The Monopolist

He was born Peter Andreas Thiel on October 11, 1967, in Frankfurt, West Germany. His family emigrated to South Africa for two years and then to Foster City, California. He read philosophy at Stanford as an undergraduate, founded The Stanford Review in 1987 as a libertarian rebuke to the campus left, earned his Stanford Law J.D. in 1992, and in December 1998 co-founded Confinity — the company that would, after its merger with Elon Musk's X.com, become PayPal. He sold PayPal to eBay in 2002, founded the global-macro hedge fund Clarium Capital in 2002, co-founded the secretive defense-and-intelligence software company Palantir Technologies in 2003, made the first outside investment in Facebook in August 2004 ($500,000 for 10.2 percent), founded Founders Fund in 2005, and funded a 2016 Hulk Hogan invasion-of-privacy lawsuit that drove Gawker Media into bankruptcy.

Sterling Aldridge's biography traces the arc with the documentary patience the subject's network requires. The book covers the Frankfurt-South Africa-California childhood, the Stanford years and the René Girard mimetic-desire intellectual education, the Confinity-PayPal founding and the long mafia of co-founders that would build half of post-2000 Silicon Valley, the Clarium years and the long-bond bet, the Palantir building of the post-9/11 intelligence-software apparatus, the 2009 Education of a Libertarian manifesto, the Thiel Fellowship that pays college-age applicants $100,000 to drop out, the 2016 Republican National Convention speech that broke ranks with the Silicon Valley consensus, the Gawker case, the long alliance with JD Vance from the Founders Fund principal years onward, and the current 2026 quiet of the Maui hilltop home.

What emerges is a portrait of the German-born American venture capitalist whose network has, more than any other living person's, shaped both the modern Silicon Valley and the modern American right.