Peter Andreas Thiel; genus. in 1967 American) is a German-born businessman, investor and hedge fund manager.
Biography
PayPal Co-Founder
Together with Max Levchin, he founded the PayPal payment system and was its CEO.
2004: Facebook's first external investor
Thiel was Facebook's first outside investor, buying a 10.2% stake in it in 2004 for $500,000, later joining Facebook's board of directors.
Peter Thiel was also one of the first investors to invest in Spotify.
Later:
- president of Clarium Capital, a macro-investing hedge fund;
- managing partner at Founders Fund, a $250 million venture capital fund he co-founded with Ken Howry and Luk Nozek in 2005;
- co-founder and chairman of the investment committee of Mithril Capital Management.
Lives in California in the city of San Francisco.
2011: Net worth $1.5 billion
In 2011, he was 293rd on the Forbes 400 list with a fortune of $1.5 billion in March 2012.
Supporter of the creation of the CIA venture fund and co-founder of Palantir
Peter Thiel is associated with the US defense sector. Thiel was an early proponent of In-Q-Tel , a CIA venture capital fund that invested in technology for the intelligence community. It was thanks to these connections that Palantir, in which Thiel co-founded, received support and contracts from the special services at the start.
Funding the Libertarian Experimental Floating City
Thiel later funded a project by the Seasteading Institute group to create an experimental floating city in which life would be arranged in accordance with the ideas of libertarianism. Seasteading Institute received $1.25 million. The founder of the Seasteading Institute is Patri Friedman, the grandson of prominent Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman. His idea is to create on floating platforms located in international waters, outside the jurisdiction of any states of the world, a new society based on libertarian ideas formulated in the works of Ayn Rand. Among the projects are platforms with a displacement of 12,000 tons, designed for 270 people. They will be able to independently move by sea and unite in even larger cities.
Meeting with British Prime Minister Johnson and getting contracts with the National Health System
Boris Johnson became Prime Minister of Britain on July 24, 2019, and on August 28, 2019, he and his assistant Dominic Cummings held a secret meeting with billionaire Peter Till. The event was marked "private" and removed from the official lists that members are required to provide pravitelstva.
Consequences of the meeting:
- A few months later in 2020, Palantir received a contract from the national health system (NHS) for one pound (the amount is a formality necessary under English law for the contract to come into force).
- This was followed by a £23m contract in December 2020 to manage the NHS data warehouse.
- Another contract for the creation of an integrated data platform worth about 330 million funtov.
The meeting with Thiel came during a period when Cummings promoted companies using artificial intelligence to work with data in government agencies. And the Palantir executive himself has been an outspoken critic of the NHS, calling the organisation the reason "people are sick."
In 2022, the deputy director of the English department of the NHS, Harjit Dhaliwal, and the director of the department of information technology, Indra Joshi, left the civil service and took a job at Palantir, in which Peter Thiel is a shareholder.
2020: Isolation in a bunker for the COVID-19 pandemic
On April 20, 2020, it became known about the departure of billionaires from Silicon Valley to New Zealand in order to hide from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic in bunkers. This was announced by Gary Lynch, CEO of Texas-based Rising S, a manufacturer of bunkers, bomb shelters and armored trailers. Read more here.
2023: Decision on cryopreservation after death
In early May 2023, German-American businessman Peter Thiel, one of the founders of the PayPal payment system, announced that his body would be preserved after death using deep freezing technology. Thus, in the future, subject to the emergence of an appropriate opportunity, descendants will have a chance to resurrect the billionaire.
Cryopreservation is based on the assumption that recorded brain death could theoretically be reversible. It is assumed that with the emergence of fundamentally new technologies, people stored at very low temperatures can be brought back to life.
Thiel, whose fortune is estimated at $8.31 billion, has contributed to research in the field of combating aging for decades, and has also shown interest in cryopreservation technologies. His fund, in particular, in April 2023 invested in the startup Cryopets, which intends to offer services to freeze dead pets with an eye to a possible subsequent resurrection.
The PayPal founder said he would invest billions in biotechnology if he could find the right people to tackle global health challenges. According to him, people spend resources on conflict and debate, whereas other problems should be focused, such as cancer treatment. Asked whether death could be defeated, Thiel replied that humanity had not even tried to do so. At the same time, he is not fully sure that the cryopreservation technology will ever work as its concept suggests.
 | I think about it more in an ideological way. I don't fully expect the technology to work, but I believe we should try to do that. We need to either defeat death, or at least find out why this is impossible, "said Peter Thiel.[1] |  |
2025
Access to a large amount of data through government contracts Palantir
Peter Thiel, a venture Palantir capital investor and co-founder, has established himself not only as a visionary entrepreneur, but also as the architect of a new political reality. In recent years, Thiel and his inner circle - immigrants from the so-called "-PayPal mathia" and related venture capital funds - have taken strategically important positions in the infrastructure of the American government.
A special place on this network is occupied by JD Vance, US Vice President on Donald Trump's team and Thiel's former protégé. Vance became a symbol of the "new wave" of the MAGA elite: its political rise was impossible without the financial and organizational support of Thiel. But Vance is just one of many. The administration's 2025 personnel policy is increasingly reminiscent of casting among graduates of technology startups and investment funds, rather than traditional political institutions.
Who else is on Thiel's protege list?
- Charlie Kirk - the founder of Turning Point USA, a political activist who actively promotes technocratic and right-wing conservative ideas among young people, shot dead in 2025;
- Christopher Luttner is a technology adviser who previously worked at Apple and; Tesla
- Peter Navarro is an economic adviser to USA Donald Trump the president, supporting a course towards integrating the private sector into public functions.
Companies with ties to Thiel and his team are getting billions in government contracts. Palantir, for example, has become a key contractor for federal agencies on data processing and analysis, integration of personal information databases and national security. Such contracts not only generate billions in profits, but also allow the private sector to control critical elements of public infrastructure. In fact, technology companies headed by Thiel and his like-minded people are becoming not only service providers, but also full-fledged entities of power.
Surveillance, analytics and predictive modeling systems developed by Palantir and similar structures are being implemented in law enforcement agencies, intelligence services and even civilian departments. This allows the private sector to accumulate data arrays that are previously inaccessible to anyone other than the state.
Sale of stake in Nvidia
Peter Thiel's hedge fund Thiel Macro LLC sold its entire stake in Nvidia (537,742 shares, about $100 million) in the third quarter. The decision follows a similar move by SoftBank and reflects investor concerns about a possible bubble in AI.
Thiel Macro is now focused on investments in Apple, Microsoft, a reduced stake in Tesla and AI startups including Substrate, Mercor and Cognition AI.
Notes
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