We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters Concepts

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

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

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

for years. Its tagline compared the science fiction dreams of Thiel’s youth with ostensibly diminished aims of the world’s most successful tech companies: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” (This was a reference to Twitter, which had been heralded in the press as a potential Facebook-killer.) VCs, Thiel argued, had once funded

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words

another over 140-character posts. Digital commerce also became easier for small-scale transactions thanks to the growth of PayPal, run by the likes of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Reid Hoffman. With the immediate success of these services, Time chose “you”—that is, the entire public—as its 2006 Person of

…

introduced features aligned with woke ideals, further fueling conservative claims of bias. While some pro-Trump tech figures emerged, they faced public ostracization. Facebook investor Peter Thiel survived as a rare Trump supporter in Silicon Valley, with Zuckerberg defending his presence on Facebook’s board of directors as “ideological diversity.” Palmer Luckey

…

public spaces with low-quality, ad-driven content. Rather than a hub of innovation, the internet had become an engine for mediocrity. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund famously lamented, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Yet those 140 characters—and the rise of short-form content—became powerful vectors for a new kind of culture: fleeting entertainment, get

…

public, then collapse to $270 million before declaring bankruptcy. The implosion of internet media followed suit. Gawker was the first to fall, in 2016, after Peter Thiel funded Hulk Hogan’s successful lawsuit against it. The site made a brief comeback in 2021 but was shuttered for good shortly thereafter. BuzzFeed News

…

up and took on a new romantic partner. Musk challenged Zuckerberg to a “cage match.” They seemed fully disinterested in cavorting together within “high society.” Peter Thiel used his great wealth to plan a doomsday-ready concrete bunker in New Zealand. Even the winners of techno-capitalism seemed unhappy. Elon Musk, the

…

government,” he declared, “is military government, and every other form is both hypocritical and destructive of true freedom.” His ideas extended beyond the fringes. Billionaire Peter Thiel referenced BAP in speeches; Senator J. D. Vance followed him on Twitter. Senior national security adviser (and menswear blogger) Michael Anton warned, “In the spiritual

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber · 29 Oct 2024 · 292pp · 106,826 words

a large extent through our smartphones. In reality, we have entered an age of deceleration and decline. As one noted tech investor summed it up, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” 11 The symptoms of technological, economic, and cultural stagnation can be detected everywhere. Some of the evidence is hard to quantify, but it can perhaps

…

after the Moon landing in 1969, Woodstock happened, and the Space Age gave way to the New Age. This striking observation, by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, 64 represents the broader turn to subjective spirituality and interiority that took place in the 1970s and continues to this day. This shift coincided with

…

spirit of risk-taking: speculative bubbles. 11 This statement was first articulated in Bruce Gibney’s Founder Fund manifesto but is most often attributed to Peter Thiel. Bruce Gibney, “What Happened to the Future?” Founders Fund, January 1, 2017, https://foundersfund.com/the-future/. 12 Robert M. Solow, “A Contribution to the

…

previous industrial revolutions, we might regress and become gradually more primitive. Baudrillard, “America After Utopia,” New Perspectives Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2009): 96–99. 64 Peter Thiel, “Could This Be the New Counterculture?” interview by Glenn Beck, The Glenn Beck Program, October 22, 2014, https://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21

…

, 2011, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dr-no-money/. 102 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). 103 Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (New York: Crown Business, 2014). 104 Andrey Rzhetsky et al

…

the trap of constantly comparing oneself to others. According to René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, recently popularized among the Silicon Valley set by Peter Thiel, our wants tend to be borrowed from other people. We want not what we desire on our own but what we think other people desire

…

beings—this time two dogs, plus some mice, rats, and plants—were safely returned from space to Earth. The success of Apollo speaks to what Peter Thiel has called “definite optimism,” or the belief that the future will be better than the present for specific, concrete reasons—as contrasted with “indefinite optimism

…

hard work and ingenuity, failure was impossible. Like the Manhattan Project, the Apollo program succeeded in large part because of the visionary determination of what Peter Thiel has called “extreme founder figures”—people like von Braun, NASA’s George Mueller, and President Johnson—all of whom demonstrated a relentless drive that bordered

…

then. 307) It is Bitcoin’s immutable and hard-coded deflationary monetary policy that makes it a vertical or zero-to-one innovation, to use Peter Thiel’s terminology. In contrast to horizontal innovations, which incrementally modify and improve existing technologies, zero-to-one innovations are radically new, breakthrough technologies. 308 Deflationary

…

Satoshi Nakamoto—after all, as the history of Christianity demonstrates, a group of committed believers can have quite an outsize impact on the world. As Peter Thiel once remarked, “The best startups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong

…

“with philosophical if not religious zeal,” not Washington’s creeping obsession with cost-effectiveness. Neufeld, Von Braun, 452. 350 Referring to the dot-com bubble, Peter Thiel hinted at the apocalyptic nature of transformative bubbles: “But March of 2000 wasn’t just a peak of insanity. In some important ways, it was

…

greater exists. Like the spires reaching toward the heavens, the rockets soaring into space provide an irreducible experience of the sublime. In a 2018 talk, Peter Thiel asked, “What aspects of technology are actually charismatic? Where there is a good story—[a] story about technology making the world a better place. It

…

, and trade-offs—from unconstrained vision, which rests on utopian idealism and prefers centralized top-down solutions that ignore trade-offs. In Zero to One, Peter Thiel offers a striking characterization of indefinite optimism: “Instead of working for years to build a new product, indefinite optimists rearrange already invented ones. Bankers make

…

submarines have their portable churches.” Adamsky, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020), 1–2. 403 “Tech Investor Peter Thiel Speaks at The New York Economic Club,” CNBC, March 15, 2008, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2018/03/15/tech-investor

…

-peter-thiel-speaks-at-the-new-york-economic-club.html. 404 Aristotle, Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 3.6.5.1281. 405 Cited in Stephen

…

/2005/12/bit-gold.html. Thiel, Peter. “The End of the Future.” National Review, October 3, 2011. https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thiel/. Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. New York: Crown Business, 2014. Wheatley, Spencer, Didier

…

): 279–305. Sullivan, John Edward. Prophets of the West: An Introduction to the Philosophy of History. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Thiel, Peter. “Peter Thiel at the Economic Club of New York.” March 16, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg446iBq638. Thiel, Peter, and Blake Masters. Zero to One

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

by Ashlee Vance · 18 May 2015 · 370pp · 129,096 words

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

…

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

…

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

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America

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

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

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

…

, Thiel had started an early-stage venture capital firm called Founders Fund. It published an online manifesto about the future that began with a complaint: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” There was no single cause of the tech slowdown. Perhaps there were no more easy technological problems, those had all been solved a generation ago

…

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

…

” (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

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking

by Michael Bhaskar · 2 Nov 2021

, 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

…

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

…

Martin Wolf, ‘We're living in an age . . . of really slow and boring technological change compared to what our ancestors managed to generate.’ 23 Or Peter Thiel, again succinctly expressing the technological stagnation view: ‘I don't think we're living in an incredibly fast technological age.’ 24 In reality, the 3IR

…

in medicine and transport but across swathes of the frontier. Whole societies appear to be running out of new ideas. When a tech titan like Peter Thiel or a science fiction writer like Neal Stephenson says they are disappointed with our achievements, it's easy to shrug: of course they'd say

…

, 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),

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy

by Jonathan Taplin · 17 Apr 2017 · 222pp · 70,132 words

believe in democracy. The men who lead these monopolies believe in an oligarchy in which only the brightest and richest get to determine our future. Peter Thiel, the first outside investor in Facebook and cofounder of PayPal, thinks the major problem of American society is its “unthinking demos”: the democratic public that

…

the fortunes created by the digital revolution may have done more to increase economic inequality than almost any other factor. Despite Marc Andreessen’s and Peter Thiel’s belief that the outsize gains of tech billionaires are the result of a genius entrepreneur culture, inequality at this scale is a choice—the

…

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

…

’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

…

small group of right-wing radicals to whom the ideas of democracy and decentralization were anathema. By the late 1980s, starting with eventual PayPal founder Peter Thiel’s class at Stanford University, the dominant philosophy of Silicon Valley would be based far more heavily on the radical libertarian ideology of Ayn Rand

…

Page, for example, wants to set aside a part of the world for unregulated experimentation.” This is not just a libertarian fantasy. This is where Peter Thiel and Larry Page want to take the world. Thiel has financially supported an idea called seasteading, which is the concept of creating permanent artificial islands

…

is not part of the libertarian creed, which in many respects is antidemocratic. As Ben Tarnoff, writing in the Guardian noted, one of the reasons Peter Thiel was drawn to Donald Trump’s authoritarian candidacy was that “he would discipline what Thiel calls ‘the unthinking demos’: the democratic public that constrains capitalism

…

, the creative industries, or equitable society. Information is an abstraction, and it doesn’t ‘want’ anything.” Even the most radical of the Valley’s libertarians, Peter Thiel, didn’t believe the “information wants to be free” nonsense, noting, “Every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside

…

Fortune 500. The corporate conquest of the Web had started. CHAPTER FOUR The Libertarian Counterinsurgency We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. —Peter Thiel 1. George Gilder was down on his luck. Sweating like a pig in a humid office with a broken air conditioner, he was working in

…

economy free from government regulation and taxes, powered by new technologies such as fiber optics and personal computing. 2. The sixteen-year-old chess prodigy Peter Thiel, bored by his high school in Foster City, California, was seized with libertarian fervor. The New Yorker’s George Packer sets the stage. He became

…

Benko noted: “When George Gilder, arguably the smartest man in the world, says, as he said to me over dinner recently in Washington, DC, that Peter Thiel is the smartest man in the world… pay attention.” In a speech, Thiel later explained why he formed the Stanford Review: to fight feminism and

…

can fail to deliver good jobs, or that sometimes government aid is a crucial lifeline.” The notion of altruism and cooperation is not something that Peter Thiel believes in. He is as confident as an Ayn Rand hero that “achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life.” He

…

a throwback to the Jim Crow 1950s and a contemporary statement from someone like Donald Trump. This is in essence the truly elitist theory behind Peter Thiel’s thinking. Though his undergraduate degree was in philosophy, Thiel gravitated toward technology and politics. What he believed was that politics was impeding progress and

…

cover the cost of creating 100 percent of the content. This, he noted, could hardly be characterized as a fair business deal. 6. It is Peter Thiel’s investment in Palantir that demonstrates a certain libertarian hypocrisy about corporate welfare. Thiel is always complaining about crony capitalism, but the initial investment in

…

afraid to leave their mansions for fear of losing money on their investment. I would say it takes no big leap to guess that both Peter Thiel and Larry Page truly believe that technology can deliver happiness. In a new book, The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the

…

to live that dialectic. They created a world dominated by tech elites, with a set of rules that we are now condemned to live by. Peter Thiel declared that “competition is for losers,” and the following decade would prove just who the losers would be. CHAPTER FIVE Digital Destruction This renegade thing

…

, captured perfectly by Timberlake, appealed to a young Mark Zuckerberg, who eventually appointed Sean president of Facebook. Parker served an important function, introducing Zuckerberg to Peter Thiel, who became the company’s first outside investor. But Parker couldn’t shake his bad-boy habits, and in 2005 he was busted on suspicion

…

only 13 percent of the streaming music revenues that the music business does. The cofounder of YouTube, Chad Hurley, was a PayPal alumnus, schooled in Peter Thiel’s philosophy. He built his company on the same “don’t ask permission” ethic that Larry Page had embraced. Emails released during one of the

…

became too much, and in the fall of 2011 Condé Nast sold off a large share of Reddit to a group led by Sam Altman, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. At the debate, Ohanian proudly mentioned his personal consumption of “free music and movies” available on the Internet, going so far as

…

form of robber-baron capitalism took on a new form in the digital age. CHAPTER SIX Monopoly in the Digital Age Competition is for losers. —Peter Thiel 1. Robert Bork did more than any individual in the twentieth century to embed the libertarian free-market principles of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman

…

Om Malik put it, “Most competition in Silicon Valley now heads toward there being one monopolistic winner.” Part of this is the network effect that Peter Thiel felt was so crucial, but part of it is also the unique nature of the Internet’s architecture. As Barry Lynn points out, “The entirely

…

, Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T dominate the Fortune 100, a reexamination of some of the deregulatory nostrums of the Reagan era is in order. As Peter Thiel explains in Zero to One, the profit margins of true monopolies are extraordinary: “Google brought in $50 billion in 2012 (versus $160 billion for the

…

might play in this crisis. If the rise of monopoly can be seen as a cause of economic stagnation, why has it endured? Because, as Peter Thiel points out in his book, “whereas a competitive firm must sell at a market price, a monopoly owns its market, so it can set its

…

days of Andrew Jackson.” But it would take Google to really perfect that model. CHAPTER SEVEN Google’s Regulatory Capture Monopolists lie to protect themselves. —Peter Thiel 1. How have monopolies escaped regulation? Like its two peers, Facebook and Amazon, Google has used the tools of political lobbying and public relations to

…

—and it leads in thirteen of the top fourteen commercial functions of the Internet, according to Scott Cleland at the consulting firm Precursor, LLC. As Peter Thiel points out, companies like Google “lie to protect themselves. They know that bragging about their great monopoly invites being audited, scrutinized and attacked. Since they

…

age. They are existing in harmony today because the counternarrative about the costs of digital innovation—and who bears those costs—has not been made. Peter Thiel knows that competition is anathema to the kind of capitalism he wants, but the regulators in Washington still live in a fantasy world of “perfect

…

world’s largest social network. The bratty kid portrayed in the movie The Social Network may have been changed by marriage and fatherhood. Larry Page, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos are in their forties and fifties. Their libertarian ideals are fairly fixed, but watching the evolution of Mark Zuckerberg over the past

…

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

…

which ads we’ll respond to but to actually change our emotions,” wrote Sophie Weiner on AnimalNewYork.com. In May of 2016, Facebook board member Peter Thiel was drawn into the privacy debate when it was revealed that he had financed a lawsuit brought by Hulk Hogan against the online news site

…

Owen Thomas, the gay writer who wrote the Valleywag piece, ended with this statement: “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.” After Thiel confessed to secretly funding the Gawker lawsuit, Marc Andreessen, Thiel’s

…

’s support in great numbers on Twitter, using the hashtag #ThankYouPeter. Trump’s principal Breitbart News Network backer, Milo Yiannopoulos, wrote, “Freedom-minded PayPal founder Peter Thiel has revealed himself to be a Batman of sorts. The hero Silicon Valley needed.” But Jason Mandell, a PR specialist based in Silicon Valley, highlighted

…

the basic contradiction between libertarian beliefs and freedom of the press. “People like Peter Thiel are used to being able to tell an engineer ‘this is broken—fix it’,” Mandell said. “They don’t understand the unique dynamic between the

…

its allies on the copyleft, Kim equated free speech with free music and movies. The libertarian cant of his pitch could have been written by Peter Thiel or Sean Parker. But Kim didn’t have the style of Sean Parker, so he was a rather unlikely leader of the new free-music

…

to get to that place, but it was the Internet that had always been his ticket to wealth—earned or scammed. With Megaupload he followed Peter Thiel’s principles of building a proprietary technology and a good brand with network effects that could scale. But before he arrived at the $175 million

…

Dark Web, such as Kim Dotcom and Dread Pirate Roberts, as the outliers of our story, but in reality they both considered themselves anarcho-capitalists. Peter Thiel has flirted with that fringe belief, but one of the richest men in America, Charles Koch, has fully embraced it. He and his brother David

…

, in less than a generation.” But beyond the externalities comparison, the Kochs are important because they financed the rise of the libertarian political framework that Peter Thiel, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg used to get rich. Without the political protection of the Koch network, none of the Internet empires would

…

your pocket, but has it really changed the world the way the inventions of Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, and Henry Ford did? Even Peter Thiel has remarked, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.” For Gordon, the future may be characterized by stagnant living standards, rising inequality, falling education levels, and an aging population. This chart, taken from

…

between editorial content and paid advertising? If indeed the author of Hooked is onto something—exposing our powerful addictions to social networking apps—then is Peter Thiel’s almost spiritual commitment to “liberty” really the same as Thomas Jefferson’s life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? I don’t think so

…

the fleeting nature of fame in the twenty-first century. 3. Perhaps the Internet’s greatest failing is the convergence of anonymity and misogyny. When Peter Thiel noted that giving the vote to women in the 1920s “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron,” he was reiterating a basic Randian

…

on fighting ‘social justice warriors’ online.” But for the young men spending hours harassing Zoe Quinn, it is feminism that is the problem. Of course Peter Thiel felt this back in the early 1990s when he wrote in the Stanford Review that “the passionate hatred of men, the utopian demands for an

…

run his campaign, a Washington Post columnist noted that it represented “the dangerous seizure of the conservative movement by the Alt-Right.” But for Milo, Peter Thiel is a hero on par with Trump for funding the Hulk Hogan lawsuit against Gawker. “With his lawsuit,” he wrote, “Thiel has perhaps done more

…

with jobs. The fact that Facebook is on track to generate annual revenues of $20 billion with fewer than fifteen thousand employees speaks volumes. Is Peter Thiel’s idea of corporations—free to reap monopoly profits and operate free from government regulation—what we want for our country? Thiel’s icon Ayn

…

would be no fire over which to cook it when the hunters got back. This is why I have no truck with the arguments of Peter Thiel and his fellow Ayn Rand acolytes, who believe that “if any civilization is to survive, it is the morality of altruism that men have to

…

, but my hope is that we can build a parallel structure that will benefit all creators. The only way this will happen is that in Peter Thiel’s “deadly race between politics and technology,” the people’s voice (politics) will have to win. Google, Amazon, and Facebook may seem like benevolent plutocrats

…

, 2009). 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

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019

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

…

-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

…

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

…

percent of the company and controlling three of its five board seats. The Valley’s Internet-era inner circle had become funders and close advisors. Peter Thiel had given Facebook its first big investment back in 2004 and was a board member. Marc Andreessen was a mentor as well, meeting Zuckerberg regularly

…

within the industry saw a place that was falling short of its promise. Peter Thiel became one of the more outspoken critics. “What Happened to the Future?” asked a 2011 manifesto issued by Thiel’s VC firm, Founders Fund. “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140 characters.”14 DAY ONE Jeff Bezos also believed the Internet economy could do more

…

, and champions of the free market. In the space-age Valley, the person embodying this contradiction was Dave Packard. In the cyber age, it was Peter Thiel. In contrast to his tech brethren who rallied around Barack Obama in 2008, Thiel remained unwavering in his belief that modern politics was a dead

…

a brush; were the innocent also getting ensnared in a net designed to catch terrorists and thieves? But the contracts continued to roll in.28 Peter Thiel always had been a figure of contradictions: a gay man who rejected special treatment for minorities; a defender of free speech who funded a lawsuit

…

business use, founded and led by Diversity Myth author-turned PayPal millionaire David Sacks. Palihapitiya became an observer on Yammer’s board, whose members included Peter Thiel and Sean Parker.14 The new generation of money men wore designer T-shirts instead of sport coats, drove Teslas instead of Mercedes, and used

…

, involved a tiny number of people: all men, all wealthy, all pretty confident in their conviction that the industry was a marvelous meritocracy. Some, like Peter Thiel and David Sacks, had translated their college networks into powerful instruments of wealth creation. Others, like Sean Parker and Ram Shriram, had parlayed early success

…

Hillary Clinton’s corner, becoming a reliable source of campaign cash and policy advice. The singular exception to that trend was a highly visible one: Peter Thiel, who overcame his long disdain for the mess of electoral politics to come out publicly in favor of Trump’s renegade bid for the White

…

,” in Keeping the Edge: Managing Defense for the Future, ed. Ashton B. Carter, John Patrick White (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001), 130–63. 22. Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” The Cato Institute, April 13, 2009. 23. Rachel Riederer, “Libertarians Seek a Home on the High Seas,” The New Republic

…

, archived at https://perma.cc/T493-FALD. 6. Tim Wu, tweet, 5/24/2018 8:14AM; Regis McKenna, interview with the author December 3, 2014. Peter Thiel believed in this market-definition-and-domination strategy so strongly that he co-wrote a book on the subject, Zero to One: Notes on Startups

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac · 17 Sep 2024

.com could take on the big credit card corporations, Musk found himself preoccupied with another competing start-up called Confinity. Its founders, Stanford University alums Peter Thiel, Max Levchin, and Luke Nosek, had developed a product called PayPal that allowed people online to email each other money. For a while, Confinity was

…

bankers approached, however, forked over checks. Founders Fund, the venture fund founded by Peter Thiel, Musk’s PayPal cofounder and frenemy, was among the tech investors who seemed unimpressed by the venture. Thiel was not a fan of Twitter. “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters,” Thiel famously once said, mocking Twitter’s original value proposition. His firm passed

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 · 12 Jan 2016 · 1,104pp · 302,176 words

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

…

/plane never happened, and in fact high fuel costs caused many local helicopter short-haul aviation companies to shut down.43 As Peter Theil quipped, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” THE INVENTIONS THAT ARE NOW FORECASTABLE Despite the slow growth of TFP recorded by the data of the decade since 2004, commentators view the future