![]() ![]() His investment record is patchy, although it shows that he has always been good at getting out before the peak. Thiel isn’t a gifted geek, just someone who is good at spotting an opportunity. The strange thing is that the record doesn’t really support this hagiographical vision. In a way, The Contrarian is a chronicle of the evolution of a weird personality cult: the Thielverse, whose members, overwhelmingly, young, rightwing single males, worship their hero as someone gifted with godlike prescience and wisdom. They have also provided their hero with a cadre of devoted followers who have helpfully burnished his myth as he climbed the greasy pole to his current obscene wealth.Ĭhafkin is a terrific journalist and he has provided a detailed, impeccably researched account of this journey. The company’s early employees and investors became what the media came to call “the PayPal mafia” because they have parlayed their windfall profits into a number of other successful tech companies (with Thiel taking a cut nearly every time). It was the idea that launched PayPal, which grew rapidly because eBay users liked it, and was the start of Thiel’s rise to billionaire-hood, even though it lost money hand over fist and was rescued from insolvency by a “merger” with a similar outfit founded by Elon Musk. ![]() The idea was to use digital IOUs instead of dollars to buy stuff. But then he ran into Max Levchin, who had an idea for software that would enable personal computers to communicate with banks’ mainframe systems. While labouring in that arid wasteland, he co-authored a book, The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus, which brought him to the attention of the most poisonous segments of American conservatism and in a way launched him on the contrarian track that has since defined his life.Ībandoning his legal career, he tried to use his growing political notoriety to set up a hedge fund. In it, one finds the seeds of Thiel’s victim mentality, not at that stage as a gay man (that came later) but as a white, conservative, non-PC male.ĭespite that, though, he stayed on at Stanford’s law school before leaving to embark on what looked like a standard legal career. What particularly infuriated him was the university’s supposedly liberal, politically correct ethos and it led him to found the Stanford Review, a scabrously neo-reactionary little journal designed to troll liberals and their detested values. Thiel then went to Stanford, which he hated. In the Thielverse young, rightwing single males worship their hero as someone gifted with godlike prescience and wisdom But even then he was perceived as “inscrutable, distant and haughty”. At school, Thiel was a classic nerd and a formidable chess player (one of the best under-13 chess players in the US, apparently). His father was a mining expert and took the family to apartheid South Africa for a few years before returning to the US and settling in California. He was born in 1967 in Frankfurt to pious Christian parents and came to the US as a one-year-old. ![]()
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