Peter Thiel's Origin Story His ideology dominates Silicon Valley.

[LessAspin]

2. Who's Afraid of Peter Thiel?

Link to tweet

Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel is famous for destroying media outlets, not paying taxes, and being a conservative tech billionaire. A new biography, The Contrarian, suggests that he is after more than riches. TIME chatted with its author, journalist Max Chafkin.

Why should we care about Peter Thiel, apart from the fact that he is another rich tech billionaire and they’re all weirdly fascinating?
I think that Peter Thiel is secretly the most important person in Silicon Valley. He’s this behind the scenes player, who is behind so many of the really important things that have happened over the last two decades. Obviously Facebook is one of the world’s largest companies; a lot of people think it’s uniquely bad for the world. And a lot of people are super skeptical of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO. And of course, Thiel is behind Facebook. He was the first outside money in the company. He is also the person who basically set up Mark Zuckerberg to be Mark Zuckerberg and turned him into this imperial CEO, who is now, arguably more powerful than a lot of world leaders.

A lot of people are really excited about cryptocurrency and you can connect it back to to PayPal, which is the company that Thiel co-founded in the late 1990s with an explicitly libertarian ethos. There’s this aspect of crypto-world now, where people are really excited about the idea of taking power away from institutions and governments and that’s something that Thiel and his libertarian brethren that were starting that company were really interested in. It’s not something that happens accidentally.

Do you see Thiel as dangerous?
It’s really important that we understand the ideology of Silicon Valley. Five of the top 10 companies in the world are tech companies. They exert an enormous cultural and economic influence over our lives. Those companies have been really successful at telling a story about the world and their place in the world: we’re just trying to make the world a better place. Thiel comes with a very different perspective. He comes out of activist conservative media. I think it’s really important that we explore the ideology of what somebody like Peter Thiel believes. When you start peeling back the layers, what you find is this very out-there political and economic philosophy that I think is a little bit scary.

What do you find scary about his economic and political philosophy?
It’s bordering on fascism. Thiel taught this class at Stanford and then turned it into a book called Zero to One. He talks about how companies are better run than governments because they have a single decision maker—a dictator, basically. He is hostile to the idea of democracy. That’s pretty scary when you consider the role the companies that he’s been involved in play. Facebook, I’d say is the most influential media entity in the history of humanity, but he also has a major stake in several defense contractors, including SpaceX...

https://time.com/6092844/peter-thiel-power-biography-the-contrarian/

Larry Ellison joins Peter Thiel in Trump's camp