Peter Thiel: Paypal mafioso

Summary

Good Bad Billionaire: Episode Summary – Peter Thiel: PayPal Mafioso

Released on December 2, 2024 by BBC Radio 5 Live

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Introduction

In the climactic episode of the current series of Good Bad Billionaire, hosts Simon Jack and Zing Tsjeng delve deep into the life and legacy of Peter Thiel, a figure often shrouded in controversy and intrigue. Known as the "Dungeon Master," Thiel's journey from a young chess prodigy to a billionaire investor and political influencer provides a compelling narrative that the hosts critically examine to determine whether he is good, bad, or just another billionaire.

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Early Life and Education

Peter Thiel was born in 1967 in Frankfurt, Germany, before relocating to Cleveland, USA, at the age of one. His early childhood was marked by frequent moves due to his father's career as a chemical engineer, exposing him to various cultures, including a stint in apartheid-era South Africa. This nomadic lifestyle led him to attend seven different elementary schools.

At the age of ten, Thiel and his family settled in Foster City, a suburb in the San Francisco Bay Area, an area that would later become the epicenter of his entrepreneurial ventures. Raised in a devout Christian household, Thiel maintained his faith throughout his life, stating, "Christianity is the prism with which I look through the whole world" (06:27).

Thiel's early fascination with death, stemming from a childhood experience at three years old, profoundly influenced his later pursuits. As he reflected, "I think seeing death as a problem that needs to be conquered and that can be conquered is very contrary and bizarre" (05:06).

Excelling academically, Thiel was a mathematics and chess prodigy, ranked seventh in the US at twelve. However, he abandoned competitive chess, citing the risk of losing touch with reality, an early indication of his complex relationship with societal norms.

He pursued higher education at Stanford University, earning a degree in philosophy before attending Stanford Law School. During his time at Stanford, Thiel became deeply immersed in libertarianism, influenced by Ronald Reagan and Ayn Rand. He co-founded and edited the Stanford Review, a conservative university newspaper, and authored the controversial book "Diversity, Multiculturalism, and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford" (09:04).

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Career Beginnings: PayPal and the PayPal Mafia

After graduating from Stanford Law School in 1992, Thiel briefly worked at a corporate law firm before experiencing a quarter-life crisis, which led him to become a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. His tenure there lasted three years, during which he honed his investment acumen.

In 1998, Thiel co-founded Confinity with Max Levchin, an electronic payment company that would later merge with Elon Musk's X.com to form PayPal. PayPal's innovative platform addressed the growing need for secure online transactions, becoming integral during the e-commerce boom despite burning through $180 million in funding (14:03).

Thiel's leadership played a pivotal role in PayPal's success, culminating in its 2002 IPO and subsequent acquisition by eBay for $1.5 billion. An unusual move, Thiel resigned on the day of the acquisition, cashing out with $55 million (22:07). This decision underscored his characteristic contrarianism and set the stage for his future endeavors.

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Entrepreneurial Ventures and Investments

Post-PayPal, Thiel focused on investment through his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, initially managing $10 million. His contrarian investment strategies earned him a reputation as a savvy investor, though the 2008 financial crisis severely impacted his fund.

Simultaneously, Thiel founded Palantir in 2004, a data analytics company named after a seeing stone from The Lord of the Rings. Despite his libertarian ideals aiming to reduce governmental oversight, Palantir became deeply entrenched with governmental contracts, including those with the CIA and NYPD, raising ethical questions about his true intentions (24:15).

In 2005, Thiel launched Founders Fund, a venture capital firm targeting high-risk, high-reward tech startups. Notably, he was the first outside investor in Facebook, investing $500,000 for a 10% stake, which significantly increased his wealth as Facebook grew exponentially (25:18).

Thiel's investment portfolio extended to companies like Lyft, Airbnb, LinkedIn, and SpaceX. However, his decision to sell 90% of his Facebook shares before its meteoric rise highlighted his complex investment philosophy, often driven by personal beliefs over market trends (32:02).

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Political Influence and Controversies

Thiel's foray into politics is marked by his staunch libertarian views intertwined with significant financial support for conservative causes. In 2016, he was one of the few Silicon Valley elites to back Donald Trump, aligning with his belief that technology could supersede traditional political structures. He served on Trump's executive transition team, and his support extended to funding candidates and political initiatives, including a dating app for Republicans, Right Staff (30:47).

His political maneuvers have sparked debates about his true motivations, with some sources suggesting his support for Trump was strategic, aiming to benefit his businesses like Palantir from government contracts. Thiel's dual role as a libertarian advocating for minimal government interference while enabling state surveillance through Palantir showcases inherent contradictions (24:39).

In a 2018 declaration, Thiel publicly renounced Silicon Valley, criticizing its "woke" culture and likening it to fundamentalist Islam, further polarizing his image within the tech community (31:43).

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Philanthropic Endeavors

Thiel's philanthropic efforts are unconventional, focusing on fostering technological advancement rather than traditional humanitarian causes. He established the Thiel Fellowship, awarding $100,000 to young entrepreneurs under 20 to drop out of university and pursue startups. Critics argue this undermines education, while supporters view it as a catalyst for innovation (39:08).

Additionally, the Thiel Foundation invests in futuristic projects like seasteading, life extension, and artificial intelligence, reflecting his desire to transcend current societal limitations. However, his philanthropic contributions are modest in proportion to his wealth, with Forbes estimating he has donated between 1% and 5% of his fortune (40:13).

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Judgment: Good, Bad, or Just Another Billionaire?

Wealth (7/10) Thiel's net worth stands at approximately $9 billion. While significant, it pales compared to other tech magnates. His strategic wealth management, including early exits from PayPal and Facebook, suggests a mix of savvy investment and perhaps missed opportunities. His lifestyle, marked by luxury cars and personal staff, is typical of billionaires, yet his quest for immortality through investments in life extension technologies adds a unique dimension (35:38).

Villainy (9/10) Thiel is often depicted as a modern-day supervillain. Publications like Vanity Fair and The New Yorker have labeled him a right-wing mogul with sinister undertones. His support for controversial political figures and companies like Palantir positions him as a polarizing figure who thrives on disrupting societal norms. His personal vendettas, such as funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against the gossip site Gorka, further cement his villainous image (37:36).

Philanthropy (1/10) Despite his innovative approach to philanthropy, Thiel scores low in this category. His contributions are seen as self-serving, focusing on advancing personal and technological agendas rather than addressing broader humanitarian issues. The focus on projects like seasteading and life extension overlooks immediate global challenges, resulting in a minimal philanthropic impact (39:59).

Power (9/10) Thiel wields considerable influence, both economically and politically. His ability to shape elections, support key political figures, and invest in pivotal tech companies underscores his significant power. His role in founding and funding influential institutions and companies demonstrates his capacity to impact global trends and policies (41:18).

Legacy (8/10) Thiel's legacy is likely to be multifaceted. He is poised to be remembered as a key architect of Silicon Valley's libertarian ethos and as an influential investor behind major tech successes. However, his contradictory actions, such as promoting minimal government while enabling surveillance, present a complex legacy that intertwines innovation with ethical ambiguities (42:06).

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Conclusion

Peter Thiel emerges as a bad billionaire in the eyes of the hosts, Simon Jack and Zing Tsjeng. His relentless pursuit of personal and technological advancement, often at the expense of societal well-being, aligns with the characteristics of a morally ambiguous figure whose actions foster both innovation and controversy. Thiel's legacy will be debated for years to come, reflecting his profound impact on technology, politics, and the ethical landscape of modern capitalism.

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Notable Quotes

• Peter Thiel on Death and Immortality:
  "I think seeing death as a problem that needs to be conquered and that can be conquered is very contrary and bizarre" (06:05).

• Thiel on PayPal's Security:
  "PayPal was the right product at the right time for the burgeoning e-commerce on the Internet" (16:26).

• Thiel on Technology vs. Politics:
  "We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism" (30:11).

• Simon Jack on Thiel's Philosophy:
  "He has a slight contempt for his fellow human beings. He thinks that most of us are lemmings or sheep or sheephole" (38:12).

• Thiel on Political Correctness:
  "We need to somehow recreate a frontier in which people can think for themselves" (04:41).

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Final Verdict

Bad Billionaire

Peter Thiel epitomizes the bad billionaire archetype through his strategic manipulations, controversial political affiliations, and philanthropic endeavors that often serve his own interests. While undeniably influential and innovative, his actions reveal a complex interplay of personal ambition and ideological rigidity that challenges conventional notions of ethical wealth management.

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This summary captures the essence of the "Peter Thiel: PayPal Mafioso" episode of Good Bad Billionaire, providing a comprehensive overview for listeners and interested individuals alike.

Transcript

[Simon Jack]

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the uk.

[Michael Lewis]

Hey there, it's Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite Moneyball, the Blind side and Liars Poker. On the latest season of my podcast, against the Rules, I'm exploring what it means to be a sports fan in America and what the rise of sports betting is doing to our teams, our states and ourselves. Join me and listen to against the Rules on America's number one podcast network, iHeartradio. Open your free iHeart app and search against the Rules. Listen to against the rules on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Simon Jack]

Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Each episode we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

[Singh Singh]

And then we judge them. Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

[Simon Jack]

I'm Simon Jack, the BB BBC's business editor.

[Singh Singh]

And I'm Singh Singh. I'm a journalist, author and podcaster.

[Simon Jack]

And this episode, the last of the current series, is a man who is probably the smartest person I've ever interviewed.

[Singh Singh]

Really? Well, we have to get into that because the thing that fascinates me most about Peter Thiel, whom we're talking about this episode, is the fact his nickname is the Dungeon Master.

[Simon Jack]

A very smart guy, no doubt got some very strange ideas about life, death, society, or the lack of it, and wants to live forever. He basically thinks he can keep himself alive till he's 120, by which time will have invented a keel for death.

[Singh Singh]

I mean, I don't want to live forever, I have to be completely honest. Especially not if it means spending the rest of eternity with someone called the Dungeon Master.

[Simon Jack]

No. Well, at 57, Peter Thiel is worth US$9 billion.

[Singh Singh]

He's also, by the way, made his fortune investing in some of the world's biggest, biggest tech companies. And that includes household names like Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify, and LinkedIn.

[Simon Jack]

He actually made an appearance. If you've seen the film the Social Network, he's in it.

[Singh Singh]

And actually, apart from Elon Musk, his name has probably come up the most.

[Simon Jack]

On the show, probably because of his involvement at early stages with some of those huge tech successes. In fact, we will tell the story of how he ousted his old friend at one time, Elon Musk, from their company, PayPal.

[Singh Singh]

Yeah, he's really, truly one of Silicon Valley's most intriguing characters and playing an increasingly important, important role in politics as well.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, we're trying to think who he would be in the billionaire cinematic universe. And I thought Dr. Strange.

[Singh Singh]

Oh, that's good, because he's not charismatic enough to be Tony Stark, is he?

[Simon Jack]

No, he's not. I think Elon Musk styles himself on Tony Stark. Like I say Dr. Strange for me.

[Singh Singh]

So what's he like in real life?

[Simon Jack]

He is clipped. He speaks in a very interesting metallic kind of voice, and he stutters a bit. Usually when you interview a CEO, they sort of trot out some corporate pattern that they've got. Exactly.

[Singh Singh]

Nonsense.

[Simon Jack]

Exactly. Whereas him, he goes, okay. And you can see his eyes scanning the horizon for the answer. So you really feel you're getting a bespoke, thought through answer from somebody who's thought a lot about these things.

[Singh Singh]

Interesting, because he does describe himself as a contrarian.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And a libertarian who's made billions from big state surveillance. And we'll get into what that means a little bit later on. He's an intellectual who says he hates politics, but seems to get stuck in quite a bit. He's one of Trump's biggest donors. He's been called a kingmaker.

[Singh Singh]

And speaking of living forever, he signed up to be cryogenically frozen in the hopes of his second coming.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Like I say, he's invested in a cure for aging and floating city states. That's right in tune with his idea of trying to escape what he sees as the harness of nation states. And get this, he'll even give you $100,000 if you drop out of university to launch a tech startup.

[Singh Singh]

He's also argued that diversity initiatives are, quote, very evil and very silly, and doesn't seem convinced that women being given the vote was an entirely good thing.

[Simon Jack]

So is he a genius freethinker at the impression he left on me when I spoke to him, what, 14 years ago? Or is he a libertarian bogeyman, an.

[Singh Singh]

Enemy of democracy, and does that make him good, bad, or just another billionaire?

[Simon Jack]

So here's a little clip of him with an interview he did with the BBC back in 2010. Have a listen. I think we are living in a world in which the problems of overbearing states have become very dominant and in which the problem of political correctness has become very acute. So I think we need to somehow recreate a frontier in which people can think for themselves. But let's go back to the beginning.

[Singh Singh]

Peter Thiel was born in 1967 in Frankfurt, Germany, but his family moved to Cleveland in the States when he was one, much like some of the other European billionaires that we've covered on the show, including George Soros and Sergey brin.

[Simon Jack]

Of course, Mr. Google. One of Peter's most vivid childhood memories apparently is when, aged just three, he first became aware of death. He was sitting on a cowhide rug in his parents apartment in Cleveland and asked where the rug came from and his parents said, a cow. What happened to the cow? It died. Peter's dad then revealed that death was something that happened to all cows. People too. Peter recalls. It was a very, very disturbing day. And he's been disturbed by it ever since.

[Singh Singh]

I mean, some kids get their bubble burst about Santa Claus, but this guy has to get it about death and mortality. I mean, it's quite intense.

[Simon Jack]

Well, let's have little listen to him. Here's Peter again talking about that very subject. So I think seeing death as a problem that needs to be conquered and that can be conquered is very contrary and bizarre because our entire culture is one where people have become complacent about it and they talk themselves into saying this has to happen anyway. And so it's something that I think we should start thinking about and instead of rationalizing it or ignoring it, we should fight it. Fight death. There we go. His father was a chemical engineer and his job meant the family moved several times while Peter was a child, including stints working for mining companies in Africa.

[Singh Singh]

All this meant that Peter attended seven different elementary schools, including an elite or white prep school during apartheid South Africa.

[Simon Jack]

In 1977, aged 10, the family settled back in the US in Foster City, a suburban community in the San Francisco Bay Area.

[Singh Singh]

You don't get more all American in a city called Foster City.

[Simon Jack]

No. And the Bay Area, Gosh, we spent a lot of time in the Bay Area. I think we should do a series.

[Singh Singh]

Episode recorded from the Bay Area. By this point, Peter's parents were devout Christians and Peter has by the way, remained a Christian his whole life, saying that Christianity is the prism with which I look through the whole world.

[Simon Jack]

Again, this is really odd if you think devout Christian who wants to cheat death. Are those two things consistent? I don't know.

[Singh Singh]

I mean you'd think if you're a Christian, you believe that when you die you go up to heaven, you're basically cheating yourself out of an eternity spent in heaven. Kicking back with Jesus.

[Simon Jack]

For young Peter, TV was banned until junior high school. That's when he's about 12 years old. But he found other ways to amuse himself.

[Singh Singh]

And this is the of the Dungeon Master nickname because Peter was your archetypal 80s geek. He loved science fiction. He played Dungeons and Dragons, the role playing game. And his favorite book was Lord of The rings, yeah.

[Simon Jack]

He was also skinny, socially awkward. He was a loner, which meant he was bullied.

[Singh Singh]

And kids can be really cruel. One of the things that they did to him was they put up for sale signs in his front lawn and asked when he'd be leaving town.

[Simon Jack]

I remember someone at my school didn't like our English teacher and put his house up for sale in the local newspaper and had people knocking on his door. It's an old trick anyway. But he was a maths and chess prodigy. By age 12, he was ranked seventh in the whole of the US at chess.

[Singh Singh]

In fact, his chess kit had a sticker on it saying born to win. And when he did occasionally lose, he would sweep the pieces off the board. And he later said, show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, what a little brat with a.

[Singh Singh]

Drive to win, though. You have to give him that.

[Simon Jack]

But he gave up competitive chess because in his words, taken too far, chess can become an alternate reality. Again, that's kind of an odd question because he's right behind some of the meta ideas to create a metaver this alternate reality in which one loses sight of the real world. My chess ability was roughly at the limit. Had I become any stronger, there would have been some massive trade offs with success in other domains in my life.

[Singh Singh]

Instead, during high school, he got into libertarianism. He was an admirer of Ronald Reagan and Red. Ayn Rand.

[Simon Jack]

Ayn Rand, I think is really important person, actually for several of these billionaires. Ayn Rand wrote a couple of books called the Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged. And a lot of people in finance and in entrepreneurialism use it as a bit of a bible. And roughly the philosophy is that rational self interest is the best way to proceed in life, making sure that you personally are fulfilling yourself to the nth degree and that all other things should get out of the way and that self interest is the highest moral purpose a human beings can have. And basically the government should just protect your right to pursue that.

[Singh Singh]

I was going to say it also kind of lines up really nicely with capitalism. Right?

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. I mean, Randism, if you like, is an extreme expression of free market capitalism.

[Singh Singh]

Unfortunately, Ayn Rand is no longer with us, so we can only really project what she might think of being so influential in the finance world and on libertarians like Peter. In 1985, he headed to Stanford University to study philosophy and he stayed on there to go to law school.

[Simon Jack]

Now, during that time at Stanford, again, an institution which made a lot of appearances in these stories, he made some important friends and future colleagues, like future LinkedIn co founder Reid Hoffman.

[Singh Singh]

Now, Peter and Reid would have intellectual discussion in which Peter would actually quote Margaret Thatcher saying, there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. He was also influenced by the French philosopher and Stanford professor Rene Girard's concept of mimetic desire in English. That is how people unconsciously learn to want the same thing as those around them.

[Singh Singh]

And Peter said at the time, thinking about how disturbingly herd like people become in so many different contexts. As an investor, entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against a crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.

[Simon Jack]

A very controversial figure. Classmates remember him describing South Africa's apartheid as a sound economic system, though a spokesman has denied that he supported apartheid.

[Singh Singh]

And while at Stanford, he was the president of the Stanford Federalist Society, a group for libertarians and conservatives.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. He also founded and edited a university newspaper. That's a good thing to do. It was called the Stanford Review. But it's a bit different from most university newspapers in the sense that it was very conservative. An early issue featured a front page on Professors who Are Closet Marxists.

[Singh Singh]

But in Max Chavkin's biography, he surmises that he'd chosen to reject those who'd rejected him after speaking to a classmate of his who remembered that he viewed liberals through a lens as people who were not nice to him.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. So is this just the kind of kid who got sand kicked in his face and vows revenge by taking on not them, but their values? Unlike some of his billionaires, he actually finished Stanford. And when he graduated from Stanford law School in 1992, he became an associate at a corporate law firm in New York.

[Singh Singh]

But he quit because he was turned down for a Supreme Court clerkship that he desperately wanted. And he described it as being the unhappiest period of his whole life, which lasted seven months and three days. Very precise.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. He described this period as a quarter life crisis. I didn't ask the question of why I was doing this nearly enough. In retrospect, I was too competitive.

[Singh Singh]

He then worked as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse for three years. I think you might have to unpack what derivatives are.

[Simon Jack]

Derivatives are the expected value of something at some time in the future. So if I know that I'm going to need lots and lots of orange juice or soybeans because I'm a food producer, I want to lock in the price I'm going to have to pay when I Take delivery of it. So I will buy the right to buy this at a certain price at some time in the future. Now, in the meantime, that contract can fluctuate depending on, let's say the soybean harvest fails and suddenly the price will shoot up. I still have the right as the buyer to buy it at the price I agreed. But you have lots of speculators who buy and sell these contracts because they fluctuate in value. That's a derivative trader.

[Singh Singh]

And that's what Peter was doing for all those years.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, and you can do it all sorts of things. Interest rates, stocks, bonds, all of them have derivative contracts associated with them.

[Singh Singh]

Clearly, though, working as a trader, Credit Suisse wasn't taking up all his time, because during this time he co authors an incendiary book called the Diversity, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford. Quite the mouthful.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. So culture wars raging, right. Back then. The book was critical of political correctness and multiculturalism in higher education.

[Singh Singh]

And Peter was arguing that the extreme focus on racism, as he put it, was responsible for creating even more social tension.

[Simon Jack]

And the co authors describe the term rape as sometimes including seductions that are later regretted.

[Singh Singh]

Oh, and this book is going to come back to haunt him. It also defended an incident at Stanford a few years earlier in which his fellow student, a man called Keith Raboy, tested the limits of free speech on campus by shouting homophobic slurs outside an instructor's home, including the words hope you die of aids.

[Simon Jack]

But Peter is actually gay. However, at the time of the book, he hadn't come out.

[Singh Singh]

Now, interestingly, he actually didn't come out to his own friends until 2003, when he was in his mid-30s. And he said to one friend, do you know how many people in the financial world are openly gay? He says he didn't want his sexual orientation to get in the way of his work.

[Simon Jack]

But he has apologized recently for what he wrote. He said in 2016, more than two decades ago. That was back in the 90s. I co wrote a book with several insensitive, crudely argued statements. And as I've said before, I wish I'd never written those things. I'm sorry for it. Rape in all forms is a crime. I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise.

[Singh Singh]

But let's go back to 1994. So it's Christmas and Peter's hanging out with his old pal Reid Hoffman, escaping the holiday rush and, you know, intellectually sparring and talking about Silicon Valley. Instead.

[Simon Jack]

They were thinking about all the different Tech companies that they could start and there was a sense that something important was happening. It made sense to try and do something there in that space.

[Singh Singh]

So by 1996, Peter quits Wall street and he moves back to the San.

[Simon Jack]

Francisco Bay area and he starts his first hedge fund. That's an investment fund which buys shares in companies and called it Thiel Capital Management.

[Singh Singh]

And through friends and family he raises a million dollars. Sounds quite a lot, but you know, in the grand scheme of things, not very large for a hedge fund. And he's ready to begin his career as an investor.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, in 1998, Peter meets a 23 year old Ukrainian born computer programmer who just arrived in the Bay Area. His name was Max Levchin and he'd heard Peter give a talk on currency trading at Stanford and they met for smoothies the next day. Very Californian.

[Singh Singh]

Now Peter was impressed with Max and he invested in his idea, becoming co founder and CEO of a company they called Confinity.

[Simon Jack]

And the idea was an electronic payment system designed to make E commerce, which was emerging at that time, easy, consistent and secure. They would eventually call that system PayPal.

[Singh Singh]

Yes, and that is exactly the PayPal that you're thinking of. And other investors were very soon brought round. At the launch party in 1999, Nokia invested $3 million, sending the money via PayPal through to Peter's PalmPilot.

[Simon Jack]

Who remembers a Palm Pil.

[Singh Singh]

I do not know what a Palm Pilot is.

[Simon Jack]

It was an early kind of Filofax, if you remember those from the 80s, which was a big binder with all the details in your calendar basically compressed into a digital device. These days everything a Palm Pilot would do would be a small app on your phone. But at that time it was seen as quite groundbreaking. And it's around this time that we could probably safely say that Peter Thiel is a millionaire. But what's he going to do with it?

[Singh Singh]

In fact, he's got several million into his PayPal account.

[Michael Lewis]

Hey there, it's Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite Moneyball, the Blind side and Liars Poker. On the latest season of my podcast against the Rules, I'm exploring what it means to be a sports fan in America and what the rise of sports betting is doing to our teams, our states and ourselves. Join me and listen to against the Rules on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search against the Rules. Listen to against the rules on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Simon Jack]

This was the early Days of the Internet. There was a period when people said, I'm not sure I want to punch my credit card or my debit card details.

[Singh Singh]

I remember my parents warning me about this, right.

[Simon Jack]

So people had a reluctance to do commerce on the Internet. They felt a little bit vulnerable. Systems like PayPal seemed to be a secure walled garden where you could do that with some degree of safety. So PayPal was the right product at the right time for the burgeoning e commerce on the Internet.

[Singh Singh]

And in fact, you can kind of clock this from the way Wired magazine, which is obviously the magazine, the cutting edge of technology, was describing it in 1999. An application that will allow individuals to quote beam sums of money between handheld devices such as mobile phones, palm Pilots and pages.

[Simon Jack]

As Peter promoted it at the time, all these devices will become one day, just like your wallet. Every one of your friends will become like a virtual miniature ATM.

[Singh Singh]

But for Libertarian Peter, there's another goal to PayPal. So he wanted to create the new world currency, a kind of web based currency, currency that has the potential to undermine government tax structures and could lead, as he put it, to the erosion of the nation state.

[Simon Jack]

A claim that some people make for bitcoin today. Basically getting you out of the supervision of central banks and nation states and sanctions and whatever. I don't know whether Peter Thiel has any bitcoin, but I'd be amazed if he doesn't.

[Singh Singh]

And if you want to learn more about bitcoin and cryptocurrency, you can find out more in an episode we've done about the FTX founder, Sam Bankman. Fried.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. So Peter and Max began recruiting like minded friends from their old universities, including, including 10 former Stanford review members, all.

[Singh Singh]

Of them maths geniuses, workaholics, no frat boys, no jocks. Also nobody with an MBA.

[Simon Jack]

Crucially, the culture was very anti establishment. A former PayPal chief financial officer said the difference between Google and PayPal was that Google wanted to hire PhDs while PayPal wanted to hire people who got into PhD programs and then dropped out.

[Singh Singh]

Rock on. But to make a success of it, they used some, shall we say, creative techniques that could be called growth hacking. Max created a bot to target ebay sellers posing as a potential buyer before telling them to set up PayPal in order to get paid.

[Simon Jack]

So yeah, I would pay you, but you've got to set up this account first.

[Singh Singh]

The early team actually became known as the PayPal mafia, with Peter as the don. And over the next decade, this group would go on to launch some of the biggest tech companies in the world. LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Yammer, Tesla.

[Simon Jack]

Quite a lot of acorns dropped out of the PayPal oak tree and went on to become pretty big trees themselves, including, for example, Elon Musk. More on him shortly.

[Singh Singh]

So you can actually look up an image of the PayPal mafia, because Fortune magazine did a photo shoot with them dressed like the Corleone family. And actually, if you do find it, it is extraordinary that they all agree to pose like this. They are fully decked out, and they look like they're from the Sopranos.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah.

[Singh Singh]

And in 2000, Peter got into business with a guy called Elon Musk, who.

[Simon Jack]

Had founded his own Digital Payment Company, X.com around the same time as Confinity.

[Singh Singh]

Now, they both roughly had the same market share, but both were losing money. So the two competitors merged, becoming known as PayPal.

[Simon Jack]

But behind the scenes, all was not well. Peter and Elon were battling for control.

[Singh Singh]

Elon was initially made the CEO, but within months, there was a boardroom coup. And while Musk was on honeymoon, this was, by the way, his first vacation in years. The board ousted him, and he was replaced with Peter as the CEO.

[Simon Jack]

Beware of going on holiday, elon quipped. In fact, that's the problem with vacations.

[Singh Singh]

And in Peter's biography, an unnamed source told Max Chavkin, musk thinks Peter's a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart.

[Simon Jack]

Brilliant. Musk has explicitly said Peter's philosophy is pretty odd. It's not normal. He's a contrarian from an investing standpoint and thinks a lot about the Singularity. We'll discuss that in a moment. I'm much less excited about that. I'm pro human singularity. Go.

[Singh Singh]

Okay, so tell me if I'm wrong, but the Singularity is when artificial intelligence, robots, whatever you want to call it, will merge with human existence. Correct. And will kind of leap forward in technology.

[Simon Jack]

Well, it means different things to different people. The dictionary definition is that the Singularity is the point in time when advances in artificial intelligence can create. Create machines that are smarter than humans. But for some people, it means the moment when they sort of merge. And you can upload your human experiences to a machine and essentially become immortal. So, like I say, it means different things to different people. But I did ask him about this when I met him, and I said, do you actually think that? And he said, yeah, I think it'll happen within my lifetime, if My lifetime is 120 years. Which is why he takes Protein pills, doesn't have any sugar. Keeps his gut, biome, whatever. He takes all these extraordinary health things. He wants to be alive at the point when this happens.

[Singh Singh]

So he'll be 120 in which year?

[Simon Jack]

If he's 57 now, so that's 63 years from now. So that makes it 2087.

[Singh Singh]

Would I be alive then to see the singularity? Actually, you know what? Cart me off to the retirement home. I don't think I want to see this happen.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, well, some people listening may well be. So you'll have to tell us from beyond our grave whether it happened.

[Singh Singh]

Yeah, maybe they'll be able to upload our consciousness from all the recordings we've done of a good billionaire.

[Simon Jack]

Exactly. There we go. We're practically immortal already. There we go. Let's get back to Peter Thiel. Over the next couple of years, PayPal would sign up more than 20 million users.

[Singh Singh]

But it was burning through cash, as a lot of startups do. In fact, it burnt through $180 million in funding before breaking even.

[Simon Jack]

And remember, during this period, we had the dot com crash where a lot of other tech companies bit the dust.

[Singh Singh]

But PayPal managed to bounce back, and it really did change the way people use the Internet. People became confident about sending money on the scary thing known as the Internet.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And having a PayPal account wasn't some kind of niche thing for nerds. A lot of people had it. Millions of people had it. So in 2002, Peter took PayPal public. That's when you sell shares to the public in an IPO. Shortly after it, he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion. And Peter took $55 million personally.

[Singh Singh]

And he resigned on the day of the acquisition, which seems like quite a bold move.

[Simon Jack]

Doesn't usually happen. Usually when a company acquires another one, the person who' acquired will stay on for a year or two to sort of smooth the transition. They can earn their way out. Often they won't be able to use the proceeds of the sale immediately. They'll have to wait for a lockup period. So him quitting with his money on day one is kind of unusual.

[Singh Singh]

Always a contrarian. So after selling PayPal, Peter focused on investing. So he set up a hedge fund called clarium capital with $10 million, mostly his own money.

[Simon Jack]

And with that, he was able to place bets that fitted his own views of the world. His contrarianism, like buying Japanese government bonds when others were sell. And the hedge fund soon became a giant. And he gets a reputation of being a bit of a genius investor.

[Singh Singh]

And that could have been where the story ended. He could have become just another Warren Buffett. But a recent seismic world event had deeply impacted Peter's thinking at that time. The September 11th terrorist attacks had completely challenged his libertarian beliefs.

[Simon Jack]

He published an essay called the Straussian Moment, based on Leo Strauss's philosophy, known primarily for reviving sort of classical political philosophy through analysis of works by ancient thinkers.

[Singh Singh]

And Peter Rowan. A religious war has been brought to a land that no longer cares for religious wars. Today, mere self preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment.

[Simon Jack]

So it's in this context that he makes his next big move. In 2004, he founds a company called Palantir, named after a seeing stone in Peter's beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy. And he invests $30 million in it. And Palantir becomes a very controversial company.

[Singh Singh]

In fact, it's a global surveillance company. It's designed to find terrorists and other criminals by detecting small minute patterns in vast amounts of digital data.

[Simon Jack]

So libertarian Peter becomes a contractor with the government. Palantir was used by the CIA, the New York Police Department.

[Singh Singh]

It was also controversially awarded a contract with the British national health service in 2023, which provoked protests over patient data security.

[Simon Jack]

And more immediately, the technology has been used by the Israeli military in g. Palantir's chief exec, Alex Karp said, our work in the region has never been more vital and it will continue.

[Singh Singh]

And according to Vanity Fair, Palantir has been labeled by some journalists as one of the most terrifying companies in Silicon Valley.

[Simon Jack]

So libertarian Peter, wanting to throw off the yoke of big government, is actually enabling them to surveil its own citizens, both at home and abroad. So it's in the same year as founding Palantir, Peter makes another investment that will prove incredibly profitable.

[Singh Singh]

That friend from Stanford, Reid Hoffman, introduces him to a 20 year old Harvard dropout, a guy called Mark Zuckerberg.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, remember him? Peter gives Mark $500,000 in exchange for 10% of the company. This was the first outside investment in Facebook. And you could say the rest is history.

[Singh Singh]

In fact, you can recap the whole saga in our episode about Mark Zuckerberg.

[Simon Jack]

Peter then goes full throttle with his investment. He launches a venture capital firm, founders fund.

[Singh Singh]

In 2005, founders fund sought riskier, more out of the box companies as they put it that really have the potential to change the world.

[Simon Jack]

Its online manifesto began with, we wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.

[Singh Singh]

That's quite a funny manifesto, to be fair.

[Simon Jack]

A little bit of a pop there at Twitter, now known X, of course, now owned by his old friend Elon Musk. And the sort of stuff that Peter invests in or backs is definitely out there. Some examples, he becomes the largest contributor to a think tank formerly called the Singularity Institute, which is interested in identifying and managing potential risks to humanity from artificial general intelligence and the general means that it can roam free and do whatever it likes rather than being set specific tasks.

[Singh Singh]

He also gives $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation. Its goal is to reverse human aging, and the person running it thinks humans will one day live to be a thousand.

[Simon Jack]

There's also the Alcor Life Extension foundation that had been freezing corpses in liquid nitrogen since 1976. I wonder what kind of storeroom they've got.

[Singh Singh]

They've been in the game for very early on, and I really hope they don't have any kind of energy failure anytime soon.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. He also invests one and a quarter million dollars in something called the SED Institute, founded by Milton Freeman's grandson, Milton Freeman, great libertarian free market prophet, if you like. And seasteading refers to the founding of new independent city stakes that are on floating platforms in international waters, so you can get away from the exertion of control by nation states.

[Singh Singh]

And Palantir, presumably.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. But as well as these wackier businesses, he also invests in some companies you've probably heard of. Lyft, TaskRabbit, LinkedIn, Stripe, Airbnb, Spotify, some household name.

[Singh Singh]

He even invested in Elon Musk's SpaceX, although he apparently passed on investing in Tesla. According to Musk, Peter told him he didn't fully buy into the climate change.

[Simon Jack]

Thing, but these are some of the biggest tech companies in the world. So whilst he's investing big money, he's also making huge returns. And by the summer of 2008, for example, Facebook was valued at $15 billion and his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, had assets of more than $7 billion.

[Singh Singh]

And that meant that in 2000, Forbes lists Peter Thiel as worth $1.2 billion.

[Simon Jack]

Well done, Peter Thiel, age 40, you are a billionaire.

[Singh Singh]

So let's take a story beyond a billion. Due to Facebook's seemingly inexorable growth, Peter's personal fortune keeps growing and growing.

[Simon Jack]

We didn't get everything right. The 2008 financial crisis nearly decimated hedge fund Clarium Capital.

[Singh Singh]

Some thought his hedge fund was poised to do well because it was a crisis that Peter himself had long been predicting.

[Simon Jack]

But instead, clarium went from $7 billion in assets to a few hundred million. To paraphrase a colleague, he's an exceptionally competitive person. He was on the cusp of entering the greats of the investing gods, but he just missed it.

[Singh Singh]

And by 2010, he closed the New York office and moved Clarion back to San Francisco.

[Simon Jack]

But he is still a billionaire and not above getting involved in personal vendettas.

[Singh Singh]

So throughout the 2000s, there was a US called Gorka, which was posting gossip about celebrities in the media. And Gorka also owned Valleywag, which was a Silicon Valley gossip blog of which Peter was a regular subject, including a.

[Simon Jack]

2007 blog entitled Peter Thiel Is Totally Gay People.

[Singh Singh]

And while friends and colleagues knew he was gay at this point, he saw it as a public outing.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, he's going to nurse that grievance, because jump forward a decade. Peter secretly gives $10 million to the wrestler Hulk Hogan to help him sue Gorka after Gorka made public a sex tape involving Hulk Hog.

[Singh Singh]

So Gorker lost the legal battle, and the whole thing drove Gorka and its owner to bankruptcy in 2016.

[Simon Jack]

But Peter called funding that lawsuit one of the greater philanthropic things that I have done. I saw Gorka pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people, even when there was no connection with the public interest. I thought it was worth fighting back.

[Singh Singh]

And not long after Peter got married to his longtime partner in Vienna, it's reported that guests came expecting to celebrate Peter's 50th, but were instead surprised to be attending his wedding.

[Simon Jack]

But he's about to get involved in something more high stakes and more divisive than just bringing down a gossip column or gossip site. And that is politics.

[Singh Singh]

Now, from many of his statements about his suspicion of the state and big government, you might be surprised that he would even get involved in politics at all. Yes.

[Simon Jack]

In a Fox Nation interview, he said, I would like us to be honest about how terrible politics is. As someone who is generally libertarian, I would like to live in a world that is less conflict, less politics.

[Singh Singh]

And in a widely read 2009 essay on the libertarian think tank Cato Institute's website, he argued that freedom and democracy were no longer compatible. Instead, only technology can make a real difference in the world.

[Simon Jack]

We are in a deadly race between politics and technology, he wrote. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

[Singh Singh]

God, there's quite a lot to unpack in that.

[Simon Jack]

There is quite a passage there.

[Singh Singh]

I think it would take us a whole podcast episode to break that down. In 2016, he was one of the very few people from Silicon Valley to support Donald Trump.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Speaking at the Republican National Convention, he also served on Trump's executive transition team.

[Singh Singh]

And now journalists have noted concerns that his counterterrorism company, Palantir, benefited from this support when it was awarded lucrative government contracts.

[Simon Jack]

An anonymous former dinner guest of Peter Thiel's told Vanity Fair, Trump is a means to an end. For Thiel, as human beings, they couldn't possibly be more different.

[Singh Singh]

And somewhat ironically, given that Trump had urged total allegiance to the United States. Just a month after he won the election, Peter revealed to have become a citizen of New Zealand, a popular second home to the super rich, who are very keen to avoid living out the apocalypse.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, it was the thing to have at a certain time, having a bunker beneath the ground in New Zealand in case there was a zombie or atomic bomb collapse.

[Singh Singh]

Civilization.

[Simon Jack]

Exactly. There's a lot of preppers who make their way to New Zealand.

[Singh Singh]

Now that support of Donald Trump has meant that Peter has become a divisive figure in the world of tech.

[Simon Jack]

In 2018, he publicly renounces Silicon Valley. Its calling it a one party state and comparing its woke worldview with Saudi Arabia's domestic strain of fundamentalist Islam called Wahhabism. And he moved to Los angeles.

[Singh Singh]

And in 2022, he leaves the board of Facebook's parent company Meta, after being one of its longest serving members.

[Simon Jack]

I remember when I chatted to him in 2010, it was around the time of the Facebook IPO, he had sold 90% of his shares in Facebook. And I asked him why he'd done that. He said, we still have substantial shareholdings, but you sold 90%. And I said, why did you do that? Is it because you don't believe in this? He said, I saw how much Facebook paid for Instagram. They paid a billion dollars for a company with 12 employees. And I thought, if you're so vulnerable, you have to pay a billion dollars to a company that has only just started. That means there's something vulnerable about your business model. But turns out Peter Thiel isn't so smart. Turned out to be one of the best acquisitions in the history of technology. And if he'd held onto his shares, he would be a Lot richer than he is today.

[Singh Singh]

It's so funny because what I think is emerging from this portrait of Peter Thiel is he' he's got these ruthless investor instincts. Right. He's very savvy, but at the same time he has these quite out there worldviews and the two don't really seem to connect.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, I think that also he's almost kind of a pathologically contrarian. So if everyone's saying that Facebook is going to be the next big thing and he's already profited from it, he almost feels kind of compelled to disagree, even when it's actually to his own detriment.

[Singh Singh]

Interesting. I mean, he really is one of the more complicated people we've covered on this podcast.

[Simon Jack]

So he's just left the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook. And one of the other rumors about his reason for leaving was to focus on influencing the US midterm elections. This is according to the New York Times. He spoke to an anonymous source with knowledge of Peter's thinking.

[Singh Singh]

And in those midterms he supported J.D. vance's run for Ohio senator and was reportedly the one who introduced Vance to Trump, Vance now being his vice presidential nominee.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, he also funded 15 other hard right Trump supporting Senate and House candidates, many of whom back the lie that Trump won the 2020.

[Singh Singh]

And alongside funding candidates, Teal has also funded a dating app to help Republicans meet a like minded partner. It was designed by former Trump staffers and it's called the Right Staff.

[Simon Jack]

I like the name. It prides itself on only having two gender options, ladies and gentlemen, no pronouns necessary.

[Singh Singh]

And it includes profile prompts like a random fact I love about America is.

[Simon Jack]

And favorite liberal lie is it seems that people's political motivation may have dried up pretty recently though, as of 15th October. So really recently, recently it's emerged that Peter Thiel has not funded Trump's 2024 bid.

[Singh Singh]

In fact, in an interview with the Atlantic late last year, in November, Peter said voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help. The national reckoning he had hoped for with Trump's presidency, in other words, did not materialize.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, he said, there are a lot of things I got wrong saying it was crazier and more dangerous than I thought.

[Singh Singh]

Now, J.D. vance views differently. He told the Financial Times recently, I'm going to keep on talking to Peter and persuading him that, you know, he's obviously been exhausted by politics a little bit, but he's going to be really exhausted by politics if we lose In Kamala Harris as president.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And Peter has said, I'm still very strongly pro Trump, pro jd. JD Vance. I've decided not to donate any money politically, but I'm supporting them in every other way possible. I'm sure they're a bit less grateful for those other ways than they would be for some cold, hard cash.

[Singh Singh]

On the business side, Peter has also been cashing out of Palantir, selling $600 million of stock in the global surveillance company just this September. And he's made a cool 1 billion selling shares this year alone.

[Simon Jack]

So that brings us right up to date. His current worth, we think, is 9 billion. So now we judge him. Is he good, bad, or just another billionaire? On our various categories, yes.

[Singh Singh]

We rank our billionaires from 0 to 10. The first category is wealth. How rich is he and how does he spend it?

[Simon Jack]

$9 billion is a lot of money, but for someone who has been involved in all of these companies. PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, Lyft, Airbnb, Airbnb, LinkedIn, etc. Etc. In a way, I would have expected him to have been richer than this.

[Singh Singh]

I've got to say, he could do better.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. I mean, his wealth sold out of Facebook too early. That's what I was saying.

[Singh Singh]

I mean, his wealth has more than doubled in just a year, so that's not nothing.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And some people. Fair to say that some people think actually that number could be a little off, that 9 billion number because he is thought to be very skilled at avoiding tax exposure, as many of our billionaires are.

[Singh Singh]

And, you know, he does enjoy spending it. He's got a half million dollar McLaren supercar. He's got his own butler.

[Simon Jack]

Butler. Okay, well, let's judge him right now. So 9 billion doesn't get him above 5 in the absolute wealth stakes. But the McLaren supercar and the butler, the wanting to live forever, he's wearing it pretty well. And, you know, he's just, you know, his oddness, I think, also sort of amplifies his absolute wealth.

[Singh Singh]

Right? I mean, supercars, butlers, hired staff, quite par for course with billionaires. But I think you're right. The wanting to live forever, that really edges it for me.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to give him a seven for wealth because even though he's not top of the tree, he acts like he is and he hangs out with all the people who are.

[Singh Singh]

That's very true. I agree. Seven out of ten for me.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, villainy. What have they done to get to the top profiles of Peter? Are Pretty damning of him sometimes. They often describe his image as explicitly villainous. He actually likes being seen as a bit of a villain.

[Singh Singh]

I mean, the laundry list is long. Vanity Fair says that he's seen as a right wing supervillain. The New Yorker says that he's a villain out of central casting. Even the Financial Times has described him as a libertari Bond supervillain.

[Simon Jack]

Right. And that's what we're trying to get at in this. So I think he ticks a lot of boxes in the villainy category, almost deliberately and by his own choosing. So I think that he will be pleased to know that I'm going to give him an 8 out of 10 for villainy.

[Singh Singh]

I mean, he really does seem to revel in the fact that so many people seem to think of him as this kind of right wing villain.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. And he said some pretty unpleasant things when he was back at university as well. So I might even nudge him up to a nine. As I say, he won't mind that. But actually, you know, his own have justified a high score in these stakes.

[Singh Singh]

He says this big talk about, you know, freedom and independence and libertarianism and being allowed to go your own way, while at the same time founding and investing in companies that explicitly designed to not let people go their own way and to actually keep tabs on them.

[Simon Jack]

And this is one of the things about him. To me, he has a slight contempt for his fellow human beings. He thinks that most of us are lemmings or sheep or sheephole. Yeah. Whatever disparaging analogy you want to make. And that free thinkers go the other way and everyone else should get out of the way. And the oppression of government and rules and democracy and blah, blah, blah is all there to frustrate the potential of the individual in a way that's kind of his hallmark throughout this, which is weird because he's been very influential in producing websites like Facebook, which thrive on herd mentality. Right.

[Singh Singh]

And surveillance.

[Simon Jack]

And surveillance and. Yeah. So exactly.

[Singh Singh]

A truly complex individual.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, I'm going to go. Nice.

[Singh Singh]

I think I'd agree with you. 9. And it pains me to say he'll probably enjoy that.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. So let's move on to the sort of diametric opposite of that, philanthropy. What's he done on that school?

[Singh Singh]

Well, in 2010, he set up the controversial Thiel Fellowship, which was originally named 20 under 20. You can kind of see why they changed that name.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Every year he awards $100,000 to young tech entrepreneurs under the age of 20 if they drop out of University to launch a startup.

[Singh Singh]

Critics have said it's an attack on education. It's an attempt to steal away the best and the brightest. Peter on his has argued they could return to school at the end of the two year fellowship.

[Simon Jack]

Okay, so that's an interesting one. Whether that's philanthropy or whether that's a kind of tech incubation kind of laboratory you could argue about. But he's also got a more traditional philanthropic arm called the Thiel foundation. Set up in 2006, it focuses on science, technology, long term, thinking about the future.

[Singh Singh]

But as Fortune magazine points out, it's no ordinary charity. It supports for profit companies and the new frontiers of science we've mentioned in this episode like seasteading and prolonging the Hewlett human life.

[Simon Jack]

And the philanthropy, as we said, often is not an absolute number. It's about the proportion of their wealth they give away. And Forbes estimates he's given away between 1 and 5%. So that is not a huge effort on the philanthropy front compared to some others.

[Singh Singh]

Now I'd give him a 1 out of 10 for this, 1 out of 10 for philanthropy. He's really not doing well. And also, I mean they're all quite.

[Simon Jack]

Self serving these things, aren't they?

[Singh Singh]

Exactly. You know, you can imagine that he's not thinking about the millions of starving children around the world when it comes to creating a New York City state on floating water.

[Simon Jack]

We'll give him a one for philanthropy if that. Let's leave it at one power. Interesting one this.

[Singh Singh]

Well, I would say that he is an incredibly powerful person. I mean, he's kind of become this almost boogeyman, right?

[Simon Jack]

Well, you know, the boogeyman to some, profits to others. And I mean, New York magazine, for example, said Thiel's increasing prominence as both an intellectual in and benefactor of the conservative movement and his status as a legend in Silicon Valley makes him at least as important as more public tech CEOs like Martin Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, he still holds sway over Zuckerberg. So, you know, he's clearly a powerful person. He is a person that even people richer than him, people seemingly more influential, turn to as a kind of father figure or kind of wise old owl. So in that way he wields a lot more influence than his own private wealth would suggest.

[Singh Singh]

That is a really interesting thing to know actually. In vanity fair in 2019, they wrote that in the Los Angeles Game of Thrones, he's Littlefinger, AKA he's the person pulling all the strings.

[Simon Jack]

The hottest ticket, they said is an invite to a dinner hosted by one of the people who helped get Donald J. Trump elected in 2016. And that person is Peter Thiel.

[Singh Singh]

I would score him quite highly on this.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, no, for sure.

[Singh Singh]

Oh, I would say like maybe eight out of ten.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, eight or even nine. I'm going to give him. Because one of our tests when we did Rupert Murdoch was, could he influence elections? Could he pick up the phone to a head of state and influence elections? I think he gets a yes in both those categories, I would say. And of course, you've got to remember Facebook's involvement with the Cambridge Analytica stuff. I'm going to give him a nice nine for power.

[Singh Singh]

Okay, eight from me, nine from you. Now we come to our last category, Legacy. What do we think will be his legacy?

[Simon Jack]

Well, the thing is, if he's right about some things, this category doesn't exist because he'll still be with us for the rest of time.

[Singh Singh]

I mean, I'm shook by that statement. You know, maybe this category is irrelevant when it comes to him.

[Simon Jack]

If you're immortal, the legacy category is irrelevant.

[Singh Singh]

It's tbd.

[Simon Jack]

Tbd. So let's assume that he's not going to live forever. I mean, his legacy. I think the legacy he leaves will be in the footprints of the companies he's founded. And also his Ayn Rand inspired, extreme libertarian kind of view of the world is one shared by quite a lot of tech superpowers that we have and influence their thinking about how the world should be ordered. And collectively, they have an enormous amount of power over the world. So I think Peter Thiel will go down as actually punching way above his weight in terms of absolute wealth. I think he will be seen as a architect of a mindset that has become incredibly powerful. So I'm going to give him an eight.

[Singh Singh]

Well, I'm sure Rand would be very pleased with him being called an architect.

[Simon Jack]

Well, Ayn Rand. Right. Still very influential. A lot of these people treat her books as bibles. And I think the people who think Ayn Rand was influential, they will certainly think that of Peter Thiel. So As I say, 8 out of 10 for legacy.

[Singh Singh]

For me, I think 8 out of 10 is a good. Is a good notch for him to land at. I mean, he may very well edge up to nine or a ten. You know, he's still got quite a long way to go, especially if he lives far longer than the rest of us.

[Simon Jack]

Yes, it's going to be interesting. Maybe there'll be a whole new generation of good, bad billionaire Listeners who haven't even been born yet who will have a Peter Thiel episode.

[Singh Singh]

Yes, Our AI generated voices that live on long after the BBC has crumbled.

[Simon Jack]

I don't mind, as long as we get paid. Just kidding. So is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

[Singh Singh]

Well, is he good, bad, or just another billionaire? Well, interestingly, one anonymous entrepreneur who spent time with Peter told Vanity Fair, does he believe that chaos is a ladder he can climb? He's playing chess while we are playing checkers.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Another anonymous longtime investor in Peter's firms told biographer Max Chavkin he wanted to watch Rome burn, which is interesting. A lot of people talk about the, you know, the. Right. The Steve Bannon's of this world as basically kind of enjoying some sort of rapture as there's the democracy disintegrates.

[Singh Singh]

Right. They're chaos agents, basically.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah. Although it's been noted that Thiel's ideological shifts have matched his financial self interest at every turn. That's another interesting perspective.

[Singh Singh]

I mean, when you put that all into context. He is an incredibly fascinating, complicated guy. But I also cannot avoid that in my heart of hearts. I think he is a bad billionaire.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, I think you've got to be right. I mean, I get to interview a lot of chief execs and founders, investors and whatever, and people say, who's the smartest person you ever interviewed? And I would say for many years, I would say Peter Thiel. He's all. Also one of the most unusual, I think, the contradictions in what he's done. Do it for me. You know, I'm all libertarian, but I'm going to make sure that your government has got detailed surveillance on you at all times. And also if you believe this, then it's fine. But I personally don't believe that the highest moral purpose is the pursuit of self interest. And I do believe in a society and from a personal point of view, if you don't believe in that, I can't say that you're a good person. So for me, he's a bad billionaire.

[Singh Singh]

So, Peter Thiel, you are, unfortunately, although I think you all enjoy this, a bad billionaire.

[Simon Jack]

You'll love it.

[Singh Singh]

And that, believe it or not, brings us to the end of season two.

[Simon Jack]

Say it ain't so.

[Singh Singh]

I mean, we've covered some truly exceptional billionaire stories.

[Simon Jack]

We love hearing from you. So please do rate and review us in your review. Let us know whose story scandalized you the most, what business tips you've learned, which were a favorite rags to Richard's Tales and who was this season's biggest villain. And we'd like to thank everyone who's listened, which has also helped us win a small award gold at the British Podcast Awards for best business podcast. So thank you to the listeners for that.

[Singh Singh]

Thank you to the listeners. Thank you, judges. Thank you to our excellent producers.

[Simon Jack]

So when you look back on this series, what sticks in your mind?

[Singh Singh]

I mean, I think there'll be plenty of people whose stories will still be developing in the many years to come. I mean, Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT springs to mind.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, sure. That's going to have an increasing influence on all of our lives. You need an AI to predict how it's going to work out.

[Singh Singh]

I also think, you know, in terms of sheer extravagance, I loved learning about Mukesh Ambani funding his son's super luxury wedding.

[Simon Jack]

Yeah, with $600 million. Although one of the killer stats in that is that as a percentage of his wealth, he actually spent less of a percentage of his wealth than many normal Indian families do.

[Singh Singh]

Unfortunately, most families can't afford to fly out Rihanna and Beyonce.

[Simon Jack]

And also, if you remember on that episode, I predicted that in five years time, Mukesh Ambani will be the richest person in the world. That's my bet.

[Singh Singh]

So I am not confident enough to make any bets on any of our billionaires, because who knows where the land of wealth will take them in the years to come.

[Simon Jack]

Good Bad Billionaire will be back for a third season in 2025. Hooray. Which billionaires could we measure up and judge? There's 2,781 billionaires in the world with a combined $14.2 trillion. So plenty to choose from.

[Singh Singh]

Could it be John Demo, the Big Brother, reality TV billionaire, Disney star Selena Gomez, even Elon Musk?

[Simon Jack]

Well, we want to hear from you. Whose billions would you like us to delve into in season three?

[Singh Singh]

Or head to the BBC World Service's Facebook page and join the conversation under the Good Bad Billionaire post.

[Simon Jack]

Your pick could make it onto season three of Good Bad Billionaire, so look out for new episodes dropping into your feed in the new year to find out if your billionaire made the cut.

[Singh Singh]

See you very soon.

[Simon Jack]

Bye for now. Good Bad Billionaire was produced by Louise Morris. James Cook is the editor and it's a BBC Studios production. For BBC World Service for the BBC World Service.

[Singh Singh]

And the podcast commissioning editor is John Manell.

[Michael Lewis]

Hey there, it's Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite Moneyball, the Blind side and Liars Poker. On the latest season of my podcast against the Rules I'm exploring what it means to be a sports fan in America and what the rise of sports betting is doing to our teams, our states and ourselves. Elves, join me and listen to against the Rules on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search against the Rules. Listen to against the rules on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcast.