Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life

By Richard Byrne Reilly

Investigative journalist Richard Byrne Reilly has published the first biography of Peter Thiel, the controversial billionaire and contrarian behind some of the world's most powerful and disruptive technology companies. "Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life," an unauthorized microbiography published as an eBook, illuminates the world view of the man who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, became both the first outside investor in Facebook and the first institutional investor in the newly-legalizing marijuana industry, and is now a pledged Donald Trump delegate. "Players, Companies, Life" recounts the board meeting where Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo's $1 billion offer for Facebook; proffers Thiel's brutal appraisals of tech giants; and tells how a chess grand master's strategy inspired his approach to investing. Above all, Players is an inspiring blueprint on the value of optimism -and how to attain your goals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Byrne Reilly
• Release date: May 16, 2016
• ISBN: 9781533726667

Richard Byrne Reilly

Richard Byrne Reilly is an award-winning investigative journalist and author who has covered technology, venture capital, security, intelligence, military, celebrity and crime. His work has appeared in the National Enquirer, New York Magazine, the New York Post, FoxNews.com, the San Francisco Examiner, Red Herring, VentureBeat, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and many European publications. "Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life," an unauthorized microbiography of the tech entrepreneur in his own words, is Reilly's second book. His first, "The Frigate Bird," a spy thriller set in northern Massachusetts with cover art by Raymond Pettibon, was released in 2013. A Bay Area native, he lives on California's Central Coast.

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Richard Bryne Reilly

Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life

The unauthorized microbiography of technology’s greatest entrepreneur

Copyright 2016 © Richard Bryne Reilly

Art by John Ritter @ ritterillustration.net

All rights reserved

richardbyrnereilly.com

Typeset with love by reedsy.com

For Stephie. Much love and thanks for the save.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

I. PLAYERS

Elon Musk

Steve Jobs

Technologists

Tim Cook

Marissa Mayer

Edward Snowden

Bitcoin

Mark Zuckerberg

Warren Buffet

Vladimir Putin

Hollywood

Sean Parker

China

Ronald Reagan

Eric Schmidt

Reid Hoffman

Carl Icahn

Cleantech

Hillary Clinton

Democracy

Techwomen

Jesus Christ

Eduardo Saverin

II. Companies

Palantir

Tesla

California

PayPal

Microsoft

Apple

Rocket Internet

Amazon

Groupon

Facebook

NSA

Alibaba

Friendster

Uber

SpaceX

Twitter

IBM

College Inc.

HBO’s Silicon Valley

Lyft

III. Life

Frozen after death

Billionaire

Lawyer

Outsider

How to lose money

Big mistake

Personal wealth

Luck

Artificial Intelligence

Happiness

Drugs

Biggest fear

Buzzwords

Big data and cloud computing

Coding

Architects

Libertarian

The next bubble

Big on biotech

Competition

The Valley

Failure

Mission focus

Endgame

About the Author

Foreword

The entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel is quietly and publicly building the future he would prefer in the companies he builds and funds and the causes he supports. The cofounder of PayPal, the Silicon Valley company that invented online payments, and Palantir, a spookily prescient data analysis firm with ties to the United States Intelligence Community. Thiel was also the first outside investor in Facebook.

Through his venture firm Founders Fund and hedge fund Clarium Capital, he has pursued a singular idea: that technology can solve big problems in novel ways, replacing tired ways of doing business with elegant and more efficient solutions. Thiel rejects the small-mindedness of most of the Valley’s entrepreneurialism. The motto of Founders Fund is: We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

But Thiel is not satisfied with successful, albeit ambitious, investments that expand human possibilities by allowing us to do new things. He studied 20th-century philosophy, and later law at Stanford, and he is committed to a Left Coast cyber-libertarianism that seeks to encourage businesses to flourish.

He also has invested in a variety of eccentric, religio-technological causes including antiaging research that seeks to deliver us from dying, and machine learning research that advances the so-called Singularity, a science fiction scenario, positing all human history is rushing toward a moment where the capacities of artificial intelligences exceed the capacities of humans.

German by birth, and gay (although deeply ambivalent about being identified as such, except as a matter of fact), he has reliably supported Republican candidates in presidential and state elections. He funds the Thiel Fellowship, whose sole purpose is to give talented undergraduates enough money to drop out of prestigious universities.

Thiel is almost impossible to categorize or pin down. But the talented journalist and novelist Richard Byrne Reilly has hit up on the best approach to capturing the technologist’s restless, critical, original intelligence by letting Thiel speak for himself. In Players, Companies, Life, Reilly has created an innovative, impressionistic cut-up of a biography, allowing Thiel to tell his story in his own words.

In sixty-seven short chapters, Reilly provides just enough crucial context before allowing Thiel to explain

Reviews for Peter Thiel

[Nabil Kania · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Thiel is the best. fun read. I liked it a lot.