Peter Thiel (b.1967,) in full Peter Andreas Thiel, is a German-American entrepreneur, investor, and business executive. He was a co-founder of the e-commerce payments company PayPal and the data analysis company Palantir Technologies.
Born in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, Thiel moved to the United States when he was one. He studied philosophy at Stanford University and attended Stanford’s law school. Soon after graduation from law school, Thiel published The Diversity Myth (1992) about alleged political intolerance at Stanford.
In 1998, Thiel co-founded Confinity, which was designed to handle payments between Palm Pilots. In 1999, Confinity merged with entrepreneur Elon Musk’s X.com to create PayPal, and Thiel became its CEO and chairperson. In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal and Thiel became a multimillionaire. He subsequently invested in many startups, notably Facebook, and established the hedge fund Clarium Capital Management. In 2004, Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies, a data analytics firm.
Thiel’s funds have invested in such companies as Airbnb, Lyft, and Musk’s SpaceX. Thiel’s philanthropic initiatives have focused on artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship, life extension, and seasteading. Thiel also published Zero to One (2014) based on his ‘Startup at Stanford University’ class.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Peter Thiel
I suppose the basic intuition that I have about it is very simply, this is a world in which there is a possibility of things going extraordinarily well or extraordinarily badly, where both the good things and the bad things are bigger than people think.
—Peter Thiel
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