Peter Thiel Hates a Copycat

The billionaire’s extreme contrarianism is the secret to his success.

- Sebastian Mallaby

This fall, Peter Thiel will celebrate his 54th birthday. He has already lived more lives than most mortals can imagine. He has been a Wall Street lawyer, a hedge-fund trader, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and a fabulously successful venture capitalist. The team he led at PayPal, the online-payments company he co-founded in 1998, is so influential in the Valley that its alumni are known as the “PayPal Mafia.” Zero to One, his provocative 2014 manifesto on innovation and start-ups, has sold more than 3 million copies globally. He was the most prominent tech titan to back Donald Trump in 2016 and remains a lavish supporter of Trumpish Senate candidates. Ambitious to avoid death, or at least postpone it, he has flirted with ideas for freezing brains for future reanimation and for transfusing the middle-aged with the blood of the young.

Thiel is, in other words, a gift to a biographer. Yet he also presents challenges. For one thing, he is a fierce guardian of his privacy: After the scurrilous blog Valleywag outed him as gay, Thiel financed a lawsuit that bankrupted its parent company, Gawker Media. For another thing, the profiler must decide which Thiel is the salient one—which of his many and varied pursuits cut to the essence of his character. And because biography aspires to capture not just the figure but the landscape—the life, but just as crucially the times—the author must also judge which of Thiel’s projects matter to the rest of us. Max Chafkin, a Bloomberg journalist, wrestles with these choices in The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power. The title hits the mark. The subtitle causes difficulties.