The Contrarian

Peter Thiel built his reputation on being right when the consensus was wrong. Max Chafkin argues that the contrarian image has hidden a calculating operator who uses money, networks and ideology to bend institutions toward his own ends, from PayPal, Facebook, Palantir and Founders Fund to the secret financing of the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker and his move into national politics.

Chafkin is a features editor and technology reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek whose work has also appeared in Fast Company, Vanity Fair and The New York Times Magazine. Yahoo Finance's reviewer noted how many sources would speak only anonymously for fear of retaliation. The New York Times called the book judicious and diligent and said it is also a story about Silicon Valley's political coming of age. The Times Book Review found it chilling.

The book is openly critical. Publishers Weekly praised it as engrossing but said the effort to expose Thiel's influence sometimes becomes overheated. Readers wanting a neutral account of Thiel's investing ideas should also read his own Zero to One, or Jimmy Soni's The Founders for the PayPal years.

For investors it shows how a small network of founders and funders, the so-called PayPal Mafia, came to control capital, companies and political access in the tech economy.

1. Contrarianism is a brand as well as a strategy. Thiel's best bets went against consensus, but Chafkin shows that the reputation for independent thinking also served as marketing for his funds and his politics.
2. Networks compound like capital. The PayPal alumni and Stanford Review circle gave Thiel deal flow, board seats and political allies for decades.
3. Litigation finance can be a weapon. Funding the Gawker lawsuit in secret showed how a determined billionaire can use the courts to destroy a media critic.
4. Government is a market. Palantir's growth through defense, intelligence and immigration-enforcement contracts shows how much Silicon Valley money now depends on Washington.
5. Power-law winners shape the rules. A few large venture wins gave Thiel the resources to pursue influence well beyond technology.

The book opens in 2016, with Thiel helping Mark Zuckerberg manage conservative anger at Facebook just as he prepares to back Donald Trump. It then tells his life chronologically.

1. Origins. Thiel's immigrant family, his years as a competitive chess player, and Stanford, where he co-founded the Stanford Review and built a network of ideological allies. A brief career in law and finance follows.
2. PayPal. He co-founds the company, fights for control and wins, takes it public, and sells it to eBay in 2002. The PayPal alumni network becomes the core of his influence.
3. Investor. Thiel makes his early bet on Facebook and starts Palantir and Founders Fund. He runs a hedge fund, Clarium Capital, and becomes the voice of a contrarian philosophy for founders.
4. Fringe and feud. He backs seasteading, life extension and the Thiel Fellowship, and secretly funds Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker, which ends with the site's bankruptcy in 2016.
5. Power. He speaks at the 2016 Republican convention, joins Trump's transition, and builds influence through Palantir's government contracts and political donations. Chafkin closes on Thiel's support for a new generation of right-wing candidates.

A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial, and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business, and politics Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of our contemporary way of life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, including funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president in 2016. Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy--