The story of how one of Silicon Valley's dark princes made his billions and wields his influence. Peter Thiel is not a name as well known as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, yet he's had considerable influence in the tech world and has attempted to push his ideas into the sphere of politics. Born in West Germany in 1967, his family moved to the United States the following year. A mathematics wiz and chess aficionado, he studied philosophy at Stanford University. His literary influences included Tolkein and Ayn Rand. He soon got involved in campus culture wars through the university's newspaper, The Stanford Review, which Thiel co-founded. The paper's bugbears were political correctness and identity politics, but some of the articles pushed boundaries into racism, sexism and homophobia. After Stanford, Thiel went into law, but soon got bored and dropped out of the corporate world. Instead he co-founded PayPal, the electronic payments system that revolutionised online shopping. Thiel was never really a technologist; investing was his true calling. His investments (including an early bet on Facebook, giving him a 10.2% stake in the company and a place on the board) made him a billionaire many times over. So much wealth, one would think, would result in overwhelming joy, but Thiele remained restless and continued his Stanford University culture wars. When gossip blog Gawker outed Thiel as gay, he sought revenge by suing the media outlet through various proxies, keeping his involvement secret. He would eventually bankrupt Gawker. It was seen by some as deeply disturbing that a billionaire investor could shut down a media company, seemingly at whim. Thiele's far right activities reached their peak when he met political strategist Steve Bannon and gained entry into Trump's circles. He would publicly endorse Trump at one of his rallies and donate one million dollars to his campaign. Business journalist Max Chafkin has called his biography of Thiel The Contrarian. This is due to his subject's ability to hold various competing (or flat out contradictory) positions at the same time. As Chafkin writes: “How exactly could a hedge fund guy who was effectively shorting the American economy also be a wide-eyed futurist? What kind of libertarian sold spy technology to the CIA? What kind of gonzo risk taker says no to an early investment in Tesla?” The Contrarian reads as both a jaw-dropping biography of a cold nihilist and a well researched history of Silicon Valley, its personalities, energy and ethos. So many tech companies started out as sunny, optimistic, idealistic outfits, promoting themselves as striving to make the world a better place. But as they grew and became more powerful, businesses like Facebook and Google would start courting authoritarian regimes like China. (Mark Zuckerberg requested President Xi Jinping name his unborn child at a White House dinner.) A powerful book that raises a lot of questions about the power of technology and the lack of accountability surrounding it. The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power, by Max Chafkin. Bloomsbury. $29.99 Review by Chris Saliba Comments are closed.
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