Into the ‘Thielverse’
As the first wave of the pandemic swept the United States last year, the country’s billionaire doomsday preppers were expected to put their plans into action.
Peter Thiel, the vastly wealthy co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, still had time to board his private jet and escape to his house overlooking Lake Wakatipu in Queenstown.
A New Zealand citizen since 2011, Thiel had long anticipated global collapse. He’d even made massive financial bets on it. Here was his chance to ride out the crisis and emerge unscathed to build the libertarian utopia he’d always dreamed of. But, as is so often the case in Thiel’s life, his contrarian instincts led him elsewhere, to Hawaii, where he laid low at one of his other lavish properties, an oceanfront mansion on Maui.
Rather than live up to his prepper image, says Max Chafkin, the features editor at and author of , a new biography on Thiel, the entrepreneur saw opportunity amid the on a Zoom call from his home in New York. “But at the end of the day, a lot of what he has done is easily explained through the norms of capitalism. He’s just trying to make money.”
