Peter Thiel is worth about $8 billion, per Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.
Billionaire Peter Thiel said he had $50 million in Silicon Valley Bank when it collapsed.
With a net worth of $8 billion, he’s among Silicon Valley’s most successful venture capitalists.
Here’s a look at his colorful life, from cofounding PayPal to setting up the Founders Fund.
Peter Thiel, 55, was born in Germany but his family came to the US when he was one year old. He moved to Foster City, California, when he was in fifth grade.
Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Source: Britannica
While studying philosophy and law at Stanford, Thiel founded a newspaper called The Stanford Review to take aim at the university’s emphasis on political correctness.
RuslanKaln/Getty Images
Source: Britannica
Thiel became a world-ranked chess player at a young age and the game even inspired some of his business strategies.A chess board
Getty Images
Source: GQ.
Before moving into the tech sector, Thiel worked as a clerk for an appeals judge. He had interviews to clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Antonin Scalia, but wasn’t successful.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Source: Business Insider
After working as a securities lawyer for seven months, Thiel became a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse and made enough money to launch PayPal with Max Levchin.
MediaNews Group/Bay Area News via Getty Images
Source: Insider
PayPal later merged with Elon Musk’s payment company, X.com, before selling to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
AP
Source: CNet.
The same year PayPal was founded, Thiel coauthored a controversial book with David Sachs titled “The Diversity Myth” that challenged what he called political correctness in education.
Getty / Chip Somodevilla
Source: Amazon listing
The “PayPal Mafia,” including Keith Rabois, Elon Musk, David Sacks, and Reid Hoffman, went on to become wealthy angel investors.
Corbis/The Telegraph
Source: Insider
Thiel’s stake in PayPal netted him about $55 million, which he used to launch a hedge fund, Clarium Capital. It lost 90% of its assets by 2011.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for New York Times
Source: Bloomberg
In 2004, Thiel and Alexander Karp cofounded Palantir, which can sift through photos, videos and other data to detect criminality. It was based on Thiel’s idea of using financial industry fraud-detection software to monitor terrorist activity.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Source: Palantir, Insider
In 2004 Thiel became the first outside investor in Facebook by paying $500,000 for a 10% stake and joined the board.
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Source: Reuters
Soon afterwards, Thiel started his VC firm, Founders Fund, which aims to address “often difficult scientific or engineering problems.”
John Lamparski/Getty Images
Source: Founders Fund
In the 2010 film about Facebook, “The Social Network,” Thiel was played by Wallace Langham. Thiel reportedly disliked the portrayal.
Wallace Langham
Source: Reddit
In 2011, he launched the Thiel Fellowship, which gave $100,000 and two years of support to 20 applicants under the age of 20 so they could launch their companies.
Thiel Fellowship
Source: The Thiel Fellowship
He coauthored another book, called “Zero to One.” He explained the title by saying: “Every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.”
Amazon
Source: Insider
His mantra was to not copy existing ideas. “The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network.”
Taylor Hill/Getty Images
Source: Insider
Thiel wrote in a 2015 Reddit post that he aimed to live to be 120 years old and takes human growth hormone daily. He’s also expressed interest in getting blood transfusions from younger people to slow aging.
Scott Olson/Getty Images
Source: Reddit
In 2007, Thiel began a feud with Gawker after it published a story headlined “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” He responded by comparing the site to Al-Qaeda “in that it scares everybody.”
Medium
Source: PE Hub Network
In 2016, it was revealed that Thiel had been funding Hulk Hogan’s 2012 case against Gawker because he thought the site was a “bully.” He’d put about $10 million into similar cases against Gawker.
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Source: The New York Times
Gawker lost against Hulk Hogan, who sued after it published a sex tape featuring the wrestler, and shut down. Thiel’s position on Facebook’s board also came into question at the time.
Associated Press
Source: The New York Times
The billionaire backed Donald Trump in the 2016 election, which caused rifts with other Silicon Valley types.
Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Source: Insider
Reed Hastings, the former Netflix CEO and former Meta board member, emailed Thiel in 2016, condemning his support for Trump.
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Source: Insider
In his attempt to live longer, Thiel also signed up in 2017 with cryogenics company Alcor.
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Source: CNBC
In January 2018, Thiel spoke at Stanford about how Silicon Valley’s left-leaning ways were hindering progress, calling it “a one-party state.”
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Source: Stanford Daily
In 2018 he also backed the Seasteading Institute, which wanted to build self-sustained floating cities and experiment with different types of governments.
Blue Frontiers
Source: Insider
Thiel stepped down from the Meta board last year in a bid to support pro-Trump candidates in the 2022 midterms.
Godofredo A. Vásquez/ AP Photo
Source: The New York Times, Insider
In 2022, Thiel’s plans for a massive compound in New Zealand were rejected by the local government after complaints from environmental groups.
Screenshot via Netflix
Source: Insider
His fellowship program helped birth power players like Dylan Field, who founded design software firm Figma which Adobe acquired for $20 billion. But the fellowship also faced some controversies.
Courtesy of Dylan Field
Source: Insider
Some fellows, who were as young as 16, had never been in charge of their own finances and felt they were left adrift.
Thiel Fellowship
Source: Insider
Thiel told his portfolio companies to pull their funds from Silicon Valley Bank before it collapsed in March. He later said he had $50 million of his own money in a personal account at the bank.
Nikolas Liepins/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Thiel call for startups to withdraw their funds from SVB was blamed by some for adding momentum to the bank run that triggered the bank’s implosion.
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Source: Financial Times
He said his SVB account was frozen when regulators took control of the bank on March 10. He regained access to the funds it after regulators guaranteed all deposits.
Marco Bello/Getty Images
Source: Insider
Additional reporting by Prachi Bhardwaj and Taylor Nicole Rogers.
