Peter Thiel is a libertarian from Germany
In the film The Social Network, he was portrayed as himself, by name. He praised the film as "poor in many ways". He also inspired the character Peter Gregory on the HBO series Silicon Valley. He liked this better. “I think an eccentric character is always better than a bad one,” he says.
Peter Thiel was born half a century ago in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany. When he was one year old, he and his family moved from Germany to the United States.
SUMMARY: Peter Andreas Thiel
Date and place of birth: October 11, 1967, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Address: 2140 Jefferson ST, San Francisco, CA 94123
Citizenship: German, American, New Zealand
Luck: $2,6 million (2017)
Contact person: 1 415 230-5800
Education: San Mateo High School, California, USA; Stanford University - Departments of Philosophy and Law
An experience: law firm employee, investment banker, founder of PayPal (1999), internet company investor, financial market investor
Interests: chess, mathematics, politics
As a child, he played the popular game Dungeons and Dragons and was fascinated by it. reader . His favorite authors were Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. He also loved the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. As an adult, he remembered that he had read The Lord of the Rings more than ten times in his youth. Six of the companies he later founded were named after Tolkien's books (Palantir Technologies, Valar Ventures, Mithril Capital, Lembas LLC, Rivendell LLC, and Arda Capital).
At school, he specialized in As a student at San Mateo High School, he won first place in the California state math competition. He was an exceptional chess talent - he ranked seventh in the American Chess Federation's under-13 rankings. After graduating from high school, he started study of philosophy at Stanford University, during which he founded "Stanford Review", a newspaper critical of political correctness. Later he visited law school Stanford. Shortly after graduating in 1992, he published The Diversity Myth (written with David Sachs) critical of political intolerance at the university.
While at university, Thiel met René Girard, whose theories greatly influenced his later views. Girard believed, among other things, that competition slows down progress because it becomes an end in itself—competitors are more likely to forget why they are competing and become more addicted to competition itself. Thiel applied this theory to his personal life and business ventures.
Paypal Mafia
After graduation, he applied for a job with the U.S. Supreme Court. He even talked about this with famous judges - Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. However, he was not hired. He held this position for a short time. court clerkbut soon moved to New York to work securities lawyer for Sullivan and Cromwell. After seven months and three days, he left the office, citing a lack of transcendent value in his work. Then, in 1993, he started working derivatives broker for currency options in Credit Suisse. When he again felt that his work lacked significant value, he returned to California in 1996.
Peter Andreas Thiel as a child
On the West Coast, Thiel witnessed the rise of the Internet and the personal computer, as well as a boom in the dot-com sector. With the financial support of friends and family, he was able to raise a million dollars create Thiel Capital Management and start a career as an investor. At the beginning, I fixed ... a loss of 100 thousand. dollars - after entering the unsuccessful Internet calendar project of his friend Luke Nosek. In 1998, Thiela became financially involved with Confinity, whose goal was to payment processing .
After a few months, Peter was convinced that there was room in the market for software that would solve the payment problem. He wanted to create a kind of digital wallet in the hope that internet customers would appreciate greater consumer convenience and security through the encryption of data on digital devices. In 1999, Confinity launched a service PayPal.
PayPal took off after a successful press conference. Shortly thereafter, representatives from Nokia and Deutsche Bank sent Thiel $3 million to grow the company using PayPal through PalmPilot devices. Through a merger in 2000 with Elon Musk's X.com financial company and mobile retailer Pixo, PayPal was able to expand its business into the wireless market, allowing users to transfer money using free registration and email instead of exchanging bank account information. Until 2001, he was engaged in PayPal over 6,5 million customers and expanded its services to private consumers and businesses in twenty-six countries.
The company went public on February 15, 2002, and was sold to eBay in October of that year for $1,5 billion. These deals made Thiel a multimillionaire. He quickly invested his money in new startups, the most famous of which turned out to be Facebook.
In 2004, our hero took part in the creation of a data analysis company - Palantir Technologies. Palantir technology, which allows for accurate data search and prevents outside surveillance, interested CIAкоторый subsidizes the companywhich has been the subject of controversy. It is not known to what extent Palantir's software allowed security services to be under surveillance on the Internet, so the company came under attack, especially after the Edward Snowden leaks. However, he denied accusations of providing tools to spy on American citizens, stressing libertarian views and Thiel's conscientiousness. It was assured that a security system was implemented in the company's products, which makes it unlikely that the services will be abused.
- Peter emphasized in 2013 in an interview with Forbes. -
The company has grown steadily since its founding and was valued at $2015 billion in 20, with Thiel being and still the largest shareholder in the company.
At that time, he was both successful and unsuccessful in the global financial market. He founded Clarium Capital Managementinvesting in financial instruments, currencies, interest rates, commodities and stocks. In 2003, Clarium reported a return on equity of 65,6% as Thiel correctly predicted a weaker US dollar. In 2005, Clarium posted another 57,1% gain, just as Thiel had predicted—this time, a rise in the dollar. However, in 2006 the losses were 7,8%. And then? Assets managed by Clarium, after achieving a yield of 40,3% in 2007, increased to more than $7 billion in 2008, but depreciated sharply due to the collapse of the financial markets in early 2009. for just 2011 million dollars, more than half of which was Thiel's own money.
In addition to Facebook, Thiel has been financially involved in the development of many other websites. Some of them are now very famous, others have long been forgotten. His investment list includes: LinkedIn, Slide, Booktrack, Friendster, Yammer, Rapleaf, Yelp Inc, Geni.com, Practice Fusion, Vator, Metamed, Powerset, IronPort, Asana, Votizen, Caplinked, Big Think, Quora, Stripe, Ripple, Lyft, Airnb and others.
Many of these startups were the work of his former colleagues at PayPal. Some even call Peter Thiel the "Don of the PayPal Mafia". Being the head of the "PayPal mafia", which includes such big players as Space X's Elon Musk or LinkedIn boss Reid Hoffman, gives a lot of influence and morals in Silicon Valley. Thiel is one of the most respected entrepreneurs and business angels in the world. His rather contradictory management methods shock some, delight others, but may surprise even more ... Thiel's political choice.
Trump is a triumph
Peter is one of the biggest and most prominent supporters of Donald Trump in the Valley, which - for this environment - is an unusual and isolated case. Before the 2016 presidential election, at the Republican National Election Convention, he spoke shortly before Trump himself, who was supposed to accept his party's nomination in the election. Thiel echoed the candidate's skepticism about the US military presence in the Middle East and praised his economic skills.
Knowing Thiel and American realities, you do not believe that Thiel's support for Trump's candidacy is disinterested. Many companies in which he is a shareholder could benefit from a new presidency, swept around, among other things, the assertion that the US political and economic system has been preserved in various systems. For example, SpaceX, whose biggest client is NASA (and backed by the Thiel Founders Fund since 2008), has long been at war with Boeing and the aviation industry. Many of Thiel's other ventures, including healthcare startup Oscar and education company AltSchool, are also working in areas that would benefit greatly from President Trump's deregulation announcement.
The entrepreneur sharply criticizes the US political system, believing that freedom and democracy are inherently incompatible. He funds research to prove that death is reversible and can be treated like a disease. Recently, Sam announced that he was not going to die. He is also funding the idea of establishing an experimental colony outside the US, free from government power. The Thiel Foundation is dedicated to supporting teenagers who would like to start their own business, rather than pursuing a higher education. This initiative is the expression of Thiel's extremely critical opinion of contemporary education.
Many consider him eccentric and a person with special rights (read: crazy). However, it is worth noting that supporting Trump in a situation where he is unlikely to be given the presidency turned out to be another worthwhile investment from Thiel. Being so involved in supporting this candidate, he once again hit the jackpot.