fund Wound Down 8-Year Bitcoin Bet Before Market Crash,” Financial Times, January 18, 2023. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT to make TV obsolete: Joseph Menn and Greg Miller, “How a Visionary Venture on the Web Unraveled,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 2000. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT once owned by Death Row Records founder: Andrew Rice, “DEN Board Asked Founder to Leave,” Wired, November 1, 1999.

Dead People Suck: A Guide for Survivors of the Newly Departed
by Laurie Kilmartin
Published 13 Feb 2018

The next Marie Curie is a college senior right now, waiting to be talked out of applying to law school. But first things first. Every feared rapper is in a beef, nerds need to be called out too. START A BEEF: Stop writing “Dad lost his battle with cancer.” Instead, cast some blame in the obit: “Elon Musk failed to cure Dad’s leukemia.” “Peter Thiel did nothing as Mom’s heart gave out.” Neither statement is incorrect. Let’s see if those two fight back, with a cure. MONEY MAKE PATIENTS PAY A “YOU SAVED MY LIFE” COMMISSION: A doctor or a scientist gives a sick person 5, 10, maybe 40 more years of life. And what do they get in return? Gratitude.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World
by Jamie Bartlett
Published 12 Jun 2017

There are now tens of thousands of self-declared transhumanists based all over the world, including influential people at the heart of the world’s tech scene. Ray Kurzweil, a firm believer in the ‘singularity moment’ (the point at which artificial intelligence becomes so advanced that it begins to produce new and ever more advanced versions of itself), is a senior engineer at Google. Billionaire Peter Thiel—co-founder of PayPal, influential Silicon Valley investor and a member of President Donald Trump’s transition team—is also a self-declared transhumanist and has invested millions of dollars into life extension and artificial-intelligence projects. Transhumanism is fast becoming the meeting point between science and science fiction.

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Of the nineteen tech entrepreneurs or investor billionaires who have signed the Giving Pledge to donate half their wealth, at least half are financing healthcare and medical research. Ben Popper, ‘Understanding Calico: Larry Page, Google Ventures, and the quest for immortality’, The Verge, 2013, http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/19/4748594/understanding-calico-larry-page-google-ventures-and-the-quest-for. 16. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, donated $3.5 million to the forerunner of de Grey’s SENS research centre, called the Methuselah Foundation. Ariana Eunjung Cha, ‘The tech titans latest project: Defy death’, Washington Post, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/04/04/tech-titans-latest-project-defy-death/. 17.

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone
Published 30 Jan 2017

The first hearing was canceled due to Hurricane Sandy, which resulted in a long delay that led him to mistakenly believe he was in the clear. Then he was called back to appear in housing court. The city was throwing the book at Nigel Warren, hoping to set an example to curb usage of Airbnb. At the time, Airbnb was enjoying a wave of positive press for new features and another $200 million in funding led by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor. Warren seethed that the company was enjoying all this adulation while embroiling hosts like himself in legal trouble. Finally, he decided to take action. He did two things. First, he e-mailed Airbnb, complaining in part, “This entire situation came as a complete surprise.

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Lyft recovered quickly. That spring, with unconventional sources of capital now flooding into Silicon Valley, it raised $250 million from a consortium of investors that included hedge fund Coatue Management, Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, and the Founders Fund, the investment vehicle of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and it expanded into twenty-four new U.S. cities, thirteen of which were midsize markets where Uber did not yet operate.21 The battle was on again. A few weeks later, Uber rushed to raise another $1.2 billion in a hastily convened Series D round from the financial firms Fidelity, Wellington, and BlackRock, as well as the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries
by Safi Bahcall
Published 19 Mar 2019

As Mark Zuckerberg met with investors to raise funds for his new startup, users were just beginning to abandon the most recent social network success story, Friendster, for MySpace. Most investors concluded the websites were like clothing fads. Users switched networks like they switched jeans. Investors passed. Peter Thiel and Ken Howery at Founders Fund, however, reached out to their friends behind the scenes at Friendster. They dug into why users were leaving the site. Like other users, Thiel and Howery knew that Friendster crashed often. They also knew that the team behind Friendster had received, and ignored, crucial advice on how to scale their site—how to transform a system built for a few thousand users into one that could support millions of users.

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“Interpretation of the Evidence for the Efficacy and Safety of Statin Therapy.” The Lancet 388 (2016): 2532. Cooke, Robert. Dr. Folkman’s War. Random House, 2001. ________. “Dr. Folkman’s Progeny.” Vector, Spring 2008. Cordes, Eugene H. Hallelujah Moments. Oxford, 2014. Cowley, Stacy, and Julianne Pepitone. “Facebook’s First Big Investor, Peter Thiel, Cashes Out.” CNNMoney, Aug. 20, 2012. Daida, Hiroyuki. “Meet the History: The Discovery and Development of ‘Statin,’ the Penicillin of Arteriosclerosis.” Shinzo (Heart) 37 (2005): 681. Endo, Akira. “The Origin of the Statins.” Athero. Supp. 5 (2004): 125. ________. “A Gift from Nature: The Birth of the Statins.”

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

Author Cal Newport refers to the type of thinking that leads to breakthrough solutions as deep work. He advocates for dedicating long, uninterrupted periods of time to making progress on your most important problem. In a November 6, 2014, lecture titled “How to Operate,” entrepreneur and investor Keith Rabois tells a story about how Peter Thiel used this concept when he was CEO of PayPal: [Peter] used to insist at PayPal that every single person could only do exactly one thing. And we all rebelled, every single person in the company rebelled to this idea. Because it’s so unnatural, it’s so different than other companies where people wanted to do multiple things, especially as you get more senior, you definitely want to do more things and you feel insulted to be asked to do just one thing.

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Jeff Bezos again, in a 1997 letter to shareholders: Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time. But you’re still going to be wrong nine times out of ten. We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. Knowing something that is important yet mostly unknown or not yet widely believed is what investor Peter Thiel calls a secret. This has the same meaning as its colloquial use, just applied to innovation. As Thiel wrote in his 2014 book, Zero to One: Great companies can be built on open but unsuspected secrets about how the world works. Consider the Silicon Valley startups that have harnessed the spare capacity that is all around us but often ignored.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 25 Apr 2018

It's a policy that makes little sense, as patents are already monopolies which should normally earn high returns. Policymakers' objectives should not be to increase the profits from monopolies, but to favour investments in areas like research. Many of the so-called wealth creators in the tech industry, like the cofounder of Pay Pal, Peter Thiel, often lambast government as a pure impediment to wealth creation.9 Thiel went so far as to set up a ‘secessionist movement' in California so that the wealth creators could be as independent as possible from the heavy hand of government. When Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, was quizzed about the way companies control our personal data, he replied with what he assumed was a rhetorical question: ‘Would you prefer government to have it?'

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But if and when government does not step in and play its part, financialization can have no end.40 The next chapter turns to the world of innovation, a glamorous arena of inspired inventors and fearless entrepreneurs where ‘wealth creation' is not all it is claimed to be. 7 Extracting Value through the Innovation Economy First, only invest in companies that have the potential to return the value of the entire fund. Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (2014) STORIES ABOUT VALUE CREATION The epicentre of a still-unfolding technological revolution, Silicon Valley is the most dynamic industrial district in the world for high-tech start-ups. Since the 1980s it has made millionaires of many thousands of founders, early-stage employees, executives and venture capitalists - and billionaires of a significant number too.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

People point out that technologies which futurists confidently expected several decades ago have yet to materialise: “where’s my jetpack?” is a common refrain. When 2015 rolled around, people celebrated the fact that this was the year depicted in Back to the Future, the biggest movie of 1985, by asking, “hey dude, where’s my hoverboard?” PayPal founder Peter Thiel laments the slower-than-expected progress by saying that “we were promised flying cars and instead what we got was 140 characters” (ie, Twitter). Yet we also got the ability to access almost every fact, idea or thought that a human has ever recorded within a couple of seconds, which people 100 years ago would probably have viewed as far more impressive than flying cars.

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance
by Jessica Bruder and Dale Maharidge
Published 29 Mar 2020

Pentagon-backed research for predicting war casualties has been adapted into technology that law enforcement agencies use to forecast crime. Sold by a firm called PredPol, the software has been compared by critics to the widely discredited “broken windows” theory of policing. They note that it perpetuates discrimination and does not predict white-collar crime. Meanwhile, Palantir, the $20 billion data analytics firm cofounded by Peter Thiel, has drawn protests for selling its services to ICE and the NYPD. (Meanwhile, executives raised eyebrows by sponsoring “thirteen-course tasting-menu lunches with lobster tail and sashimi at headquarters” as the company hemorrhaged money, a show of what critics dubbed “Palantir Entitlement Syndrome.”)

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook
by Extinction Rebellion
Published 12 Jun 2019

Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion.

The Cosmopolites: The Coming of the Global Citizen
by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Published 14 Jul 2015

Bitcoin’s potential, Ver argues, is that since it is so heavily encrypted, there is only so much that governments can do to get in its way. Meanwhile, his intellectual compatriots are literally trying to engineer the globe into states of their own making. The Seasteading Institute, a nonprofit funded by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, promotes the creation of “seasteads,” man-made autonomous islands in international waters. The islands don’t actually exist—the technology isn’t quite there, and the institute is mostly run by kooky volunteers. But the organization operates on the philosophy that the nation-state and national citizenship should by now be obsolete, and that people ought to “vote with their feet” and decide what kind of government (and tax regime) they want to live under.

Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else
by Chrystia Freeland
Published 11 Oct 2012

By 1997, with just four years of technology experience under his belt, Hoffman, still running fast, decided to found his own company, Socialnet.com, an online dating site. Socialnet eventually closed down four years later without making much of a mark, but as Hoffman waded into the start-up world, two friends, Peter Thiel and Max Levchin, invited him to join the founding board of directors of their new company, PayPal. In January 2000, Hoffman went to work there full-time, a decision that made him a multimillionaire just two years later when eBay acquired the company. But the revolution still wasn’t over yet, and Hoffman wasn’t finished running.

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This is the project of the Seasteading Institute, which is hoping to construct man-made islands in the international waters of the ocean, beyond the legal reach of any national government. These oases, where the rich would be free to prosper unrestrained by the grasping of the 99 percent, are the brainchild of Milton Friedman’s grandson and are being funded in part by Silicon Valley billionaire and libertarian Peter Thiel. Not all plutocrats want to escape to a Seastead. Paul Martin and Ernesto Zedillo are members in good standing of the global elite. Martin is a former Canadian prime minister, finance minister, deficit hawk, and, in his life before politics, a multimillionaire businessman. Zedillo is a former Mexican president, holds a doctorate in economics, directs Yale University’s Center for the Study of Globalization, and serves on the boards of the blue chips Procter & Gamble and Alcoa.

Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food
by Chris van Tulleken
Published 26 Jun 2023

Clinical Medicine 2016; 16: 551–64. 11 Corbyn Z. Could ‘young’ blood stop us getting old? 2020. Available from: https://amp.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/02/could-young-blood-stop-us-getting-old-transfusions-experiments-mice-plasma. 12 Kosoff M. Peter Thiel wants to inject himself with young people’s blood. 2016. Available from: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/20i6/08/peter-thiel-wants-to-inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood. 13 Hervey GR. The effects of lesions in the hypothalamus in parabiotic rats. J Physiol. 1959 Mar 3;145(2):336–52. 14 Paz-Filho G, Mastronardi C, Delibasi T, et al. Congenital leptin deficiency: diagnosis and effects of leptin replacement therapy.

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It
by Ken Auletta
Published 1 Jan 2009

The fear is that an increasing number of businesses depend on Google to get their eyeballs. At a certain point, Google can flip their business from being a utility” to a gatekeeper that charges for access. This power imposes constant pressure on other companies. “You can’t wait for the wave to get there. You’ve got to start paddling,” said Peter Thiel, who was cofounder and CEO of PayPal, and is now president of Clarium Capital Management, a global hedge fund and Silicon Valley venture capital firm. “If you were running a railroad company in the 1940s and people started to fly airplanes, what would you do?” I asked Thiel what he would do if placed in charge of a traditional media company.

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Guth, ”Bill Gates Issues Call for Kinder Capitalism,“ Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2008. 291 ”We believe the Internet“: Yahoo press release, May 2, 2006. 291 extols ”nerd values“: Craig Newmark commencement speech to UC Berkeley, May 13 2008; Jim Stengel quote from ”Veteran Marketer Promotes a New Kind of Selling,“ Wall Street Journal, October 31, 2008. Account of Harvard Business School pledge in Leslie Wayne, ”A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Temptation,“ New York Times, May 30, 2009. 292 ”My pause“: author interview with Tom Glocer, June 5, 2008. 292 ”You can’t wait“: author interview with Peter Thiel, January 29, 2008. 293 ”When I landed“: author interview with Michael Eisner, June 19, 2008. 293 ”feels incredibly exciting“: author interview with Jeff Zucker, April 25, 2008. 294 ”All large media companies“: author interview with Eric Schmidt, June 11, 2008. 295 Sergey Brin told me that it is Google’s willingness to ”experiment“: author interview with Sergey Brin, March 26, 2008. 295 Google aims ”to do everything“: author interview with Marc Andreessen, March 27, 2008. 295 ”The French regarded“: Clay Shirky Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, The Penguin Press, 2008.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

Another Nobel laureate, Oliver Williamson, predicted as much,6 and pointed out the negative effects on productivity: “Suffice it to observe here that the move from autonomous supply (by the collection of small firms) to unified ownership (in one large firm) is unavoidably attended by changes in both incentive intensity (incentives are weaker in the integrated firm) and administrative controls (controls are more extensive).”7 Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal, wrote in praise of monopolies in his enormously readable and equally controversial book, Zero to One. A Rand Paul supporter, Thiel said, “Competition is for losers. . . . Creative monopolies aren’t just good for the rest of society; they’re powerful engines for making it better.”8 While Thiel might be right about striving to dominate one’s industry or market, he provided no real evidence that monopolies are good for consumers or society as a whole.

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As cited in Oliver Williamson and Sydney G. Winter, eds., The Nature of the Firm (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 90. 6. Oliver Williamson, “The Theory of the Firm as Governance Structure: From Choice to Contract,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 16(3) (Summer 2002) 171–95. 7. Ibid. 8. Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014). 9. Lord Wilberforce, The Law of Restrictive Trade Practices and Monopolies (Sweet & Maxwell, 1966), 22. 10. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 11. John Hagel and John Seely Brown, “Embrace the Edge or Perish,” Bloomberg, November 28, 2007; www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2007-11-28/embrace-the-edge-or-perishbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-financial-advice. 12.

Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It's Doing to Us
by Will Storr
Published 14 Jun 2017

If they have networks, that can be really useful too, because then we have access to more people like them.’ She showed me a shared room, upstairs, where temporary guests auditioning for a place in the house would sleep. Their beds were neatly made and cluttered with belongings: the books The Psychology of Influence and Persuasion by Dr Robert Cialdini and Zero to One by Peter Thiel, the influential libertarian investor, Trump supporter and co-founder of PayPal, lay near a comedy Viking helmet and a bright red squirt gun. During their trial, the Mansion’s permanent residents would have meetings in which the auditionees’ potential career trajectory and personalities would be discussed, judged and voted upon.

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The $10,000 they spent on a promotional video was quickly recouped; they took in almost $60,000 on their first day of sales and $484,013 within six weeks, with orders eventually building towards $1,000,000. He founded Cambrian Genomics and raised $10,000,000 from venture capitalists including PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel. His company began partnering with major international corporations, such as Roche and GlaxoSmithKline, as well as some smaller start-ups. One of these was Sweet Peach, which had been founded by Audrey Hutchinson, a young biology student and Distinguished Scientist scholarship recipient at New York’s Bard College.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

The introduction in recent years of feedback methods that allow buyers and sellers to evaluate each other, reducing informational gaps and improving incentives on both sides to perform well, has only added to the platforms’ extraordinary market power. And they have proven to be highly effective in identifying, and destroying or purchasing, potential competitors. In the words of the online investor and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, ‘Competition is for losers.’ These companies have grown through brilliant innovations in technology and business processes, which they have used to offer new services of immense value to individual and corporate consumers. The possibilities for future social benefit are far-reaching, from artificial intelligence to smart manufacturing to the deep integration of machines into human biology.

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On the erosion of real wages and the loss of trust within firms, see Robert Solow, ‘The Future of Work: Why Wages Aren’t Keeping Up’, Pacific Standard, 11 August 2015 Scalability of technology platforms: this is just one aspect of the economic effects of investment in intangible assets, which now outstrips investment in tangible assets in the US and UK. For a pioneering analysis see Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy, Princeton University Press 2017 ‘Competition is for losers’: Peter Thiel, Wall Street Journal, 12 September 2014 Effects of information and choice overload, especially on the poor: see Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir, Scarcity: The True Cost of Not Having Enough, Allen Lane 2013 Consumer detriment from UK retail electricity market: UK Competition and Markets Authority, Energy Market Investigation: Final Report, 24 June 2016 Volkswagen scandal: see Frank Dohmen and Dieter Hawranek, ‘Collusion between Germany’s Biggest Carmakers’, Der Spiegel, 27 July 2017, and Jack Ewing, Faster, Higher, Farther: The Inside Story of the Volkswagen Scandal, Bantam Press 2017 Limits of competition policy: recent arguments, and disparate US and EU views, are explored by John Vickers in ‘Competition Policy and Property Rights’, Economic Journal, 120.544, 2010 Hidden costs of price comparison websites: see e.g.

Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World
by Naomi Klein
Published 11 Sep 2023

When he does this, it strikes me that he sounds like Noam Chomsky. Or Chris Smalls, the Amazon Labor Union leader known for his EAT THE RICH jacket. Or, for that matter, me. But, as always in the Mirror World, nothing is as it seems. There are many rising stars on the right who follow a similar playbook. Flush with dollars from tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel, and endorsed by Trump, they promise a mix-and-match of bringing back factory jobs that pay family-supporting wages, building the border wall, fighting the toxic drug supply, liberating speech from Big Tech, and banning “woke” curricula. Among those building careers around versions of this platform in the United States are JD Vance in Ohio, Josh Hawley in Missouri, and Kari Lake, who narrowly lost her bid to become governor of Arizona (and claimed, of course, that the election was stolen).

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; Naomi Wolf’s Coup,” War Room: Pandemic (podcast), episode 1,506, December 23, 2021, at 24:55, posted on Rumble. “mass formation psychosis”: “No Evidence of Pandemic ‘Mass Formation Psychosis,’ Say Experts Speaking to Reuters,” Reuters Fact Check, January 7, 2022. “My job … is to wake people up from the Truman Show”: James Pogue, “Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets,” Vanity Fair, April 20, 2022. “becalmed … like Stepford kids”: Naomi Wolf, @DrNaomiRWolf, Gettr, April 16, 2022. “latest thinking”: “Dr Naomi Wolf on Kristina Borjesson Show,” Today’s News Talk (audio), July 24, 2022, at 26:46. “You can’t pick up human energy”: “Dr Naomi Wolf on Kristina Borjesson Show,” at 26:58–28:26.

Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos, and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley
by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans
Published 25 Apr 2023

That said, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where Andy would have had $3 million to invest in Lux Delux unless he had help from Tony. Other investors included SV Angel, a venture capital firm headed by legendary tech investor Ron Conway; Alex Hsu, the childhood friend of Tony’s; and Joe Lonsdale, the future libertarian venture capital investor who would go on to start the data mining behemoth Palantir with billionaires Peter Thiel and Alexander Karp. Joe wrote a roughly $100,000 check to Lux Delux. Asked about the investment a decade later, he wrote, “That was just a small investment and one among over a hundred from that time period—I met him via Tony whom I knew through friends in technology founder circles.” Just as Tony had launched Zappos from his condo in 1000 Van Ness, Lux Delux’s product and engineering operations were primarily based out of Andy’s San Francisco apartment in the South of Market district, a part of town that had started attracting new tech talent and companies like Airbnb and Zynga.

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While such efforts sound radical to most people, they have become widely accepted, even adopted, as ways to further the realm of productivity and individual betterment within Silicon Valley, a place where its leaders consistently pioneer what was previously thought unimaginable. Living longer, for example, is something that Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel have each spent millions of dollars on researching. But as his fixation on biohacking and flow states deepened, Tony was venturing closer to a dark rabbit hole from which he might not escape. His friends in Park City tried to find comfort in reverting to their old habits, despite his changing behavior and ever-grander visions.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

With the exception of Rupert Murdoch, all of them began giving their stories to Facebook in the hopes of luring a portion of its enormous audience. Advertisers, meanwhile, were coming in droves, responding to Facebook’s promise of a mass audience that could be precisely targeted. Zuckerberg’s early backer Peter Thiel was a student of the philosopher René Girard, who came up with the concept of “mimetic desire” and invoked it to explain Facebook’s essence. “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind,” Girard wrote. “We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.”

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Facing legal claims that, if successful, threatened to bankrupt the company, BuzzFeed was placing its fate in the hands of its young general counsel, Nabiha Syed. She would have to prove the dossier, or at least a decent portion of it, to be true. Her task was straightforward, from a legal standpoint, but would require a massive investment in top-of-the-line intelligence gathering. Peter Thiel had bankrolled lawsuits against the media company Gawker that practically bankrupted the once successful gossip news site, which had to be sold to another media company. It appeared that backers of Trump were trying the same legal gambit to take out BuzzFeed. Syed, suddenly on the front line of the site’s legal strategy, hired a team of investigators led by the former FBI cybersecurity chief Anthony Ferrante, who had spent his last year or so at the agency running the government’s inquiry into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

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Amazon already supported several internet tax proposals in Congress, anyway, so it was unclear what more the president might demand. But the outside attacks weren’t coming only from Trump; the president’s close ally, Rupert Murdoch, through Fox News, especially its on-air business hosts and pundits, was constantly upbraiding the four Silicon Valley giants, in part because of their liberalism. Although conservatives like Peter Thiel had made their fortunes there, the dominant ideology and ethos of the place was libertarian-left. Another source of the hostility was the sheer power of the data the four giants had compiled on their users and customers, which advertisers so prized. The data giants were beginning to compete with cable, the base of Fox and Murdoch’s power.

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts
by David Gerard
Published 23 Jul 2017

The explicit promise of Bitcoin is that you can get in early and get rich – without even building an enterprise that’s useful to someone. Pre-Bitcoin anonymous payment channels Peer-to-peer electronic payment services existed before Bitcoin. PayPal was explicitly intended to be an anonymous regulation-dodging money transmission channel, with an anti-state ideology; in a 1999 motivational speech to employees, Peter Thiel rants how “it will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means”10 – though they quickly realised that being part of the system made for a much more viable business. e-Gold was a digital currency backed by gold, founded in 1996. It was perceived as anonymous but was actually pseudonymous, and the company made their records available to law enforcement.

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference
by Alice Ross
Published 19 Nov 2020

That’s not about ESG or impact metrics or the personal satisfaction of doing an enormous amount of good, it’s about the real hard unsexy grind of building a company no matter what the industry it’s in.’ Investors have still been happy to buy into Just. Tetrick says that shareholders include the Heineken family, Japanese conglomerate Mitsui, sovereign wealth funds including Singapore’s Temasek, and early-stage venture capital funds including veteran investor Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Some of them want a stable source of wealth over the very long term (in the case of Temasek for the citizens of Singapore); others are keen to invest in companies that are attempting to solve environmental problems (in the case of various family offices whose younger members want to change the world); while some simply want to have their finger on the pulse of emerging technologies (in the case of various high-net-worth individuals; the minimum investment in Just, as for many private early-stage companies, is about $1m).

The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money
by Bryan Caplan
Published 16 Jan 2018

Labaree, David. 1997. How to Succeed in School without Really Learning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. 2012. Someone Has to Fail: The Zero-Sum Game of Public Schooling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lacy, Sarah. 2011. “Peter Thiel: We’re in a Bubble and It’s Not the Internet. It’s Higher Education.” TechCrunch. April 10. http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/10/peter-thiel-were-in-a-bubble-and-its-not-the-internet-its-higher-education. Lahelma, Elina. 2002. “School Is for Meeting Friends: Secondary School as Lived and Remembered.” British Journal of Sociology of Education 23 (3): 367–81. Lang, Kevin, and Erez Siniver. 2011.

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

The continued attention paid to these forecasters, and the popularity of their writings – which seems to continue even after it is obvious that they were wrong – reflects the common human predilection for apocalyptic narratives. Lot escaped the wrath of God by fleeing Sodom; Jonah’s prophecy enabled Nineveh to avert a similar fate. Today Peter Thiel, billionaire founder of PayPal, has prepared for the armageddon which may arise from the collapse of social organisation through cybertechnologies by building a bunker in a large estate in remote New Zealand. While the failure of all apocalyptic predictions to date 10 justifies considerable scepticism towards new ones, it cannot be concluded that all such narratives are false; human dominance of Earth will end some day, though probably not through shortage of coal, guano or lithium.

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Bill Gates did not drop out of Harvard to set up Microsoft because the alternative was unemployment, or because he feared an illness that would threaten his bank balance as well as his life; rather the opposite. He was able to follow his dream because he had little fear of these things; he was the son of a prosperous attorney and already marked for success by his education. Leland Stanford had qualified as an attorney before moving to California. Peter Thiel, the putative refugee in a New Zealand bunker, and perhaps the most outspoken representative of Silicon Valley libertarians, also began his career as a lawyer (he graduated from Stanford University), clerking for a federal circuit judge, and practising with a premier securities law firm before founding PayPal.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
by Brad Feld
Published 8 Oct 2012

This approach ramp works well for many students, but some high-level students found it lacking, and eventually dropped out of MIT or openly considered dropping out to start a company instead of finish their college education. They pointed to Ellison, Jobs, Gates, and Zuckerberg. They heard the calls from Peter Thiel to drop out of college (http://startuprev.com/o2). They were fascinated with TechStars, Y Combinator, and similar programs. As we tell entrepreneurs, when there is a crisis, there is great opportunity for innovation. So at MIT we took some of our own medicine and explored what we could do to meet this challenge of making the academic environment more conducive to successful entrepreneurial development.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

And as the dot-com sector regained its footing after the crash, we saw whole industries transformed, as well as the way most Americans communicated and engaged in society. So many of the pioneers in social entrepreneurship, social media, and sustainability are from Generation X and were in some way engaged with the dot-com boom. Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger of Wikipedia, Max Levchin, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel of PayPal, and Chris Anderson of Wired and now 3DRobotics are just a few examples. The core leadership of the Purpose Economy today is from this often forgotten generation, who in many ways produced the architects and catalysts of the new economy. 4. Environmental, Economic & Political Turmoil The growing uncertainty in our society is moving people to find stability within themselves, and to identify the need, to develop empathy for those affected by turmoil.

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
by Greg McKeown
Published 14 Apr 2014

One CEO recently admitted that he had allowed ambiguity on his executive team to keep the whole organization back. To repair the damage, he said he went through a huge streamlining process until he was down to just four direct reports, each with a clear functional responsibility across the whole organization. The iconoclastic entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel took “less but better” to an unorthodox level when he insisted that PayPal employees select one single priority in their role—and focus on that exclusively. As PayPal executive Keith Rabois recalls: “Peter required that everyone be tasked with exactly one priority. He would refuse to discuss virtually anything else with you except what was currently assigned as your #1 initiative.

Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 22 Jan 2018

The Sovereign Individual has an appendix offering services – an investment vehicle in Bermuda, membership of an offshore trust, advice on how to ‘secure your own tax-free zone’ and membership of The Sovereign Society, composed of ‘would-be Sovereign Individuals… who have clubbed together to help one another achieve independence’.32 (The desire for self-governing enclaves for the ultra-rich is an active project for the Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who wants to create a marine republic for the elite off the coast of California.) Crucial in this dystopian/utopian vision is the idea of exit. Rees-Mogg senior wrote that even in the early stages of this new age ‘many residents of the largest and most powerful Western nation-states, like their counterparts in East Berlin in 1989, will be plotting to find their way out… abandoning the country of their birth is not [an] unthinkable decision’.33 The nation state, for these new gods, is a ‘predatory institution’ from which ‘the individual will want to escape’.34 Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new post-national elite, a ‘domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age’.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech
by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Published 9 Oct 2017

Write your congressperson. Support an alternate product. If we don’t, there’s real danger ahead. Tech companies are now engaging in all manner of civic life—from Mark Zuckerberg’s vision for a journalism industry utterly intertwined with Facebook, to the downright terrifying work of Trump adviser Peter Thiel’s data-mining company Palantir, which received $41 million from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to build software that tracks and deports immigrants (and could, of course, be turned on any of us).7 If tech companies can’t get the basics right—if they can’t stop themselves from designing “yellowface” photo filters, or pushing cutesy language at people in crisis, or creating photo-tagging systems that fail black users—why should we trust them to provide solutions to massive societal problems?

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Published 5 Oct 2015

CHAPTER THREE Bullseye With nineteen traction channels to consider, figuring out which one to focus on is tough. That’s why we’ve created a simple framework called Bullseye that will help you find the channel that will get you traction. As billionaire PayPal founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel put it: [You] probably won’t have a bunch of equally good distribution strategies. Engineers frequently fall victim to this because they do not understand distribution. Since they don’t know what works, and haven’t thought about it, they try some sales, BD, advertising, and viral marketing—everything but the kitchen sink.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

They like to socialize at ideas-rich conferences such as the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, in Switzerland, in the winter; at the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival in Colorado in the summer; and at various meetings of TED throughout the year; indeed, they mark the passing of the seasons with conferences in the way that the old rich used to mark them out with horse races and regattas. They count big thinkers such as Thomas Friedman and David Brooks among their friends. They subscribe to ideas-led magazines such as Foreign Affairs and the New Yorker. They are the Economist rich rather than the Tatler rich. Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist who founded PayPal and was one of the first investors in Facebook, likes to fly provocative intellectuals to have dinner with him in San Francisco to discuss their latest books (he has also written a rather good book of his own, Zero to One).3 Mark Zuckerberg hosts an online book club.

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Williams, Hugh Gaitskell: A Political Biography (London, Jonathan Cape, 1979), p. 783 59 Crosland, Conservative Enemy, p. 181 60 Marion Mills Miller (ed.), Great Debates in American History, Volume VI (New York, Current Literature Publishing Company, 1913), p. 13 61 Frum, How We Got Here, p. 259 62 Ibid., p. 262 15. THE CORRUPTION OF THE MERITOCRACY 1 Michael Hicks, Bastard Feudalism (London, Longman, 1995) 2 Darrell M. West, Billionaires: Reflections on the Upper Crust (Washington, DC, Brookings Institution Press, 2014), p. 126 3 Peter Thiel, with Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (London, Virgin Books, 2014) 4 Julia Carrie Wong and Matthew Cantor, ‘How to Speak Silicon Valley: 53 Essential Tech-Bro Terms Explained’, Guardian, 27 June 2019 5 Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: The Tyranny of Just Deserts (New York, Penguin Press, 2019), p. 114 6 Emma Duncan, ‘Special Report: Private Education’, Economist, 13 April 2019, p. 3 7 The Sutton Trust, ‘Elitist Britain 2019: The Educational Backgrounds of Britain’s Leading People’, p. 5 8 Ibid., p. 12 9 Francis Green and David Kynaston, Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem (London, Bloomsbury, 2019), p. 96 10 ‘America’s New Aristocracy’, Economist, 22 January 2015; ‘How the Internet Has Changed Dating’, Economist, 18 August 2018 11 Jeremy Greenwood et al., ‘Marry Your Like: Assortative Mating and Income Inequality’ (NBER Working Paper No. 1989) 12 A.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
by Kevin Davies
Published 5 Oct 2020

Qin tells me the name means “through learning you come to understand” and “a flower ready to blossom.” * * * But it’s Church’s work on another mammal that has truly captured the attention of the media (and Hollywood): the woolly mammoth, Mammuthus primigenius, the flagship project of the de-extinction revolution. Woolly’s backers include venture capitalist Peter Thiel, on a mission to defeat mortality, who donated $100,000 early on in 2015. The story begins, and may yet resume, in Siberia—about five million square miles of permafrost. Entombed within this deep-soil layer are the remains of animals and plants, a refrigerated repository of an estimated 1,400 gigatons of carbon.

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The test received emergency FDA approval—the first for a CRISPR diagnostic—in May 2020.13 There’s even an at-home version called STOPCovid,I designed to work in about an hour for less than $10 (not counting the outlay for a sous vide to substitute for a lab water bath).14 And he formed a team with the CEO of Pinterest, Ben Silbermann, that took just three weeks to develop and release an app called How We Feel for people to track their personal health and symptoms in real time.15 Zhang and Silbermann have been friends since they met in high school in Des Moines, Iowa, a lifetime ago. Other gene editing luminaries also retooled to tackle the COVID-19 crisis. In March 2020, a venture capitalist in Boston named Tom Cahill, who had launched a $125 million fund backed by a small group of billionaires including Peter Thiel and Stephen Pagliuca, co-owner of the Boston Celtics, organized a conference call to discuss COVID-19. Word spread fast. Cahill knew something was amiss when he couldn’t dial in because the call was over-subscribed with hundreds of listeners. “There was a sense of desperation among these masters of the universe” about the threat posed by the virus to their families and businesses, said Rob Copeland, who broke the story.16 Cahill decided to convene a 21st century Manhattan Project, the Justice League of scientists to vanquish the virus.

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated
by Gautam Baid
Published 1 Jun 2020

In his deeply profound book The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil writes: “Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the ‘intuitive linear’ view of history rather than the ‘historical exponential’ view.”8 In a nonlinear world, we all think linearly. Promoters. Managements. Investors. Analysts. But Munger looks for lollapalooza effects. George Soros seeks to profit from reflexivity. Nassim Taleb emphasizes the presence of fat tails. Peter Thiel talks about power laws. All of them are looking to arbitrage between the linear environment in which we evolved and the nonlinear environment that we have created. A business should be viewed as an unfolding movie, not as a still photograph. —Warren Buffett The financial community is usually slow to recognize a fundamentally changed condition, unless a big name or a colorful single event is publicly associated with that change.

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Kenneth Posner shared a pragmatic approach for being better prepared to cope with their adverse effects. Sun Tzu, Michael Porter, W. Chan Kim, Youngme Moon, and Bruce Greenwald educated me on competitive strategy. Peter Bernstein, Howard Marks, and Seth Klarman gave me the wisdom to appreciate the role of risk and risk management. Peter Thiel taught me the significance of monopolies, power laws, and highly innovative companies. Clayton Christensen made me aware of the constant threats posed by disruptive innovation. Peter Bevelin gave me some of the finest pieces of work on multidisciplinary thinking and inversion. Thornton Oglove, Howard Schilit, and Charles Mulford educated me on how to assess the quality of reported earnings.

Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future
by Jean M. Twenge
Published 25 Apr 2023

POPULATION IN 2020) 62.7% White 12.8% Black 16.6% Hispanic 6.7% Asian, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander 1.2% Native American Parents: Silent and Boomers Children: Millennials, Gen Z, Polars Grandchildren: Polars and post-Polars MOST POPULAR FIRST NAMES * First appearance on the list Boys Michael Jason* David Christopher* John James Robert Girls Lisa Jennifer* Karen Mary Kimberly* Susan Michelle* Amy* Heather* Angela* Jessica* Amanda* FAMOUS MEMBERS (BIRTH YEAR) Actors, Comedians, Filmmakers Ben Stiller (1965) Chris Rock (1965) Brooke Shields (1965) Viola Davis (1965) Adam Sandler (1966) John Cusack (1966) Jim Gaffigan (1966) Julia Roberts (1967) Jimmy Kimmel (1967) Will Ferrell (1967) Will Smith (1968) Molly Ringwald (1968) Anthony Michael Hall (1968) John Singleton (1968) Margaret Cho (1968) Jennifer Lopez (1969) Jennifer Aniston (1969) Matthew McConaughey (1969) Wes Anderson (1969) Ken Jeong (1969) Julie Bowen (1970) Matt Damon (1970) Tina Fey (1970) Melissa McCarthy (1970) Ethan Hawke (1970) Kevin Smith (1970) Sarah Silverman (1970) Winona Ryder (1971) Amy Poehler (1971) Gwyneth Paltrow (1972) Ava DuVernay (1972) Sofia Vergara (1972) Seth Meyers (1973) Kristen Wiig (1973) Dave Chappelle (1973) Wilson Cruz (1973) Jimmy Fallon (1974) Leonardo DiCaprio (1974) Drew Barrymore (1975) Angelina Jolie (1975) Zach Braff (1975) John Cena (1977) James Franco (1978) Katie Holmes (1978) Ashton Kutcher (1978) Andy Samberg (1978) Jason Momoa (1979) Jordan Peele (1979) Mindy Kaling (1979) Claire Danes (1979) Musicians and Artists Janet Jackson (1966) Kurt Cobain (1967) Liz Phair (1967) Jay-Z (1969) Gwen Stefani (1969) Queen Latifah (1970) Tupac Shakur (1971) Snoop Dogg (1971) Eminem (1972) Jewel (1974) Lauryn Hill (1975) Blake Shelton (1976) Kanye West (1977) John Legend (1978) Entrepreneurs and Businesspeople Michael Dell (1965) Peter Thiel (1967) Sheryl Sandberg (1969) Elon Musk (1971) Larry Page (1973) Sergey Brin (1973) Sean Parker (1979) Politicians, Judges, and Activists Brett Kavanaugh (1965) Kevin McCarthy (1965) Neil Gorsuch (1967) Gavin Newsom (1967) John Fetterman (1969) Paul Ryan (1970) Ted Cruz (1970) Ketanji Brown Jackson (1970) Hakeem Jeffries (1970) Marco Rubio (1971) Gretchen Whitmer (1971) Amy Coney Barrett (1972) Stacey Abrams (1973) Raphael Warnock (1973) Marjorie Taylor Greene (1974) Andrew Yang (1975) Ron DeSantis (1978) Josh Hawley (1979) Athletes and Sports Figures Mary Lou Retton (1968) Nancy Kerrigan (1969) Tonya Harding (1970) Andre Agassi (1970) Mia Hamm (1972) Shaquille O’Neal (1972) Dale Earnhardt Jr. (1974) Derek Jeter (1974) Tiger Woods (1975) Tom Brady (1977) Kobe Bryant (1978) Journalists, Authors, and People in the News Rodney King (1965) Matt Drudge (1966) Mika Brzezinski (1967) Kellyanne Conway (1967) Anderson Cooper (1967) Joe Rogan (1967) Ron Goldman (1968) Tucker Carlson (1969) Melania Trump (1970) Chuck Klosterman (1972) Monica Lewinsky (1973) Rachel Maddow (1973) David Muir (1973) Norah O’Donnell (1974) John Green (1977) Donald Trump Jr. (1977) Kourtney Kardashian (1979) On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Dog Trait: Analog and Digital Communicators YouTube was created because a Gen X’er wanted to see a nipple.

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Before long, Gen X’ers and others were finding new things people wanted to do online, often around two of their favorite things: pop culture and commerce. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar (b. 1967); the first item that sold on the site was a broken laser pointer. Tom Anderson (b. 1970) cofounded Myspace, the social networking site that was the most popular until Facebook took over—he’s still remembered by Gen X’ers and early Millennials as “Tom from Myspace.” PayPal was founded by Peter Thiel (b. 1967) and Elon Musk (b. 1971). Twitter was founded by Jack Dorsey (b. 1976), and Uber by Travis Kalanick (b. 1976) and Garrett Camp (b. 1978). Sean Parker (b. 1979) cofounded Napster, the file-sharing music site later shut down over copyright issues, and served as the first president of Facebook.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms
by Jeffrey Bussgang
Published 31 Mar 2010

The whole entrepreneurial thing is that you kind of jump off a cliff and assemble your airplane on the way down. And financing, by the way, is a thermal draft, right? You’re a little further away, but the ground’s still coming at you if you can’t build an airplane.” While Reid struggled to construct the Socialnet airplane, he kept talking with a close friend, Peter Thiel, who invited Reid to join him in a new venture called PayPal. PayPal’s mission was to leverage the Internet as a mechanism to transfer money between consumers. It represented the potential for electronic commerce at its best—helping facilitate payments in a cheaper, more convenient manner. In December 1998, Reid joined the board.

Bitcoin: The Future of Money?
by Dominic Frisby
Published 1 Nov 2014

Escrow and other forms of payment protection can be built on Bitcoin – but then you’re back to third parties with all the associated costs and need for trust. Such forms of protection are already being developed. Whether you choose them or not is up to you. Meanwhile, as I write, MtGox is in legal proceedings. 4 Nerds, Squats and Millionaires I do think Bitcoin…has the potential to do something like change the world. Peter Thiel, Co-Founder of PayPal It is January 2014. ‘Informal Bitcoin get-together,’ says the link I’ve been texted. ‘Saturday 1pm to 4pm. Meet under the blue awning at St James Square in Spitalfields.’ I arrive about 1.45. There is no blue awning. But a group of 70 people are milling under a white one.

The Politics of Pain
by Fintan O'Toole
Published 2 Oct 2019

The Sovereign Individual has an appendix offering services – an investment vehicle in Bermuda, membership of an offshore trust, advice on how to ‘secure your own tax-free zone’ and membership of The Sovereign Society, composed of ‘would-be Sovereign Individuals… who have clubbed together to help one another achieve independence’.32 (The desire for self-governing enclaves for the ultra-rich is an active project for the Trump-supporting tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who wants to create a marine republic for the elite off the coast of California.) Crucial in this dystopian/utopian vision is the idea of exit. Rees-Mogg senior wrote that even in the early stages of this new age many wealthy citizens of Western democracies were already, like people in East Berlin in 1989, planning their exodus: ‘abandoning the country of their birth is not [an] unthinkable decision’.33 The nation state, for these new gods, is a ‘predatory institution’ from which ‘the individual will want to escape’.34 Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new post-national elite, a ‘domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age’.

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever
by Alex Kantrowitz
Published 6 Apr 2020

“One thing Mark’s talked about, and that we’ve talked about as a leadership team, is that some of the most valuable people in your organization are disagreeable givers,” she said. “We really try to protect those people. I’ve seen Mark surround himself with disagreeable givers. They’re not going to tell you just what you want to hear. They’re going to tell you what they really think.” This explains why Zuckerberg has kept Peter Thiel, the controversial venture capitalist, on his board. “A lot of people would not want Peter on their board because he is such a contrarian, and Mark did,” said Don Graham, who sat on the board with Thiel for years. “Peter became a director because he was a very early investor. But Mark wanted him to stay because Peter was such a loud voice putting forward ideas that Mark disagreed with.”

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food
by Chase Purdy
Published 15 Jun 2020

The firm was founded and is still run by Vinod Khosla, the billionaire cofounder of Sun Microsystems and former partner at storied venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. Tetrick would later raise more money from Khosla, making it the start-up’s largest investor and major influence over how the company would be run. He also persuaded big names including PayPal and Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel and Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff to invest. But Tetrick was also garnering interest from abroad. In Hong Kong, tycoons Li Ka-shing and Solina Chau were sprinkling promising upstarts with their considerable capital. The pair spent years overseeing a massive portfolio of industries, drawing money from transportation, real estate, financial services, retail, and energy and utilities businesses.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free
by Cody Wilson
Published 10 Oct 2016

“The cities fine your customers tens of thousands of dollars if you’re Airbnb; the attorneys general and the unions come after the ridesharing apps. There are undercover cops literally pulling people from Ubers. You have to move to many markets quickly, make it too hard to uproot you everywhere at once.” I met a few more people while I was there. I heard about a man collecting the notes of Peter Thiel to release as a book, about the Massive Online Open Course insurgents trying to drive a wedge between dot gov and dot edu, about Patri Freidman and those charting the high seas for zones of libertarian secession. What of these seafarers? These sojourners writing our new constitutions in the coffee shops of Palo Alto?

Leadership by Algorithm: Who Leads and Who Follows in the AI Era?
by David de Cremer
Published 25 May 2020

The skill of being tech savvy is required because it represents a means of becoming more effective in augmenting the performance of the organization, but always from a human perspective. As such, the education of our leaders should be based on an understanding of new technology, but elevated by the skill of critical thinking and enhanced with reflection on what this technology means for our human identity. Other voices utter the same idea. For example, Peter Thiel (an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist) announced that “People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, and way too little thinking about AI.” Equally, the late Stephen Hawking (Cambridge University professor), warned in The Independent that success in our search for AI domination, while it would be “the biggest event in human history,” might very well “also be the last, unless we learn to avoid the risks.”

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 14 Jun 2017

He co-founded Bitcoin magazine in September 2011, and after two and a half years looking at what the existing blockchain technology and applications had to offer, wrote the Ethereum white paper in November 2013. He now leads Ethereum’s research team, working on future versions of the Ethereum protocol. In 2014, Vitalik was a recipient of the two-year Thiel Fellowship, tech billionaire Peter Thiel’s project that awards $100,000 to 20 promising innovators under 20 so they can pursue their inventions in lieu of a post-secondary institution. * * * In the last five years, what new belief, behavior, or habit has most improved your life? The largest one is probably understanding how to interpret things that other people are saying in situations where their goals do not fully align with yours.

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The rules they’ve crafted for themselves allow the bending of reality to such an extent that it may seem that way, but they’ve learned how to do this, and so can you. These “rules” are often uncommon habits and bigger questions. In a surprising number of cases, the power is in the absurd. The more absurd, the more “impossible” the question, the more profound the answers. Take, for instance, a question that serial billionaire Peter Thiel likes to ask himself and others: “If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?” For purposes of illustration here, I might reword that to: “What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head?”

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance
by Eswar S. Prasad
Published 27 Sep 2021

The venture capitalist knows that a majority of such projects are likely to fail, but all it takes is a handful of dazzling successes in one’s portfolio to make the overall return better than investing in the broader stock market. Venture capitalists have financed both breakout successes and flameouts. In 2004, venture capitalist Peter Thiel provided seed funding of $500,000 for Facebook in exchange for a 10 percent ownership stake in the fledgling company. This meant that the firm was valued at about $5 million. In 2005, the venture capital firm Accel made an investment of $13 million for about an 11 percent ownership stake, implying that the firm was by then being valued at about $120 million.

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In the United States, hedge funds are now required to register as investment advisors with the SEC if their assets exceed $100 million. If their assets exceed $150 million, they are required to report their holdings and a variety of other details about their financial operations. Seed Capital for Innovators In 2006, Peter Thiel and other venture capitalists made further investments, and by that time Facebook was valued at about $500 million. See Evelyn M. Rusli and Peter Eavis, “Facebook Raises $16 Billion in I.P.O.,” New York Times, May 17, 2012, https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/facebook-raises-16-billion-in-i-p-o/.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

On the New York Times reporting on Clearview AI, see “The Secretive Company That Might End Privacy as We Know It,” by Kashmir Hill, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html, including this assessment, “The system—whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites—goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants.” For more on the thinking behind Clearview and Peter Thiel’s early involvement, see Chafkin (2021, 296–297, inter alia). “[L]aws have to…” are the words of David Scalzo, an investor in Clearview AI; see Hill (2020). Radio Days. Background on Father Coughlin can be found in Brinkley (1983). The effects of Coughlin’s radio speeches are explored in Wang (2021).

…

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Centennial Spotlight. 2021. The Complete Guide to the Medieval Times. Miami: Centennial Media. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 2019. “1918 Pandemic (H1N1 Virus).” www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1918-pandemic-h1n1.html. Chafkin, Max. 2021. The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power. New York: Penguin Press. Chan, Wilfred. 2021. “A First Look at Our New Magazine.” New_Public, September 12. https://newpublic.substack.com/p/-a-first-look-at-our-new-magazine?s=r. Chandler, David G. 1966. The Campaigns of Napoleon. New York: Scribner. Chase, Brad. 2010.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society
by David Wolman
Published 14 Feb 2012

“Do you have any idea how hard it is to develop a private currency based on a commodity with an ever-changing price?” His goal seemed straightforward enough: make it inflation-proof and rescue the nation from self-destruction. “This is an important step to give people power to control manipulations of currencies,” he says. That public-spirited line is reminiscent of what PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is said to have told his employees in the early days of the company, when they were trailblazing a new online system for sending and receiving money. By having one’s money in an online account, Thiel claimed, people would be able to bounce between currencies. “It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means [a.k.a. devaluation or stealth taxes] 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.”15 Yet few people would consider Thiel to be some kind of clown.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
by J. D. Vance
Published 27 Jun 2016

I’ve been fortunate, too, to have mentors and friends of incredible ability, each of whom ensured that I had access to opportunities I simply didn’t deserve. They include: Ron Selby, Mike Stratton, Shannon Arledge, Shawn Haney, Brad Nelson, David Frum, Matt Johnson, Judge David Bunning, Reihan Salam, Ajay Royan, Fred Moll, and Peter Thiel. Many of these folks read versions of the manuscript and provided critical feedback. I owe an incredible amount to my family, especially those who opened their hearts and shared memories, no matter how difficult or painful. My sister Lindsay Ratliff and Aunt Wee (Lori Meibers) deserve special thanks, both for helping me write this book and for supporting me throughout my life.

Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success
by Shane Snow
Published 8 Sep 2014

Ritchie King, “The Rise of the Machines,” Popular Science, http://www.popsci.com/content/computing (accessed February 15, 2014). 5 Most large businesses stop growing: Eighty-seven percent of large businesses stop growing, according to researchers Matthew S. Olson and Derek van Bever, Stall Points: Most Companies Stop Growing—Yours Doesn’t Have To (Yale University Press, 2009). 5 venture capitalists pay bright people: Peter Thiel, an early Facebook investor, founded the Thiel Foundation, which offers whiz kids investment money to build companies instead of going to college. Learn more at Thiel Fellowship, “About the Fellowship,” http://www.thielfellowship.org/become-a-fellow/about-the-program/ (accessed February 15, 2014). 7 “If any person or persons”: James Franklin, New-England Courant, December 3, 1772, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-01-02-0021.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
by Ben Horowitz
Published 4 Mar 2014

Bell curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful. There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.” —PETER THIEL When I was attempting to sell the cloud computing services part of the Loudcloud business, I met with Bill Campbell to update him on where I was with the deal. The deal was critical, because without it, the company would almost certainly go bankrupt. After I carefully briefed him on where we were with both interested parties, IBM and EDS, Bill paused for a moment.

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better
by Andrew Palmer
Published 13 Apr 2015

As much as he might rationally accept that this firm and others like it were adding value to the capital markets, he did not feel an emotional connection to what he was doing. Gu is the kind of person who does not lack for options. He was one of the first batch of Thiel fellows, twenty people under twenty who were each given one hundred thousand dollars to skip college for two years and pursue their ambitions in a program funded by Peter Thiel, a guru of technology investing whose résumé includes founding PayPal and backing Facebook. So Gu headed to Silicon Valley, where he worked for six months developing a variety of random Web applications. As he turned business ideas over in his head, he was drawn to a very basic financial problem for young people.

Give People Money
by Annie Lowrey
Published 10 Jul 2018

Fruit-picking robots, cancer-screening apps, drones, digital cameras, and driverless cars cannot compete with the transformative power of threshing machines, commercial airliners, antibiotics, refrigerators, and the birth control pill in terms of economic importance. “You can look around you in New York City and the subways are 100-plus years old. You can look around you on an airplane, and it’s little different from 40 years ago—maybe it’s a bit slower because the airport security is low-tech and not working terribly well,” Peter Thiel, a billionaire tech investor and adviser to President Trump, recently mused to Vox. “The screens are everywhere, though. Maybe they’re distracting us from our surroundings.” (He more famously said, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”) It could also be that our sluggish rate of economic growth has spurred our sluggish rate of innovation.

Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms
by Hannah Fry
Published 17 Sep 2018

If that’s what you can infer from people’s shopping habits in the physical world, just imagine what you might be able to infer if you had access to more data. Imagine how much you could learn about someone if you had a record of everything they did online. The Wild West Palantir Technologies is one of the most successful Silicon Valley start-ups of all time. It was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel (of PayPal fame), and at the last count was estimated to be worth a staggering $20 billion.8 That’s about the same market value as Twitter, although chances are you’ve never heard of it. And yet – trust me when I tell you – Palantir has most certainly heard of you. Palantir is just one example of a new breed of companies known as data brokers, who buy and collect people’s personal information and then resell it or share it for profit.

How Democracy Ends
by David Runciman
Published 9 May 2018

‘The internet of things,’ he writes, ‘will probably strengthen social cohesion to such a degree that when regular government structures break down or weaken, they can be repaired or substituted. In other words, people will continue using the internet of things to provide governance even when government is absent.’ 86 Libertarian, revolutionary or technocratic, these visions of the future have some features in common. One is their impatience to get there. Peter Thiel, the poster boy for Silicon Valley libertarianism, supported Trump for president because he wanted to shake things up. Thiel believes that all disruption is welcome – regardless of the consequences – because it brings the future just that little bit closer. Susan Sarandon, who became a spokesperson for Hollywood-style socialism, was of a similar view in 2016.

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global
by Rebecca Fannin
Published 2 Sep 2019

IDG Capital brought the first foreign capital into China in 1992 and counts huge returns from early investments in Tencent, Baidu, and Xiaomi. A few cutting-edge Bay Area firms never mustered the nerve or the urge to invest in China but have kept a close watch. Andreessen Horowitz partner and widely followed digital China expert Connie Chan tracks China’s progress and seeks opportunities for the firm’s US startups. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund appointed Jeff Lonsdale in 2018 as managing director–Asia, and he’s traveling often to Asia from Silicon Valley to see what’s going on and scout research opportunities for investment. Khosla Ventures, founded by Indian-born billionaire Vinod Khosla, seeks to help US portfolio companies get traction in China but hasn’t invested directly.

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking
by Matthew Syed
Published 9 Sep 2019

III Take a look at the following list of names: Estée Lauder, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Walt Disney and Sergey Brin. Can you see what they have in common? On the surface, they look like a list of famous entrepreneurs, people who have made an impact on American society. But dig a little deeper and you will note that they share a pattern with dozens of others, including Jerry Yang, Arianna Huffington and Peter Thiel, each of whom have helped to shape the modern economy of the United States. The link between these people? They are all immigrants, or the children of immigrants. A study published in December 2017 revealed that 43 per cent of companies in the Fortune 500 were founded or co-founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants, rising to 57 per cent in the top thirty-five companies.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

A Facebook memorial, a preserved cancer blog, a digital estate plan, or an inherited smart home: such items are hardly the same as uploading one’s consciousness, but they do serve as conduits between the living and the dead. Data provide a platform for sacred communion. For the majority of people who cannot afford top-shelf life extension treatments and elixirs—such as Peter Thiel’s reported interest in parabiosis, in this case consuming the blood of the young to remain youthful himself—digital immortality might be the only available route to living forever.77 There is a chasm between people who can afford actual life extension technologies (in the United States, this includes things like basic healthcare) and those who can train free chatbots to act in their stead.

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
by Eric Ries
Published 13 Sep 2011

Counteracting these forces were the hard-won lessons David had learned through each milestone. Votizen accelerated its MVP process because it was learning critical things about its customers, market, and strategy. Today, two years after its inception, Votizen is doing well. They recently raised $1.5 million from Facebook’s initial investor Peter Thiel, one of the very few consumer Internet investments he has made in recent years. Votizen’s system now can process voter identity in real time for forty-seven states representing 94 percent of the U.S. population and has delivered tens of thousands of messages to Congress. The Startup Visa campaign used Votizen’s tools to introduce the Startup Visa Act (S.565), which is the first legislation introduced into the Senate solely as a result of social lobbying.

Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency
by Joshua Green
Published 17 Jul 2017

That way conservatives reluctant to support Trump could still donate in good conscience. (The give-to-stop-Clinton gambit didn’t work. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, the only substantial donations after the Super PAC shifted its focus to defeating “Crooked Hillary” came from Robert Mercer [$2 million] and Peter Thiel [$1 million].) After Cruz dropped out in May, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner had approached Mercer to ask if she would organize an effort to support Trump. She agreed. But the awkward truth was that most wealthy conservatives didn’t support Trump. The Clinton angle was a move born of desperation, and one that risked skirting federal election law.

The New Geography of Jobs
by Enrico Moretti
Published 21 May 2012

If he had finished college first, Microsoft might not have become the dominant force it later became, and Gates himself would have been several billions poorer today. If Mark Zuckerberg had stayed in college, his nemeses, the Winklevoss twins, might have developed a social networking site before him. In 2010 the venture capitalist Peter Thiel launched a controversial charity that offers $100,000 scholarships to twenty-year-olds with exceptionally promising business ideas to enable them to drop out of college. But these are all exceptions to the rule. For the average individual, education pays, and today it pays more than ever. [back] *** 14 A third factor is the higher cost of living faced by college graduates, which we considered earlier.

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail
by Robert Bruce Shaw , James Foster and Brilliance Audio
Published 14 Oct 2017

In a recent interview, the firm’s CEO joked that his vision was to make the world less productive 34Patagonia company webpage, www.patagonia.com/us/patagonia.go?assetid=2047. 35See Alibaba Group company webpage: www.alibabagroup.com/en/about/overview 36Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004). Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist, appears to suggest the reverse in saying that successful start-up firms are all different in offering something unique while unsuccessful start-ups are all alike in offering similar products and services. His focus, however, is on a firm’s competitive offering and not how it operates in regard to its internal practices and culture (which is my focus). 37This is not to suggest that high-performing teams are monolithic—there are real differences but they also share a common set of core attributes (such as embracing a few carefully selected team norms regarding member behavior).

Bureaucracy
by David Graeber
Published 3 Feb 2015

His wife’s sister, who seems to have been the ringleader in the magical society, eventually left him for L. Ron Hubbard; on leaving NASA, Parsons went on to apply his magic to creating pyrotechnic effects for Hollywood until he finally blew himself up in 1962. 113. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). 114. I note that Peter Thiel, who agreed with much of the original argument of this essay, has recently come out as an antimarket promonopoly capitalist for precisely the reason that he feels this is the best way to further rapid technological change. 115. For as long as I can remember, at least since I was in my twenties, I’ve heard at least one person every year or so tell me that a drug that will stop the aging process is approximately three years away. 3.

Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation
by Tyler Cowen
Published 11 Sep 2013

Acknowledgments For useful discussions and comments I wish to thank Nelson Hernandez, Anson Williams, Kenneth Regan, Jason Fichtner, Erik Brynolfsson, Andrew McGee, Don Peck, Derek Thompson, Michelle Dawson, Peter Snow, Veronique de Rugy, Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Alex Tabarrok, Natasha Cowen, Garry Kasparov, Vasik Rajlich, Stephen Morrow, David Brooks, Peter Thiel, Michael Mandel, and Larry Kaufman, with apologies to anyone I may have left out. Index The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of this book. To find the corresponding locations in the text of this digital version, please use the “search” function on your e-reader.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

It particularly suits the interests of those who have become extraordinarily wealthy through the labor-saving, profit-concentrating effects of automated systems and the computers that control them. It provides our new plutocrats with a heroic narrative in which they play starring roles: recent job losses may be unfortunate, but they’re a necessary evil on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation by the computerized slaves that our benevolent enterprises are creating. Peter Thiel, a successful entrepreneur and investor who has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent thinkers, grants that “a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs.” But, he hastens to add, “it would have the benefit of freeing people up to do many other things.”34 Being freed up sounds a lot more pleasant than being fired.

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution
by Fred Vogelstein
Published 12 Nov 2013

Rabb had designed it to work with all the e-book and e-mag formats in existence. So as Amazon and Apple tried to lock authors into their proprietary formats—Amazon with its Kindle e-books, Apple with iBooks—Atavist became an attractive intermediary. Eric Schmidt of Google and the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel, and Sean Parker were part of an outside-investor group in mid-2012. By the end of 2012 the media moguls Barry Diller and Scott Rudin had teamed up to create their own e-books start-up called Brightline. Atavist, with its software, was to be their exclusive online publisher. The iPad’s impacts weren’t just limited to media.

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think
by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier
Published 5 Mar 2013

Still, the archetypes are helpful as a way to appreciate the roles that different firms play. Today’s pioneers of big data often come from disparate backgrounds and cross-apply their data skills in a wide variety of areas. A new generation of angel investors and entrepreneurs is emerging, notably from among ex-Googlers and the so-called PayPal Mafia (the firm’s former leaders like Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, and Max Levchin). They, along with a handful of academic computer scientists, are some of the biggest backers of today’s data-infused startups. The creative vision of individuals and firms in the big data food-chain helps us reassess the worth of companies. For instance, Salesforce.com may not simply be a useful platform for firms to host their corporate applications: it is also well placed to unleash value from the data that flows atop its infrastructure.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work
by Vishen Lakhiani
Published 14 Sep 2020

I was impressed by the big bold hearts of the people attending. But I noticed one striking theme. The visions written on the notes were what I would call “fluffy.” Their intent was amazing, but none of them were written in a way where the language was actionable. People who write inactionable visions are what author and entrepreneur Peter Thiel calls “Indefinite Optimists.” He popularized the label in his brilliant book Zero to One. An Indefinite Optimist trusts that the world will get better, but they have no idea how that will happen. They simply keep their fingers crossed. They wait for someone else to step up and do something. He also defined another term: “Definite Optimist.”

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?
by Thomas Frank
Published 15 Mar 2016

For a longer list of pundits making similar arguments, see my essay in Salon, “It’s Not Just Fox News,” January 11, 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/01/11/its_not_just_fox_news_how_liberal_apologists_torpedoed_change_helped_make_the_democrats_safe_for_wall_street. 24. Maron, “WTF,” Episode 613, June 22, 2015. http://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episodes/episode_613_-_president_barack_obama. 25. Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who founded PayPal, published a famous essay called “Competition Is for Losers” (Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2014). “Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites,” he wrote. “Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits get competed away.”

Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life
by Eric Klinenberg
Published 10 Sep 2018

In 2017, several leading international design firms proposed building floating work and residential space in the bay water that runs along Silicon Valley. That same year, the New York Times reported on the rise of “seasteading” in areas threatened by rising sea levels—“Floating Cities, No Longer Science Fiction, Begin to Take Shape,” teased one headline—and high-profile investors including PayPal founder Peter Thiel are betting on the concept. Leaders in the international development field may not yet appreciate the importance of these climate-driven programs, but Bangladeshi leaders credit grassroots education projects like floating schools with dramatically reducing mortality during extreme weather crises.

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism
by Olivia Fox Cabane
Published 1 Mar 2012

Many of these great business minds were so kind as to contribute insights: Chris Ashenden, Gilles August, Hayes Barnard, Sunny Bates, Steve Bell, Charles Best, Michael Feuer, Tim Flynn, Scott Freidheim, Matt Furman, Carl Guardino, Catherine Dumait Harper, Ira Jackson, Ken Jacobs, Randy Komisar, Jim Larranaga, Jack Leslie, Maurice Levy, Dan’l Lewin, Angel Martinez, Jeff Mirich, Farhad Mohit, Peter Moore, Elon Musk, Tom Schiro, Nina Simosko, Kevin Surace, Peter Thiel, Duncan Wardle, Bill Whitmore, and Bill Wohl. With great skill, dedication, patience, kindness, and generosity, Courtney Young led Penguin’s impressive team effort. Adrienne Schultz worked wonders, making the writing clearer and more concise, and greatly improving the flow. Rebecca Gradinger at Fletcher & Company took a chance on a first-time author.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone
Published 3 Jun 2019

The United States has the Future of Life Institute at MIT, founded by Max Tegmark and Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn, with a board of advisors including the ubiquitous Elon Musk (who donated $10 million). Silicon Valley has two such think tanks: the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, founded by computer scientist Eliezer Yudkowsky and tech entrepreneurs Brian and Sabine Atkins; and the OpenAI Foundation, founded by Musk, Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and others. If this zeitgeist has a single axiom, it is that existential risks are different. Bostrom wrote: We cannot necessarily rely on the institutions, moral norms, social attitudes or national security policies that developed from our experience with managing other sorts of risks. Existential risks are a different kind of beast.

Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World
by Joseph Menn
Published 3 Jun 2019

Over the course of 2017, as evidence emerged of the depth and sophistication of the efforts to promote division and Trump on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, a wider swath of the American public turned against tech companies. Inside the Silicon Valley giants, divisions crystallized. A minority were unapologetic Trump supporters, like Palantir cofounder and Facebook board member Peter Thiel, or took his ascendancy as an opportunity to speak out against what they saw as discrimination against straight white men, like a Google engineer who claimed he was fired for writing about internal bias. But many more felt caught up in a moral crisis unlike any the Valley had ever faced. Some wanted to use the money that they had earned, their networks, and some of their tech skills to set things right.

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero
by Tyler Cowen
Published 8 Apr 2019

Still, IPOs are at the very least an option for companies to make their founders more liquid, even if the IPO never happens or happens only late in the life of the company—either way, the founders know they have an option to become more liquid, should they need to. In any case, both IPOs and venture capital reflect how American capital markets make it much easier to move, in the words of Peter Thiel, from zero to one. Of course, shutting down the losers is the flip side of all this new business growth. These days there is less capital for older technologies and much more capital for nursing homes, biotech, start-ups, restaurants, luxury tourism, and other growing endeavors. Venture capital is part of a broader phenomenon whereby bank lending, the bond market, and all the other parts of the American capitalistic system decide which investors will receive additional funds and which will not.

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil
by Kenneth Cukier , Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Francis de Véricourt
Published 10 May 2021

Google’s CFO, Ruth Porat, is British; Elon Musk, of Tesla and SpaceX fame, is South African; aerospace entrepreneur turned astronaut Anousheh Ansari is Iranian. Media czar Rupert Murdoch is from Australia. Intel cofounder Andy Grove was born in Hungary, and NVIDIA cofounder Jen-Hsun Huang in Taiwan. Outspoken venture capitalist Peter Thiel was born in Germany, as was actor Bruce Willis. Steve Jobs’s father immigrated from Syria. Only Barack Obama is a naturally born American. They all broke a mold and became models for others to follow. And by doing so enhanced America’s frame pluralism and ensured the country’s ability to tap into a rich and varied repertoire of mental models.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

Their goal was to forge a future based on the shared experience of communitas writ large: a permanent Burning Man community, a place where experiments with the four forces could be conducted year round. As Burning Man cofounder Will Roger recently wrote: “I would argue that the proposal is part of a large strain of utopian separatism that can be found in the modern-tech boom: Peter Thiel’s Sea-steading efforts or Tony Hsieh’s attempt to build a start-up city in Las Vegas. But a Burning Man permanent community would arguably be the most interesting and achievable manifestation of it.”14 In the summer of 2016, they achieved just that, closing on the purchase of Fly Ranch, a parcel of nearly four thousand acres a few miles north of the festival site, filled with geysers, hot springs, and wetlands.

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy
by Leigh Gallagher
Published 14 Feb 2017

A common fixation among Silicon Valley start-ups, culture has been an obsessive focus of all three founders ever since they exited the Y Combinator program. But it didn’t truly hit home for Chesky until 2012, after the company closed its Series-C round of funding, a $200 million round that was led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The Airbnb founders invited Thiel to the office, and Chesky asked him for advice. Thiel said simply, “Don’t fuck up the culture.” He said that Airbnb’s culture was one of the reasons he had invested, but he said it was basically inevitable that after a company got to a certain size, it would “fuck it up.”

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

And if you think it’s because outside consultants are far more effective at telling a college’s story, just look at a few college videos and brochures—which are generally so “corporate” in nature that they turn off the high school students they target. While we expect pressure on traditional colleges to increase gradually, there is a scenario where things go south for them quickly. Peter Thiel argues that a diploma from a second-class university has become a “dunce hat in disguise,” awarded to graduates foolish enough to spend $100,000 to $250,000 to brand themselves permanently as mediocre.16 Thiel’s view is far from today’s mainstream, but attitudes can shift suddenly in a fickle society.

The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity
by Lynda Gratton and Andrew Scott
Published 1 Jun 2016

Indeed those that remain in employment could have more income because they are more productive and this income is then spent on goods and services in other industries. Another boost for new jobs will come as the result of technological innovation in the development of new products and services. Over the next decades there will be a host of new products that are as yet unimagined but will be seen as indispensable and will prove economically valuable. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, critically commented that we were promised flying cars and all we got was 140 characters. However that is one of the critical features of technology. No one could have foreseen how economically valuable Twitter would prove to be or how much time people would spend on it. This is clearly an important debate with serious consequences for the coming decades.

The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere
by Kevin Carey
Published 3 Mar 2015

According to a manifesto posted on its web site, UnCollege “will show you how to gain the passion, hustle, and contrarianism requisite for success—all without setting foot inside a classroom.” Stephens is one of the most well-known “Thiel Fellows,” a program named for the billionaire Silicon Valley libertarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who gave a small group of smart young men and women each a “a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 to skip college” and do something useful instead, like start a technology company. Within a year, both Stephens and Bishay would be well on their way to building new higher-education enterprises existing completely outside of the established system.

Fully Grown: Why a Stagnant Economy Is a Sign of Success
by Dietrich Vollrath
Published 6 Jan 2020

Like the increase in market power, they tend to be important for how the economic pie is divided up but have no effect on how big the pie is. One common worry is that the growth slowdown reflects a failure of ingenuity or innovation. We hear this in complaints that the things we do invent are frivolous or trivial, as in PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s famous quotation “We wanted flying cars, and all we got was 140 characters,” or in some of Robert Gordon’s analysis in his recent book. At the same time, techno-optimists say we are in the middle of an unprecedented explosion in technological creativity, often associated with the massive increase in computing power available to firms and researchers, and the possibilities of artificial intelligence and robotics.

No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy
by Linsey McGoey
Published 14 Apr 2015

While TED Heads often proclaim that ‘market’-oriented strategies and opportunities are necessary for filling the gap left by a receding state – as if they have little control over the state’s dwindling coffers – in reality, diminished spending on welfare has been carefully orchestrated by the same individuals bemoaning the state’s purported ineffectiveness. A good example is Eric Schmidt of Google, who, as Morozov points out, lambasts Washington as ‘an incumbent protection machine [where] laws are written by lobbyists’ at the same time as Google dramatically expands its own lobbying operations in Washington, DC.14 Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, is another good illustration of the double-mindedness rife in the TED world, loudly insisting that government intervention should be minimized while spending vast sums formulating legislation to his advantage. Thiel’s philanthropic gambits have gained a degree of notoriety thanks in part to some of his more imaginative claims – like his professed disbelief in the ‘ideology’ of human mortality.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat
Published 22 Oct 2018

Uber carried such a reputational debt that it was an easy mark for an outraged consumer base with an appetite for political action and a willingness to believe bad things about Uber. Deleting an app is a low-barrier action. Only a sliver of the same pointed protest was directed at Lyft, Uber’s main competitor, even though its primary investor, Peter Thiel, was the number one technology-industry booster for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump. Kalanick, under pressure created by consumer upheaval, left the advisory council. In a climate of political discontent, Uber is often treated as a scapegoat for larger frustrations on the political scene.

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
by Jeff Goodell
Published 23 Oct 2017

In Mexico, a man named Richart Sowa has made a floating island out of 250,000 used plastic bottles stuffed into recycled fruit sacks. He planted mangroves and palm trees on it, built a two-story house out of wood and fabric, and calls his plastic bottle island an eco-paradise. Then there’s the Seasteading Institute, which imagines an entire city at sea, far from the hands of government. The institute was cofounded by Peter Thiel, the eccentric billionaire who sits on the board of Facebook and campaigned for Donald Trump during the 2016 election. For Thiel, offshore cities are a kind of libertarian dream, a new city-state where the old rules don’t apply. At the moment, the institute is mostly just a website and an idea—nothing has been built yet.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

Citizens are beginning to understand that other governments are doing some things much better. Ideas are crossing borders—and they are getting there partly thanks to the other great force that reshaped the private sector and is beginning finally to have an impact on the public sector: technology. FIXTHESTATE.COM Asked to talk about how technology affects productivity, Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist who backed Facebook, draws a simple graph on his whiteboard: input on the y-axis, output on the x-axis. He then dabs on two blobs. The private sector goes in the bottom right: You put in relatively little and get out a lot. Government goes in the top left: a lot of input and very little output.

Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption
by Ben Mezrich
Published 20 May 2019

Ravikant, a brilliant thinker with degrees in economics and computer science from Dartmouth, who had invested in numerous tech successes over the years. The twins had met Ravikant a few months earlier at a tech dinner in New York hosted by Joe Lonsdale, a prodigy in his own right. Having interned at PayPal while still a student at Stanford, he’d gone on to work at Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital, and later had cofounded Palantir Technologies with Thiel and Alex Karp. Both Lonsdale and Thiel were chess geniuses known to battle it out with each other for hours on end. Thiel himself was, of course, a Valley legend, having founded PayPal, and was considered the “don” of the “PayPal Mafia”—a group of PayPal alums who’d gone on to start a slew of world-changing companies.

Lying for Money: How Fraud Makes the World Go Round
by Daniel Davies
Published 14 Jul 2018

ALSO FROM PROFILE BOOKS Red Card: FIFA and the Fall of the Most Powerful Men in Sports Ken Bensinger The full story behind the FIFA’s headline-grabbing corruption scandal, soon to be a major film. ISBN 978 1 78125 671 8 eISBN 978 1 78283 266 9 Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil Alex Cuadros An investigative journalist uncovers the murky, scandalous world of Brazil’s billionaires. ISBN 978 1 78125 387 8 eISBN 978 1 78283 125 9 Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue Ryan Holiday A unique account from behind the scenes of the case that rocked the media world – and the billionaire mastermind behind it. ISBN 978 1 78816 083 4 eISBN 978 1 78283 463 2

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement
by Rich Karlgaard
Published 15 Apr 2019

One well-known contrarian thinker argues that today’s obsession with SAT scores and the wealth-generating mojo of algorithmic genius has left the U.S. economy in a decades-long state of underperformance and a society desperate for answers. Lest you think this contrarian thinker is hostile to Silicon Valley and its wunderkinds getting obscenely rich, he’s actually one of them. Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and board member of Facebook (and himself a high school chess prodigy, Stanford law school graduate, and 800 math SAT scorer), claims there is a mismatch between what is good for overall economic prosperity and what gets easily funded by investors. In Thiel’s mind, the U.S. economy has too much investment capital flowing into “bits” companies.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

It’s true that logic is usually the best way to succeed in an argument, but if you want to succeed in life it is not necessarily all that useful; entrepreneurs are disproportionately valuable precisely because they are not confined to doing only those things that make sense to a committee. Interestingly, the likes of Steve Jobs, James Dyson, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel often seem certifiably bonkers; Henry Ford famously despised accountants – the Ford Motor Company was never audited while he had control of it. When you demand logic, you pay a hidden price: you destroy magic. And the modern world, oversupplied as it is with economists, technocrats, managers, analysts, spreadsheet-tweakers and algorithm designers, is becoming a more and more difficult place to practise magic – or even to experiment with it.

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs
by Tim Draper
Published 18 Dec 2017

I have not kept pace, but I am at over 300, and while I am nowhere near the scholar I would like to be, I have read enough good books to make the following recommendations to you as you drive toward becoming a Startup Hero. Here is my Startup Hero reading list: Dune by Frank Herbert The Startup Game by William Draper Bionomics by Michael Rothschild Foundation by Isaac Asimov How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw Zero to One by Peter Thiel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku Moneyball by Michael Lewis The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan The Epiphany by Cree Edwards …and this book you are reading right now! Read How to be The Startup Hero by Tim Draper. Notice there are not a lot of business books listed.

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 26 Mar 2013

Levchin’s freeware had solved an incredibly complex problem. Implementing cryptographic algorithms on a PalmPilot, with its hamster-league 16 MHz processor, was kind of like restocking a large warehouse using men on unicycles—conceptually possible, certainly, but difficult to do elegantly (much less quickly). Levchin and his cofounder, Peter Thiel, brainstormed about ways to turn Levchin’s innovations into a commercial product, and eventually they hit upon the idea of developing software that allowed people to store money on their PalmPilots and exchange it wirelessly. Financial transactions clearly needed the kind of security that Levchin’s code provided.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World
by Gaia Vince
Published 22 Aug 2022

So far, there are just three buildings, but it plans to expand to 10,000 residents by 2025, who will need only to sign a social contract and pay a considerable membership fee, to be a part of the libertarian dream.20 The concept shares elements with the Seasteading movement, a libertarian group of mega-rich preppers intent on building independent floating cities on the high seas. The Seasteading Institute was founded in San Francisco in 2008 by anarcho-capitalist (and Google software engineer) Patri Friedman, with funding from PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, to ‘establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems’. Some of the ideas they plan to use include harvesting calcium carbonate from seawater to create 3D-printed ‘artificial coral’ cities of upside-down skyscrapers – ‘seascrapers’ – powered by oceanic geothermal energy.

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World
by David Sax
Published 15 Jan 2022

It is the walk from the car to the doors of the sanctuary, the coffee and conversation after, the sound and smell and sight of everything that occurs in that moment in time, which makes it distinct and sacred from the other times and spaces of the week. “It’s about every human moment we have with each other,” Kim said, “in every moment we believe is meaningful and true about human life.” Sure, there are digital prophets like Peter Thiel and Ray Kurzweil, who preach a future where we upload our souls to the cloud and transcend our earthly bodies to rule as gods in some virtual universe. But for most of us, the internet is a soulless place. The most meaningful moments in life are almost always physical. They happen when we are with other people, or perhaps when we are alone in the natural world.

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
by Madhumita Murgia
Published 20 Mar 2024

She had joined OpenAI a few years previously when it was a non-profit research lab with a single goal: to create an artificial form of ‘general intelligence’, AI software able to perform any task at the same level of competence as human beings. It had been set up by radical tech entrepreneurs including Elon Musk and Peter Thiel out of a concern that AI would end up destroying the human race. Their solution? To fund the creation of a benevolent AI system that they could control to do good, not evil. But then, the organization transformed. OpenAI took a hefty investment of more than $10bn from Microsoft and converted itself into what was, for all intents and purposes, a for-profit enterprise that sold AI technologies to large corporations and governments around the world.4 OpenAI’s crown jewel was an algorithm called GPT – the Generative Pre-trained Transformer – software that could produce text-based answers in response to human queries.

How to Spend a Trillion Dollars
by Rowan Hooper
Published 15 Jan 2020

Money spent Universal health care introduced in Ethiopia: $100 billion Vaccine development; expanded immunisation programme for emerging diseases; vaccine outreach programme: $100 billion Eradication of malaria and other tropical diseases: $100 billion Eradication of tuberculosis: $23 billion Cure and eradication of HIV and other infectious diseases: $30 billion Antibiotic resistance: $10 billion Complete map of all cell types in human body: $5 billion Solving heart disease, neurological disease and cancer: $100 billion each = $300 billion Curing damaged cells in the body and extending healthy lifespan by 40 years: $200 billion TOTAL: $868 billion * Not to be outdone, the co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, has vowed to ‘defeat mortality’. ‘Death never made any sense to me,’ he has said. And PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel says death is just a problem to be solved. 3 Go carbon zero AIM: To massively cut our emissions of carbon dioxide and wean the world off fossil fuel. To transition to renewable energy, as fast as possible, and rebuild the power grids across the world. To move to zero-carbon transport and industry, to massively boost energy efficiency, and to change our housing.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter
by David Sax
Published 8 Nov 2016

Teachers, especially in public schools, have been characterized as lazy, entitled, unionized dinosaurs who are wholly resistant to progress. Many of the most popular ideas in education reform today have this bias running through them, from the Common Core curriculum and teacher compensation linked to test scores to the Thiel Fellowship, an antischolarship from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel that pays promising university students to drop out and pursue a startup instead. When ed tech fails, the blame is often placed on the teachers who apparently didn’t adopt it correctly or with enough enthusiasm. This assumption is as arrogantly false as handing out laptops to poor children and expecting their lives to change.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 13 Nov 2012

A more up-to-date and very elegant presentation of the hierarchical temporal memory method can be found in Dileep George’s 2008 doctoral dissertation.12 Numenta has implemented it in a system called NuPIC (Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing) and has developed pattern recognition and intelligent data-mining systems for such clients as Forbes and Power Analytics Corporation. After working at Numenta, George has started a new company called Vicarious Systems with funding from the Founder Fund (managed by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist behind Facebook, and Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook) and from Good Ventures, led by Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder of Facebook. George reports significant progress in automatically modeling, learning, and recognizing information with a substantial number of hierarchies.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby
Published 23 May 2016

We do believe that the huge gains in productivity will mean we could afford, as a society, to go in either direction. But guaranteed jobs, in our book, still beat guaranteed incomes hands down. More to Worry About than Jobs At a 2014 gathering in Boston, PayPal cofounder and venture investor Peter Thiel observed that the arrival of general artificial intelligence would be as momentous as the arrival of some new species of intelligent being on earth. And, he added wryly, “I think, if aliens landed, our first question wouldn’t be: what will happen to jobs?” Throughout this book, we’ve been talking about how to ensure continued employment, but even we have to admit that jobs are not the only things threatened in a world where machines become more capable of making decisions and acting on them.

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World
by Sandra Navidi
Published 24 Jan 2017

Past attendees include central bankers such as Mario Draghi and Ben Bernanke; finance ministers George Osborne, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers, and Robert Rubin; bank executives such as Lloyd Blankfein and Robert Zoellick of Goldman Sachs, Paul Achleitner of Deutsche Bank, and Ana Botín of Banco Santander; and big investors such as Philipp Hildebrand of BlackRock, Peter Thiel of Thiel Capital, Ken Griffin of Citadel, Roger Altman of Evercore, and Henry Kravis and General David Petraeus of KKR. The program remains undisclosed, and discussions are subject to the Chatham House Rule,5 according to which participants may use the information received, but are prohibited from revealing the speaker’s identity and affiliation, or that of any other participant for that matter.

Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World
by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler
Published 3 Feb 2015

A quick overview on the exponentially exploding world of crowdsourcing, today’s poor man’s version of artificial intelligence. More incredibly, today the exponential world is starting to overtake the crowd. Recently, an AI company called Vicarious, which is backed by such investors as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Peter Thiel, announced that their machine learning software achieved success rates up to 90 percent on CAPTCHAs from Google, Yahoo, PayPal, Captcha.com, and others.27 So stay tuned, since even the crowd can eventually be dematerialized and demonetized. But one use of the crowd that AI is unlikely to disrupt in the near term is the ability of people from around the world to send you cash to underwrite your ideas.

Uncharted: How to Map the Future
by Margaret Heffernan
Published 20 Feb 2020

But what is striking about transhumanists isn’t their enthusiasm for machines so much as their dismal dreariness when it comes to describing life. I can admire the intellectual dazzle of Kurzweil’s analogies between biology, technology and the stock market; I’m just puzzled by a mind that can’t see that the stock market is already an inadequate model of economics and an even poorer one for life. Why is he, like fellow transhumanists Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, so uninterested in real problems, like the fall in life expectancy, even in rich countries like the United States? Or the immediate climate crisis that could, after all, make eternal life pretty miserable? The vision feels literally disembodied and strangely inhuman. Was it these technologists that Tim Cook had in mind when he said: ‘You cannot possibly be the greatest cause on the earth, because you aren’t built to last’?

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
by Anand Giridharadas
Published 27 Aug 2018

At Summit, Snowden called for “one spot, anywhere in the world, where we can experiment, where we can be safe.” For him, this was a serious vision perhaps involving life and death. Entrepreneurs, as if to mimic genuine renegades, tended to invoke the same idea, but in their case it was less about challenging power than about amassing and protecting it. The entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel called for floating “seasteading” communities far from the reach of law. Larry Page, the cofounder of Google, reportedly said, “As technologists, we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society.” The technology investor Balaji Srinivasan called for the winners of the digital revolution to secede from the ungrateful world of Luddites and complainers—“Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” as he put it—using tools, like those Snowden had imagined, to “build an opt-in society, ultimately outside the United States, run by technology.”

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

It is hard to know just how seriously to take these visions, though they are close to universal among the Bay Area’s futurist vanguard, who have succeeded the NASAs and the Bell Labs of the last century as architects of our imagined future—and who differ among themselves primarily in their assessments of just how long it will take for all this to come to pass. Peter Thiel may complain about the pace of technological change, but maybe he’s doing so because he’s worried it won’t outpace ecological and political devastation. He’s still investing in dubious eternal-youth programs and buying up land in New Zealand (where he might ride out social collapse on the civilization scale).

The Creativity Code: How AI Is Learning to Write, Paint and Think
by Marcus Du Sautoy
Published 7 Mar 2019

The company needed money but initially Hassabis just couldn’t raise any capital. Pitching on a platform that they were going to play games and solve intelligence did not sound serious to most investors. A few, however, did see the vision. Among those who put money in right at the outset were Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Thiel had never invested outside Silicon Valley and tried to persuade Hassabis to relocate to the West Coast. A born-and-bred Londoner, Hassabis held his ground, insisting that there was more untapped talent in London that could be exploited. Hassabis remembers a crazy conversation he had with Thiel’s lawyer.

Hate Inc.: Why Today’s Media Makes Us Despise One Another
by Matt Taibbi
Published 7 Oct 2019

Until pretty recently, if you were nonwhite, female, single, childless, or gay, you were typically told you had to choose between a slew of straight white candidates who “polls said” had an actual chance. That dynamic is still true if you belong to any non-traditional political persuasion. If you’re an anarchist, a socialist, a “populist” (this term can mean almost anything), a nationalist, a Green, even a libertarian (the Ron Paul kind, not the Peter Thiel/Koch Brothers kind), you’ll hear that “polls say” people are not ready to elect your type of person. This effect is so powerful that it caused Barack Obama to underperform with black voters early in the 2008 race. Obama did not get the early backing of a lot of black churches, and leading African American Democrats like John Lewis initially steered clear.

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

Critical or ‘snarky’ coverage of the tech world was deemed ‘uncurious’ (their word), as our metrics showed that our Musk-loving readers responded better to positive stories about big tech.” Crosbie, who was laid off from the site in 2017, eventually ended up at Splinter, part of the Gawker network of websites that tech billionaire Peter Thiel semi-successfully sued out of existence in 2016, the culmination of a Count of Monte Cristo–style revenge plan that apparently stemmed from his deep-seated grudge over the site’s critical coverage of his business ventures. After Splinter finally folded in 2019, Crosbie and his coworkers launched Discourse, which is entirely worker-owned and currently thriving on Substack.

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
by Sally Adee
Published 27 Feb 2023

“Neural Recording and Stimulation Using Wireless Networks of Microimplants.” Nature Electronics, vol. 4, no. 8 (2021), pp. 604–14 82 “Brain chips will become ‘more common than pacemakers,’ says investor, as startup raises $10m,” The Stack, 19 May 2021 <https://thestack.technology/blackrock-neurotech-brain-machine-interfaces-peter-thiel/> 83 Ghose, Carrie. “Ohio State researcher says Battelle brain-computer interface for paralysis could save $7B in annual home-care costs,” Columbus Business First, 10 October 2019 <https://www.bizjournals. com/columbus/news/2019/10/10/ohio-state-researcher-saysbattelle-brain-computer.html> 84 Regalado, Antonio.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

Capitalism has lost its capitalists: too much investment is tied up in “gray capital,” controlled by institutional managers who seek safe returns for retirees. Ambitious young people want to be artists and professionals, not entrepreneurs. Investors and the government no longer back moonshots. As the entrepreneur Peter Thiel lamented, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.” Whatever its causes, economic stagnation is at the root of many other problems and poses a significant challenge for 21st-century policymakers. Does that mean that progress was nice while it lasted, but now it’s over? Unlikely!

…

Variously attributed; quoted in Brand 2009, p. 75. 89. Necessity for standardization: Shellenberger 2017. Selin quote: Washington Post, May 29, 1995. 90. Fourth-generation nuclear power: Bailey 2015; Blees 2008; Freed 2014; Hargraves 2012; Naam 2013. 91. Fusion power: E. Roston, “Peter Thiel’s Other Hobby Is Nuclear Fusion,” Bloomberg News, Nov. 22, 2016; L. Grossman, “Inside the Quest for Fusion, Clean Energy’s Holy Grail,” Time, Oct. 22, 2015. 92. Advantages of technological solutions to climate change: Bailey 2015; Koningstein & Fork 2014; Nordhaus 2016; see also note 103 below. 93.

Lost at Sea
by Jon Ronson
Published 1 Oct 2012

Zeno pauses. David Hanson is Zeno’s inventor. He’s a former Disney theme-park imagineer who later founded Hanson Robotics, now the world’s most respected manufacturer of humanoid robots. He and Zeno are guests of honor here at the Hyatt Regency in San Francisco, at an AI conference organized by Peter Thiel, the PayPal cofounder and chief Facebook bankroller. There’s huge interest in the robot. Delegates gather around him in the lobby outside the conference room, firing questions, attempting to ascertain his level of consciousness. “Is David Hanson God?” I repeat. There’s a monitor attached discreetly to Zeno that automatically scrolls a transcript of what he “hears.”

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

Ledeneva, Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking and Information Exchange (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Vadim Volkov, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). 28. The English-language literature on tech entrepreneurs is long and popular, including Walter Isaacson, The Innovators (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), and Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014), but very little of it to my knowledge looks beyond the West (in particular, the west coast of the United States and the eastern Asian rim), such as Eden Medina, ed., Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014).

Age of Anger: A History of the Present
by Pankaj Mishra
Published 26 Jan 2017

Several generations of conservative politicians have asserted the same, and have been hailed for their wisdom. Today, left-leaning admirers of Edward Snowden and critics of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Guantanamo believe this to be true as much as the NRA, white militias and survivalist groups. The libertarian Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel blames big government on the enfranchisement of women, and he issues such grandiloquent Nietzscheanisms as ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.’ But, as his own last months before his execution in 2001 by lethal injection reveal, McVeigh’s rhetoric of freedom from arbitrary and opaque authority has a much wider resonance and appeal outside as well as inside the United States.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos
by Christian Davenport
Published 20 Mar 2018

He added: “For my part, I will never give up, and I mean never.” Despite those rosy predictions, the truth was, SpaceX was hurting. Musk was burning through the $100 million he had invested of his own money, while it had also earned a $20 million investment from Founders Fund, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm started by Peter Thiel, who knew Musk from their early days at PayPal.. The challenge “was really keeping the company going financially while we were struggling. That was my contribution primarily,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell recalled. “I didn’t get to do as much engineering as I would have liked to, but continually convincing customers to invest in SpaceX, and to take the risk associated with buying launches from us.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking
by Saifedean Ammous
Published 23 Mar 2018

The twentieth century was the century that refined, improved, optimized, economized, and popularized the inventions of the nineteenth century. The wonders of the twentieth century's improvements make it easy to forget that the actual inventions—the transformative world‐changing innovations—almost all came in the golden era. In his popular book, From Zero to One, Peter Thiel discusses the impact of the visionaries who create a new world by producing the first successful example of a new technology. The move from having “zero to one” successful example of a technology, as he terms it, is the hardest and most significant step in an invention, whereas the move from “one to many” is a matter of scaling, marketing, and optimization.

The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 5 Nov 2019

The chosen theme was “Villains and Heroes,” and the evening’s invitations featured a sword-wielding centurion crouching in an ancient ruin, facing down a serpent-haired Medusa. The Mercers directed their guests to a secret website where they received costume suggestions from film, television, comic books, and everyday life, including Superman, Captain Hook, and Mother Teresa.1 As the Saturday evening festivities began, investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, dressed as Hulk Hogan, mingled with Kellyanne Conway, who wore a Superwoman costume. Steve Bannon came as himself, a likely jab at those who deemed his insurgent political activities to be villainous—or a suggestion that he was the election’s hero. As for the Mercers, Bob was dressed as Mandrake the Magician, a comic-book superhero known for hypnotizing his targets, while Rebekah came as Black Widow, covered head-to-toe in black latex.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

Yet the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Solow famously remarked in 1987: “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” 29 (Mind you, the pickup in US productivity in the late 1990s suggests that the gains from computers were real but, as with many other advances, delayed.) The American entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Peter Thiel, has put recent technological disappointment more pithily. He has said: “We wanted flying cars. Instead, we got 140 characters.” This contention of Robert Gordon’s that technological progress has largely run its course is sensational. Think of it: the rapid development of the emerging markets slowing inexorably; overall economic progress essentially dribbling away to nothing; living standards barely rising at all; no prospect of the next generation being appreciably better off than the current one; a return to the situation and the outlook (if not the living standards) that pertained before the Industrial Revolution.

Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America
by David Callahan
Published 9 Aug 2010

Nationally, the rich may remain largely Republican, as is the case today, but economic and demographic changes will continue to increase the ranks of those disposed toward liberalism. both.indd 271 5/11/10 6:27:55 AM 272 fortunes of change Right-wingers with enormous resources at their disposal will not disappear by any means, and some could be very influential. For instance, one of Facebook’s earliest backers, Peter Thiel, is a libertarian and sits on the board of the conservative Hoover Institution. Thiel is already a billionaire; when Facebook goes public or is sold, Thiel—who is in his early forties—will become far richer. He has become a major donor to the Republican Party in recent years and, in a hint of things to come, Thiel reportedly gave $1 million to the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance
by Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna
Published 23 May 2016

Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve plowed into medical research in the last 40 years, rich people only live some 8 percent (five years) longer than their grandparents, and we suffer from the same chronic diseases: cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s and organ failure. As Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal, put it: “We wanted flying cars—instead we got 140 characters.”36 Figure 6-1. To date, many expectations of the future have been disappointed. Image credit: Bill Watterston (1989). Calvin and Hobbes. Reprinted with permission of Universal Uclick. All rights reserved.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 8 Apr 2012

Without a more urgent push to compete more aggressively, Japan’s share of global GDP seems likely to keep falling. The American technology edge is especially critical in light of the slowdown in global growth. The question now is, what is the new driver, what will push the global economy to the next level of development? As the entrepreneur Peter Thiel has argued, the next driver usually comes in the form of material advances in new technology, and these are most likely to emerge in nations like the United States, where the system promotes innovation. For example, as 3D manufacturing advances, it is expected to give manufacturers the capacity to custom build goods for individual consumers more cheaply than the goods can be mass-produced in manned factories in Asia.

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram
by Sarah Frier
Published 13 Apr 2020

He suggested that some form of ephemeral sharing was going to be on the Facebook road map, and that perhaps Instagram should consider it too. But fast-following, as it was called in the technology industry, rarely worked. “Rivalry causes us to over-emphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past,” venture capitalist and Facebook board member Peter Thiel wrote in his 2014 book Zero to One, which Systrom asked all his managers to read. “Competition can make people hallucinate opportunities where none exist.” Systrom was starting to get deep into another book, by former Procter & Gamble CEO A. G. Lafley, called Playing to Win. Lafley’s theme resonated with the Instagram founders’ focus on simplicity.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect
by David Goodhart
Published 7 Sep 2020

Many of them would do better to follow the advice a friend of mine gave to his nephew who was wondering whether to continue a social science degree, having failed his second-year exams: “Rather than plowing on with something you are either not very good at or not very interested in, and acquiring at least £50,000 ($65,000) of debt, you would do far better to borrow £15,000 ($19,000) to spend on a six-month coding course that guarantees a reasonably well-paid job in a tech company. If in five or ten years’ time you get a hunger to go deeper into computer science or just want to understand Byzantium, you will get far more out of it then.” The American venture capitalist Peter Thiel has been offering money to would-be entrepreneurs to leave university and focus on Web-based start-ups instead, and some British private schools are encouraging pupils to take vocational qualification in business, hospitality, and so on with a view to going straight into jobs. Northeastern University in Boston has pioneered a hybrid form of learning somewhere between an apprenticeship and a conventional degree, with students signing up for three six-month internships as part of their degree course.17 In Israel, young people tend to go to university later because of national service when they are more mature and often get more out of it.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

This approach provides psychological safety to those who might otherwise withhold dissent for fear of offending you. If you can’t find opposing voices, manufacture them. Build a mental model of your favorite adversary, and have imaginary conversations with them. This is what Marc Andreessen does. “I have a little mental model of Peter Thiel,” explains Andreessen, referring to fellow venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, “a simulation that lives on my shoulder, and I argue with him all day long.”59 He added, “People might look at you funny while it’s happening,” but it’s well worth the ridicule. The voice of dissent could be anyone.

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators
by Ronan Farrow
Published 14 Oct 2019

“He mentioned he’s retained some lawyers, ” Greenberg said. He flipped through some notes in front of him. “David Boies?” I asked. “He mentioned Boies, but there was someone else as well. Here it is, Charles Harder.” Harder was the pitbull attorney who, in an invasion of privacy case bankrolled by the billionaire Peter Thiel, had recently prevailed in shutting down the gossip news site Gawker. “I told him we couldn’t discuss specifics, of course,” Greenberg continued. “We do this by the book. Let him call all he wants.” Our reporting was in limbo. Gutierrez was still deliberating about handing over the audio.

For Profit: A History of Corporations
by William Magnuson
Published 8 Nov 2022

Receiving an investment from one of the more established venture capital firms, such as Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins, was a mark of honor in Silicon Valley, one that signaled to the world that you had a “big idea.” By the summer of 2004, Zuckerberg realized that Facebook’s growth was taxing the server space the company had been renting, and he needed cash to keep the site functioning smoothly. So in August he met with Peter Thiel, one of the most prominent venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. Thiel ended up investing $500,000 in the company for a 7 percent interest. Venture capital would play an important role in shaping the company’s future. That summer, Zuckerberg also decided to file papers in Delaware to incorporate TheFacebook, Inc.

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child
by Morgan G. Ames
Published 19 Nov 2019

Even though higher education is in fact the overwhelming norm among computer programmers, the narrative that circulates in six-week learn-to-code boot camps and across the industry more generally is that college and even high school are not necessary for, and might even be antithetical to, technological entrepreneurialism.11 A small number of proudly and vocally self-taught programmers across Silicon Valley—who never finished college (or sometimes even high school) yet who developed enough technical expertise to land programming jobs or even start their own companies—help cast this exception as a norm. One, Chris Blizzard, worked for OLPC. Technology venture capitalist Peter Thiel formalized this attitude in his Thiel Fellowship. Launched in 2010, it gives one hundred thousand dollars over two years to students to drop out of college and start a company—despite mounting evidence that it is experienced middle-aged entrepreneurs who have the most success with startups.12 More broadly, the culture of startups, venture capital, and technology development is built on visions of utopianism, as the sky-high valuations of many upstart technology companies attest.

Chokepoint Capitalism
by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
Published 26 Sep 2022

As corporations have come to wield more power, executives have been the only worker class to thrive: their pay has increased nearly 1,000 percent.14 Lina Khan, a leading antitrust scholar and now chair of the Federal Trade Commission, says the decline in competition is “so consistent across markets that excessive concentration and undue market power now look to be not an isolated issue but rather a systemic feature of America’s political economy.”15 While competition is supposed to be central to capitalism, the wealthiest people alive today have gotten rich by suppressing it.16 They’re brazen about it too. Peter Thiel famously announced in 2014 that “competition is for losers” and counseled companies to monopolize their domains. Business schools teach baby MBAs the same lessons: to avoid industries with high competition, to do what it takes to keep potential competitors out, and, if all else fails, to buy them up.17 Warren Buffett explains that, in business, he looks “for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats,”18 because “the products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.”19 That language disguises what’s really going on here.

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

Extractive actions like these enabled Amazon and Tesla—the companies led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the world’s two richest men—to pay zero income taxes in 2018.9 When rich white guys deplete public infrastructure—such as the public universities that educate our workforces and the roads that get employees to our offices—without renewing it, we are engaging unsustainably, enriching ourselves at the expense of the public good. It’s not an accident that the most profitable companies behave monopolistically. When they don’t think the public and government regulators are listening, many rich white men talk openly about how they aspire to hold monopolies. “Monopoly,” technology investor Peter Thiel writes in his 2014 bestseller Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, “is the condition of every successful business.”10 Thiel also advises highly profitable companies on how to disguise their monopolies. “Anyone that has a monopoly will pretend that they’re in incredible competition,” Thiel writes.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

So little personal information about him is available that it’s all but impossible to get a sense of who he is, or what values he might cherish beyond this one core conviction.1 Born in Russia in 1994, Buterin was just shy of twenty when he dropped out of Ontario’s Waterloo University, spurred by a $100,000 grant from the foundation of libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel. As a co-founder of and primary contributor to Bitcoin Magazine, he had immersed himself in the body of theory developing around the blockchain, mastered its abstruse concepts, and in so doing, become convinced that Satoshi’s design was profoundly limited. Now, Thiel’s stipend in hand, he was free to pursue the intuition that he could improve upon that design.

Other People's Money: Masters of the Universe or Servants of the People?
by John Kay
Published 2 Sep 2015

The proximity of a major research-based university at Stanford is also significant, and many successful entrepreneurs have been Stanford alumni.12 The success of some early ventures established a pool of individuals with both considerable personal wealth and experience of the application of new technologies to infant businesses. These individuals supported fresh start-ups. Markkula had retired from Intel as a multimillionaire at the age of thirty-two. Another Intel veteran, John Doerr, was an early supporter of Amazon and Google. Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, was the first external investor in Facebook. The activities of these and other entrepreneur financiers were aided by small financial advisory firms (the ‘four horsemen’: Alex Brown, Hambrecht & Quist, Montgomery Securities and Robertson Stephens) which acted as conduits for institutional investors to put money alongside business angels.

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

Commentators in a range of fields cite that period as the turning point where America (and possibly the Western world as a whole) began to decline. Hedrick Smith (2013) blames the 1971 Powell memorandum for turning corporations into narrowly selfish, power-hungry profit seekers. Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010) blame a political system bent to the will of the wealthy. PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel (2012), 39:30, says technological advance has decelerated since the early 1970s (except in the computer industry). Economists Goldin and Katz (2009), p. 4, note that “educational advance slowed considerably for young adults beginning in the 1970s.” 11.The evidence for middle-class income stagnation and rising inequality is well-established.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

Elon Musk promised free frozen yogurt and a roller coaster to disgruntled employees at his Fremont, California, Tesla car factory—but the workers were complaining of injuries on the job because of the pace of production, and they didn’t want frozen yogurt to soothe their pains. They wanted a union. 39 Yet the hype for Silicon Valley continues, and ambitious programmers don’t want to just be labor, anyway—they want to be startup founders, the next Zuckerbergs themselves. Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire and Trump buddy, advises would-be founders to “run your startup like a cult.” Cult devotees, of course, will work their fingers to the bone out of love, not for money. Not many people consciously want to join a cult, but as Losse pointed out, there’s another name for a group that inspires love and commitment and unpaid labor, and it’s one that tech bosses cheerily invoke: the family.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin
Published 30 Apr 2019

Fusion reactions then heat the FRC plasma, causing it to expand back toward the chamber ends at high speed, with its energy being directly converted into electricity in the process. The cycle would then be repeated once per second to keep making power (or, alternatively, rocket thrust). Helion recently got an investment of $14 million from Peter Thiel's Mithril Fund. 5. General Fusion. Founded in Burnaby, British Columbia, by Dr. Michel Laberge and Michael Delage in 2002, GF has since received some $130 million in investment. The GF concept injects an FRC into a chamber containing a rotating liquid metal wall, which is then driven inward by an array of pistons to compress the FRC to fusion conditions.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View
by William MacAskill
Published 31 Aug 2022

But after spending two years and millions of dollars, they disappointingly only managed to produce a probiotic yogurt called Nar.72 More recently, many wealthy techno-optimists have provided hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for biomedical R&D companies aiming to achieve indefinite life spans. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel have both invested in San Francisco–based Unity Biotechnology, a company whose mission is to prevent aging.73 In 2013, Google launched the company Calico, which also aims to combat aging, with more than a billion dollars in funding.74 Ambrosia, a California start-up, charges its elderly customers $8,000 for injections of two and a half litres of blood plasma harvested from teenagers.75 Even if aging cannot be cured in our lifetime, some people plan to punt the problem to the future by paying for cryonics: having their body or severed head frozen in the hope that resurrection will be possible with future technology.

The Fund: Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Associates, and the Unraveling of a Wall Street Legend
by Rob Copeland
Published 7 Nov 2023

Ferrucci’s Systematized Intelligence Lab was walled off, literally, from the rest of the hedge fund’s operations, behind locked doors. Few who weren’t a part of his group were let in, and almost no one else at the hedge fund had a clue what was happening there. Some of the few with access were consultants from the venture-capital billionaire Peter Thiel’s furtive data-crunching firm, Palantir, famed as the tech spooks who helped hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden. Palantir seldom talked publicly about what it did for clients, and it would never even confirm publicly that it worked for Bridgewater. The swirl of secrecy added to the air of calculated mystery around Ferrucci’s operation.

Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century
by Geoffrey Parker
Published 29 Apr 2013

‘Those who live in times to come will not believe that we who are alive now have suffered such toil, pain and misery,’ wrote Fra Francesco Voersio, an Italian friar, in his Plague Diary. Nehemiah Wallington, a London craftsman, compiled several volumes of ‘Historical notes and meditations’ so that ‘the generation to come may see what wofull and miserable times we lived in’. Likewise Peter Thiele, a German tax official, kept a diary so that ‘our descendants can discover from this how we were harassed, and see what a terribly distressed time it was'; while the German Lutheran Pastor Johann Daniel Minck did the same because, ‘without such records … those who come after us will never believe what miseries we have suffered’.4 According to the Welsh historian James Howell in 1647, ‘‘Tis tru we have had many such black days in England in former ages, but those parallel'd to the present are to the shadow of a mountain compar'd to the eclipse of the moon’; and he speculated that God Almighty has a quarrel lately with all Mankind, and given the reins to the ill Spirit to compass the whole earth; for within these twelve years there have the strangest Revolutions and horridest things happened, not only in Europe but all the world over, that have befallen mankind (I dare boldly say) since Adam fell, in so short a revolution of time … [Such] monstrous things have happened [that] it seems the whole world is off the hinges; and (which is the more wonderful) all these prodigious passages have fallen out in less than the compass of twelve years.5 In 1651, in his book Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (then a refugee from the English Civil War living in France) provided perhaps the most celebrated description of the consequences of the fatal synergy between natural and human disasters faced by him and his contemporaries: There is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of Time; no arts; no letters; no society.

…

Shoemaker Hans Heberle complained that he and his family ‘were hunted like wild beasts in the forest’, and they fled from their village no fewer than 30 times during the war in search of safety.38 Peace Breaks Out in Germany Remarkably, only one of the printed eyewitness accounts blamed the rulers of Germany for their misfortunes. Peter Thiele, a tax official in Brandenburg, pulled no punches: ‘This whole war has been a veritable robbers’ and thieves’ campaign. The generals and colonels have lined their purses while princes and lords have been led about by the nose. But whenever there has been talk of wanting to make peace they have always looked to their reputations.

…

On the contrary, Maria Anna Junius, a nun in Bamberg, kept a chronicle specifically ‘so that when pious sisters come after us who know nothing of these distressed and difficult times, they can see what we poor sisters suffered and endured, with the grace and help of God, during these long years of war’. Near Berlin, the tax official Peter Thiele concluded his account: ‘Our descendants can discover from this how we were harassed, and see what a terribly distressed time it was. May they take this to heart and guard themselves against sin, begging God for mercy so that they may be spared such dread.’ In Hessen, farmer Casper Preis lamented that ‘to tell of all the misery and misfortune [of the war years] is not within my power, not even what I know and have seen myself'; and in any case, he added, even ‘if I did report everything which I have seen and so painfully experienced, no-one living in a better age would believe it’ because ‘the times were awful beyond measure’.

The Frackers: The Outrageous Inside Story of the New Billionaire Wildcatters
by Gregory Zuckerman
Published 5 Nov 2013

Why did private enterprise revitalize the nation’s energy outlook with a focus on fossil fuels, of all things, even as governments funneled $2 trillion toward cleaner, alternative energy? How did obscure energy entrepreneurs develop technologies to produce a surge of energy, even as a chorus of experts, including Peter Thiel, an original investor in Facebook, derided the country for no longer making dramatic technological advances? And why did it all happen in the United States and not in China, Russia, or other countries that boast their own enormous deposits of oil and gas in similar rock? This book, based on over three hundred hours of interviews with more than fifty of the key players of the era, attempts to answer these questions.

Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies
by Jeremy Siegel
Published 7 Jan 2014

Those that took place in the first half of that period appear far more important than those of the second half in transforming the life of the average individual.14 TABLE 4-1 Life-Changing Inventions of the Past 100 Years There are some in Silicon Valley who also believe that the United States is in a downtrend. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, has claimed that innovation in America is “somewhere between dire straits and dead.”15 This downbeat view has spread to many in the investment community. Bill Gross and Mohammed El-Erian, heads of the giant investment firm PIMCO, coined the term new normal in 2009 to describe a condition where U.S. economic growth will sink to 1 to 2 percent, well below the 3+ percent that it has averaged in the post–World War II period.16 Other investment managers have also embraced the concept.17 Even if growth is slower in the United States, this does not mean that growth rates will decline around the world.

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex
by Yasha Levine
Published 6 Feb 2018

It is staffed by over a thousand private investigators, who work closely with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in every country where it operates.131 The company runs seminars and training sessions and offers travel junkets to cops around the world.132 eBay is proud of its relationship with law enforcement and boasts that its efforts have led to the arrests of three thousand people around the world—roughly three per day since the division started.133 Amazon runs cloud computing and storage services for the CIA.134 The initial contract, signed in 2013, was worth $600 million and was later expanded to include the NSA and a dozen other US intelligence agencies.135 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos used his wealth to launch Blue Origin, a missile company that partners with Lockheed Martin and Boeing.136 Blue Origin is a direct competitor of SpaceX, a space company started by another Internet mogul: PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Meanwhile, another PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, spun off PayPal’s sophisticated fraud-detection algorithm into Palantir Technologies, a major military contractor that provides sophisticated data-mining services for the NSA and CIA.137 Facebook, too, is cozy with the military. It poached former DARPA head Regina Dugan to run its secretive “Building 8” research division, which is involved in everything from artificial intelligence to drone-based wireless Internet networks.

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
by Rose George
Published 22 Oct 2018

And I salute the mice and rats who continue to be stitched together, although now they are shaved not soap-chipped, and joined at knee and elbow not torso, and they are female usually, as female mice are less likely to chew each other’s heads off. Thank you, mice, for perhaps enabling us to live a bit longer to experiment on more mice. I know this sounds churlish. My dismay is directed at the vanity, at the rumors of the insultingly rich, people such as PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, perhaps paying to have themselves injected with young blood or plasma. Though I do admire a satirical show named Silicon Valley that portrayed a mogul who employed a Blood Boy for regular rejuvenating transfusions. On The Late Show, wrote Tad Friend in a New Yorker exploration of the longevity industry, Stephen Colbert told young people that President Trump was going to replace Obamacare with mandatory parabiosis.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion
by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell
Published 19 Jul 2021

Then there was Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who had a cultlike following in the Valley and was in the midst of making Apple the country’s most valuable corporation. What these startups-turned-juggernauts had in common was not lost on venture capitalists: driven founders with a gift for salesmanship. It didn’t take long for a handful of influential new venture capital firms—Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen Horowitz—to begin openly marketing themselves as “founder-friendly.” They lavished praise on CEOs who had started their companies and promised the founders a long leash, saying they had a better chance of thriving than companies who brought in mercenary chief executives.

Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination
by Mark Bergen
Published 5 Sep 2022

To untie its Gordian knot, YouTube had to pick a side—either by rewriting its rules definitively to appease certain stakeholders, like queer creators, or by going fully hands off. YouTube couldn’t be all things to all people. Or in Stapleton’s words, it couldn’t be “liberal icons, yas queen, #Pride and libertarian Peter Thiel–ville.” But so often her company wanted to be both. Google and Silicon Valley, after all, were all about abundance. This contradiction grated on Stapleton in the months after the Pride debacle. Then she learned of a time when her company had picked a side. And that pushed her off the ledge.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves
by Matt Ridley
Published 17 May 2010

Today, plenty of money is wasted on research that does not develop, and plenty of discoveries are made without the application of much money. When Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook in 2004 as a Harvard student, he needed very little R&D expenditure. Even when expanding it into a business, his first investment of $500,000 from Peter Thiel, founder of Paypal, was tiny compared with what entrepreneurs needed in the age of steam or railways. Intellectual property? Perhaps property is the answer. Inventors will not invent unless they can keep at least some of the proceeds of their inventions. After all, somebody will not invest time and effort in planting a crop in his field if he cannot expect to harvest it and keep the profit for himself – a fact Stalin, Mao and Robert Mugabe learned the hard way – so surely nobody will invest time and effort in developing a new tool or building a new kind of organisation if he cannot keep at least some of the rewards for himself.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

While the role of product manager is near universal in tech companies of any size, the de facto or de jure reality of it varies widely. What the PM does is in many ways representative of how the company itself develops product. Some companies have opted for different titles. At Microsoft, they are known as “program managers.” At Palantir, the secretive defense intelligence software company founded by the billionaire investor Peter Thiel, they are known as “product navigators,” which sounds terribly romantic. Whatever the flavor of title, what does a product manager, by whatever name, actually do? The MBA-esque job description would be “CEO of the product,” because those B-school pukes like sporting acronymic titles. This is many a company’s definition of the role, and it’s not completely wrong, though it makes the job seem statelier than it is.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016

Extra special thanks are due to Peter Marber for his profoundly constructive intellectual guidance over the years and his pinpoint observations and corrections and to Neeraj Seth, whose immense knowledge of global financial challenges doesn’t inhibit him from thinking of creative solutions nor fortunately from sharing them with me. Many expert thinkers on technology and its wide-ranging impact have provided forward-thinking ideas such as Scott Borg, Tyler Cowen, Marc Goodman, James Law, Daniel Rasmus, Tom Standage, Peter Thiel, and Vivek Wadhwa. Numerous innovators and doers in the information technology industry have also provided wide-ranging insights such as Jeff Jonas, Deepankar Sengupta, and Donald Hanson of IBM; Ann Lavin, Jared Cohen, and Will Fitzgerald of Google; Shailesh Rao, Aliza Knox, and Peter Greenberger of Twitter; Yinglan Tan of Sequoia Capital; John Kim of Amasia; Tom Crampton of Ogilvy; and James Chan of Silicon Straits.

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made
by Gaia Vince
Published 19 Oct 2014

Perhaps – artificial islands are already being created everywhere from the Maldives to Dubai to accommodate bigger populations on purpose-built land, and it is changing the geography of our planet. To date, most have been low-lying and so, like their natural counterparts, they are vulnerable to sea-level rise. Floating islands, though, would rise with the sea. Billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, is funding the Seasteading Institute, which hopes to create entirely floating autonomous city states. In the Anthropocene, we need to radically rethink our relationship with the ocean. Until recently, the vast, wild seas, with their seemingly inexhaustible buffet of fish, were considered too powerful for human adulteration.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

After all, it had been created by two of his friends back in 2005. Two days later, he reached back out to Wong and told him he’d like to take charge of putting together a major round of funding for the site. Wong had a slate of requirements, and a longer wish list. He wanted certain investors to participate, including Peter Thiel, his former PayPal colleague who’d become legendary for his early investment in Facebook and interest in far-out ideas such as building government-free techno-utopian floating islands. Also on Wong’s list of preferred backers were Hollywood types, including rapper Snoop Dogg and the actor Jared Leto.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

Will we finally summon the will to stop this willful self-destruction? With our government in the corrupting grip of big business and the rich as it was more than a century ago, America—the land of the new, past master at meeting unprecedented challenges—would prefer not to. *1 Cowen dedicated his short 2011 book The Great Stagnation to Peter Thiel, who he calls “one of the greatest and most important public intellectuals of our entire time. Throughout the course of history, he will be recognized as such.” Thiel is the libertarian billionaire cofounder of PayPal who donated $1.25 million to the 2016 Trump campaign. *2 To his credit, in his 2018 book Stubborn Attachments, Cowen grants that his libertarianism is nondoctrinaire enough to allow that a few problems, such as the climate crisis, do require massive government action

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

The second was to strip the person of their identity altogether and claim that they were not really black, or not really gay, or not properly a woman, because if they had been, they would not have held those opinions. This second approach, which on the face of it was absurd, became quite common. When Peter Thiel, the gay Silicon Valley billionaire, expressed support for the Republicans in 2016, he was soon told that he was no longer entitled to his sexual identity. ‘By the logic of gay liberation, Thiel is an example of a man who has sex with other men, but not a gay man,’ the writer Jim Downs wrote in Advocate magazine, ‘because he does not embrace the struggle of people to embrace their distinctive identity.’

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
by Jill Lepore
Published 14 Sep 2020

They did not consider the intelligence of women to be intelligence; they did not consider a female understanding of human behavior to be knowledge. They built a machine to control and predict what they could not. They are the long-dead, white-whiskered grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. The Simulmatics Corporation is a missing link in the history of technology, a clasp that fastens the first half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, a future in which humanity’s every move is predicted by algorithms that attempt to direct and influence our each and every decision through the simulation of our very selves, this particular hell.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire
by Brad Stone
Published 10 May 2021

Oracle escalated its case to federal court and would subsequently receive an undignified stream of legal defeats over the next few years. But in one respect, its crusade succeeded. The JEDI process was now mired in highly publicized controversy and was about to capture the attention of a more formidable figure—Trump himself. On April 3, 2018, venture capitalist Peter Thiel brought Oracle’s co-CEO Safra Catz to dinner at the White House. Catz, a registered Republican who had served on Trump’s transition team in 2016 and was a major donor to his reelection campaign, complained to Trump that the contract seemed designed for Amazon. Trump listened and said he wanted the competition to be fair, according to a Bloomberg News report at the time.

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era
by Gary Gerstle
Published 14 Oct 2022

Clinton was at the center of these discussions and plans for party reorientation.42 A third part of the reorientation of the Democrats emerged not from the pain of losing elections but from the giddiness that accompanied the information technology (IT) revolution. The 1990s were the decade of IT’s extraordinary triumph. The first web browser, Mosaic, launched in 1993; Netscape, the forerunner of Google, debuted in 1994. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and Peter Thiel and his colleagues established PayPal in 1998, which was also the year Google appeared. This was the decade as well in which prodigal son Steve Jobs returned to Apple (in 1996) and put it on the path toward its early twenty-first-century globe-straddling dominance. When Clinton took office in January 1993, an upstart stock exchange, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), heavily weighted toward these and other technology companies, stood at 670.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies
by Geoffrey West
Published 15 May 2017

After all, they have revolutionized society and not unreasonably want both themselves and their hugely successful companies to go on living forever and are willing to spend their money in trying to do so. Among the more prominent ones are Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, whose foundation has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on aging research; Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal, who has invested millions in biotech companies oriented toward solving the problem of aging; and Larry Page, a cofounder of Google, who started Calico (the California Life Company), whose focus is on aging research and life extension. And then there’s the health care mogul Joon Yun, who, though he didn’t make his fortune in classic high-tech, is based in Silicon Valley and is the sponsor of the $1 million Longevity Prize “dedicated to ending aging” through his foundation, the Palo Alto Institute.

Who Stole the American Dream?
by Hedrick Smith
Published 10 Sep 2012

By late spring, Super-PACs had raised $160 million, bankrolled mainly by a small group of billionaire would-be kingmakers such as Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam; Harold C. Simmons of Dallas and his chemical and metals conglomerate, Contran Corporation; Houston home builder Robert J. Perry; PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel; Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO of Dream-works; and hedge fund managers John A. Paulson and Paul Singer of New York. Just three super-donors—the Adelsons, Simmons/Contran, and Perry—contributed close to one fourth of all the Super-PAC cash. In the 2012 general election campaign, Super-PACs have cast themselves as weapons of political mass destruction.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers questioned the French author’s claims about the enduring power of inherited wealth in the United States by pointing to the high degree of churn among American billionaires. Summers highlighted the fact that only one out of every 10 names on the original Forbes list in 1982 were still on the list in 2012. The author and venture capitalist Peter Thiel also incorporated billionaire lists into his entertaining lament about the stagnant state of technological innovation. Scanning the Forbes global list of the ninety-two people who were worth more than $10 billion in 2012, Thiel found only eleven tech industry figures in the group, all of them names he considered distressingly familiar, such as Gates, Ellison, and Zuckerberg.

The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market
by Leah McGrath Goodman
Published 15 Feb 2011

“In the Book of Revelation, did you know that the Rapture takes place right after oil runs out?” one of the traders gushed. Others took a more analytical approach. “When people say prices are higher due to the hurricanes or other events, I think they’re confusing the symptom with the cause,” said Peter Thiel, a hedge fund manager in San Francisco, during an interview I did for Dow Jones. “The storms didn’t cause oil markets to go higher. Oil markets were concerned about a storm because global supplies are really tight.” Little could be proven about oil supply itself, but it definitely was provable that oil supply was not rising as fast as global demand, and the two were approaching a dead heat.

Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art
by Michael Shnayerson
Published 20 May 2019

Artsy was an online global gallery whose founder, Carter Cleveland, had come up with the idea in 2009 in his senior dorm room at Princeton. Fellow backers included Rupert Murdoch’s then wife Wendi, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich’s ex-wife Dasha Zhukova, Marc Glimcher of Pace Gallery, members of the Bill Acquavella family, assorted Rockefellers, Jared Kushner’s brother, Joshua, Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, and, recently, David Zwirner. Opening for business in 2012, Artsy had made a simple pitch to galleries. Someone, as Cleveland declared, would soon manage to build a platform potentially capable of showing millions of artworks and enabling them to be bought and sold. That was where the Internet was going.

Alpha Trader
by Brent Donnelly
Published 11 May 2021

Also note that if your reaction when reading about the Asch experiment was: “I would never pick the wrong line in that experiment,” you are just like almost everyone else who believes that bias is something that happens to everyone else, but not to them. Groupthink and conformity bias are real and impact smart people and dumb people alike! 39 When it comes to independent thinking, Peter Thiel nails it with this quote: The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself. Flexible and open-minded The cure for many forms of bias in trading (and in life) is to be flexible and open-minded. This is captured by the concept of “strong opinions, weakly held”, a framework for thinking developed by technology forecaster and Stanford Scholar Paul Saffo.

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach
by Ashlee Vance
Published 8 May 2023

Once again, Planet helped erode years of traditional thinking that satellites were fragile objects that should be left alone once they were in space. The first couple of launches boosted investors’ confidence in the young company. In mid-2013, Planet raised $13 million more in funding. Steve Jurvetson once again led the investment round, which was joined by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, Eric Schmidt, and others. Planet used the money to build a fleet of twenty-eight new Doves. It put those into space in 2014 by hitching a ride on a cargo rocket bound for the International Space Station. Once on the ISS, astronauts ejected the Doves into orbit. In 2015, investors really bought into Planet’s vision and pumped another $170 million into the company.

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

The Tempo Group’s plans for Detroit are from an interview with the general manager Jeff Zhao and stories in Crain’s Detroit Business. 7: The Cool Chain The migration of the tulip from the steppes of Central Asia to Holland in the saddlebags of Carolus Clusius is best told by Mike Dash in Tulipomania. The history and details of the Dutch East India Company are drawn from a number of sources found through Wikipedia. The idea that all financial bubbles are bets on globalization is suggested in Michael Pettis’s The Volatility Machine and Peter Thiel’s “The Optimistic Thought Experiment” (Policy Review, February and March 2008). The early history of floral logistics is found in From Green to Gold: An Illustrated History of the Aalsmeer Flower Auction, a book commissioned by the Aalsmeer. The scenes detailing how the auctions work are taken from interviews and tours with auction officials (including Henk de Groot), interviews with the staff of Hilverda De Boer (including Aard de Boer), and Amy Stewart’s invaluable Flower Confidential, from which I also gleaned innumerable details about the history of Dutch floriculture and the globalization of the floral industry.

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
by Edward Chancellor
Published 15 Aug 2022

They include entrenching instability in the global system, returning to the modern equivalent of the divisive competitive devaluations of the interwar years and, ultimately, triggering an epoch-defining seismic rupture in policy regimes, back to an era of trade and financial protectionism and, possibly, stagnation combined with inflation.44 Maverick tech billionaire Peter Thiel added a sobering thought: all great historic bubbles, from the Mississippi Bubble to the current day, had coincided with advances in globalization. The previous quarter of a century had produced a string of bubbles and busts that ‘represent[ed] different facets of a single Great Boom of unprecedented size and duration’.

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It
by Marc Goodman
Published 24 Feb 2015

One such company, Vicarious, a Silicon Valley start-up, is developing AI software “based upon the computational principles of the human brain.” An AI that can learn. Tens of millions of dollars in venture capital funding have flowed to the firm, including prominent investments by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel. The company’s goal is to re-create the “part of the brain that sees, controls the body, reasons and understands language.” In other words, Vicarious wants to translate the human neocortex into computer code, and it is not alone in attempting to build a mind. How to Build a Brain A typical neuron makes about ten thousand connections to neighboring neurons.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

_r=0 29. see reports and analysis by Elise Hu, ‘The White House Is Backing Strong Open Internet Rules’, NPR, 10 November 2014, http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/11/10/363013806/the-white-house-is-backing-the-internet-in-a-major-way, and ‘3.7 Million Comments Later, Here’s Where Net Neutrality Stands’, NPR, 17 September 2014, http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/09/17/349243335/3-7-million-comments-later-heres-where-net-neutrality-stands. In the end, it was more than 4 million comments 30. quoted in David Crow, ‘Strife in the Fast Lane’, Financial Times, 16 November 2014, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/997ad3ee-6b23-11e4-ae52-00144feabdc0.html#axzz3s4VCr5dH 31. the legendary libertarian Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel even argued that internet monopolies, or near-monopolies, could be good for innovation; see Thiel 2014 32. Federal Communications Commission, ‘In the Matter of Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet’, 26 February 2015, http://perma.cc/R9H9-MWXG, and Tim Wu, ‘Net Neutrality: How the Government Finally Got It Right’, New Yorker, 5 February 2015, http://perma.cc/SW5W-27QF 33. http://www.thisisnetneutrality.org and the post on Jeremy Gillula et al., ‘EFF Co-Launches Global Coalition on Net Neutrality, as the Battle for an Open Internet Heats Up’, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 25 November 2014, https://perma.cc/N9PK-UC29?

The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier
by Ian Urbina
Published 19 Aug 2019

In 2008, these visionaries united around a nonprofit organization called the Seasteading Institute. Based in San Francisco, the organization was founded by Patri Friedman, a Google software engineer and grandson of Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize–winning economist best known for his ideas about the limitations of government. The institute’s primary benefactor was Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and the co-founder of PayPal who donated more than $1.25 million to the organization and related projects. Thiel also invested in a start-up venture called Blueseed. Its purpose was to solve a thorny problem affecting many Silicon Valley companies: how to attract engineers and entrepreneurs who lacked American work permits or visas.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
Published 14 Aug 2008

Perhaps if people can see how these companies actually started, it will be less daunting for them to envision starting something of their own. I hope a lot of the people who read these stories will think, “Hey, these guys were once just like me. Maybe I could do it too.” C H A P T 1 E R Max Levchin Cofounder, PayPal PayPal was founded in December 1998 by recent college grad Max Levchin and hedge fund manager Peter Thiel. The company went through several ideas, including cryptography software and a service for transmitting money via PDAs, before finding its niche as a web-based payment system. That service became wildly popular for online vendors, especially eBay sellers, who preferred it to traditional payment methods.

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
by Ian Morris
Published 11 Oct 2010

option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=2183). 452 “None comes”: Richard Rumbold, spoken at his own execution, London, 1685, cited from Hill 1984, p. 37. 452, 453 “that mighty Leveller” and “Overturn”: Abiezer Coppe, A Fiery Flying Roll I (1649), pp. 1–5, cited from Hill 1984, p. 43. 453 “sharpened their hoes”: cited from Elvin 1973, p. 246. 453 “I, feeble and”: Emperor Chongzhen, suicide note (1644), cited from Paludan 1998, p. 187. 454 “were subjected”: Liu Shangyou, A Short Record to Settle My Thoughts (1644 or 1645), translated in Struve 1993, p. 15. 454 “the robbers and murderers” and “for so long”: Peter Thiele, Account of the Town of Beelitz in the Thirty Years’ War, cited from C. Clark 2006, pp. 32–34. 455 “Sometimes everyone”: cited from Spence 1990, pp. 23–24. 460 “Every day”: Felipe Guaman Poma, New Chronicle and Good Government (1614), cited from Kamen 2003, p. 117. 460 “Every peso”: Antonio de la Calancha (1638), cited from Hemming 2004, p. 356. 461 “Potosí lives”: cited from Kamen 2003, p. 286. 461 “The king of China”: ibid., p. 292. 462 “Along the whole coast”: cited from Lane 1998, p. 18. 464 “If death came”: The saying has been attributed to several sources, but Cardinal Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle said something very similar in a letter dated May 11, 1573, cited in Kamen 1999, p. 252. 464 “naked people”: letter to Juan de Oñate (1605), cited from Kamen 2003, p. 253. 464 “Even if you are poor”: settler’s letter home to Spain, cited from Kamen 2003, p. 131. 468 “one-handed clocks”: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Phase the First, chapter 3. 468 “The honour and reverence” etc.: Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), preface. 469 “it is not less natural”: René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644), chapter 203. 470 “Nature, and Nature’s laws”: Alexander Pope, “Epitaph: intended for Sir Isaac Newton” (1730).

Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World
by Adam Tooze
Published 31 Jul 2018

Theirs was the great technological and entrepreneurial success story of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Antitrust, data protection and intrusive tax investigations were, as far as Tim Cook of Apple was concerned, nothing more than “political crap,” antiquated road bumps on the highway to the future.40 As tech oligarch Peter Thiel told audiences and readers: “Creating value isn’t enough—you also need to capture some of the value you create.” That depended on market power. “Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines,” but Thiel knew better. As far as he was concerned, “[C]apitalism and competition are opposites.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

For us to determine that labor productivity and TFP growth were even quicker during 1941–50 does not diminish the boldness of Field’s imagination with his claim or the depth of evidence that he has marshaled to support it.61 Chapter 17 INNOVATION: CAN THE FUTURE MATCH THE GREAT INVENTIONS OF THE PAST? We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters. —Peter Thiel INTRODUCTION The epochal rise in the U.S. standard of living that occurred from 1870 to 1940, with continuing benefits to 1970, represent the fruits of the Second Industrial Revolution (IR #2). Many of the benefits of this unprecedented tidal wave of inventions show up in measured GDP and hence in output per person, output per hour, and total factor productivity (TFP), which as we have seen grew more rapidly during the half-century 1920–70 than before or since.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

I’m not interested in supporting an organization that doesn’t develop code” → OpenCog → nothing changes. “Eliezer Yudkowsky lacks academic credentials” → Professor Ben Goertzel installed as Director of Research → nothing changes. The one thing that actually has seemed to raise credibility, is famous people associating with the organization, like Peter Thiel funding us, or Ray Kurzweil on the Board. This might be an important thing for young businesses and new-minted consultants to keep in mind—that what your failed prospects tell you is the reason for rejection, may not make the real difference; and you should ponder that carefully before spending huge efforts.