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Peter Andreas Thiel; genus. in 1967 American) is a German-born businessman, investor and hedge fund manager.
Biography
Together with Max Levchin, he founded PayPal and was its CEO.
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 with assets worth about $700 million;
- managing partner at Founders Fund, a $250 million venture capital fund he 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.
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] |
State
In 2011, he was 293rd on the Forbes 400 list with a fortune of $1.5 billion in March 2012.
Philosophy
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.