Peter Thiel is perhaps the most important influence in the world’s most influential industry. chafkin reports on how his ideology began to form when he was an angry young man
Peter Thiel at Stanford. Photo: Courtesy the author Sometime around the spring of 1988, several members of the Stanford University chess team traveled to a tournament in Monterey, California, in an old Volkswagen Rabbit. To get across the Santa Cruz Mountains, they took California’s Route 17, a four-lane highway that is regarded as one of the state’s most dangerous because of its tight curves, bad weather, and wild-animal crossings.
Unbelievably, the trooper seemed to accept this. He told Thiel to slow down and have a nice day. Even more unbelievably: As soon as he drove out of sight, Thiel hit the gas pedal again, just as hard as before. To his astonished passengers, it was as if he believed that not only did the laws of California not apply to him — but that the laws of physics didn’t either. “I don’t remember any of the games we played,” said the teammate who was riding shotgun, a man who is now in his 50s.
The ideas were out there, but they were, undeniably, different. For decades, Silicon Valley had been dominated by the mythology of Steve Jobs. The acid-dropping hippie CEO had argued that technology could be a form of creative expression, and he convinced a generation of entrepreneurs that they should invent products that would improve the lives of their customers.
Peter Thiel was not a popular boy. In the middle-class San Francisco suburb of Foster City, his high-school classmates were awed by his intelligence but found him inscrutable and haughty — qualities that made him a target for abuse. “It’s obvious in retrospect that what we were doing was bullying,” one of his regular tormentors told me. “I’ve always thought he might have a list of people he’s going to kill somewhere and that I’m on it.
Thiel’s newspaper was also fixated on sex. The first issue featured a satirical column, “Confessions of a Sexual Deviant,” about a young straight man who’d chosen to be celibate. According to the Review, it was almost impossible to visit a men’s restroom without witnessing a gay sex act or to cross the quad without having fistfuls of free condoms pressed into your hand.
Once you got money via PayPal, you could transfer your balance to a bank. Or you could keep the funds inside PayPal and use them to pay other people. This, Thiel realized, made the service a kind of untrackable digital currency. It was the equivalent of a Swiss bank account in one’s pocket, he believed, boasting to a Wired reporter that it could lead to “the erosion of the nation-state.
Thiel left shortly after the merger. “I wouldn’t say we’re oil and water, but there are some pretty big differences,” Musk, who became CEO, told me. “Peter likes the gamesmanship of investing — like we’re all playing chess. I don’t mind that, but I’m fundamentally into doing engineering and design. I’m not an investor. I feel like using other people’s money is not cool.
Under Thiel, PayPal’s willingness to disregard banking rules became a key strategic advantage. Financial institutions are required to verify that customers are who they say they are by checking identifications, but PayPal, which contended it wasn’t technically a bank, made little effort to do so. It also did little to stop people from using the money they put into their accounts for illicit purposes.
Clearview assembled its gargantuan database of faces by scraping photos from Facebook profiles, which Facebook considers a violation of its terms of service. Johnson told me that when he raised money from Thiel, he presented Clearview as both a promising business and as a backdoor way to “destroy” Facebook by exposing its lax privacy standards. Thiel, who as a Facebook board member has a duty to act in the company’s best interests, invested in Clearview anyway.
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