The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power

Description

Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of our contemporary way of life, from the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Washington. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, including funding the lawsuit that destroyed the blog Gawker and strenuously backing far-right political candidates, notably Donald Trump for president in 2016. Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy. Introduction 1. Fuck You, World 2. A Strange, Strange Boy 3. Hope You Die 4. World Domination Index 5. Heinous Activity 6. Gray Areas 7. Hedging 8. Inception 9. R.I.P. Good Times 10. The New Military-Industrial Complex 11. The Absolute Taboo 12. Building the Base 13. Public Intellectual, Private Reactionary 14. Backup Plans 15. Out for Trump 16. The Thiel Theory of Government 17. Deportation Force 18. Evil List 19. To the Mat 20. Back to the Future Epilogue: You Will Live Forever Photographs Acknowledgments Notes Image Credits Index About the Author