Peter Andreas Thiel (; born 11 October 1967) is a German-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and conservative political activist. A co-founder of PayPal (1998), Palantir Technologies (2003), and Founders Fund (2005), he was also the first outside investor in Facebook (2004).
Born in Germany, Thiel was taken to the US by his parents when he was one year old. In 1971, his family moved to South Africa, then South West Africa, before moving back to the US in 1977. In 2003, he launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, and has been its chairman since its inception. In August 2004, Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor by acquiring a 10.2% stake in the company for $500,000. In 2005, he launched Founders Fund with PayPal partners Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. He co-founded Valar Ventures in 2010, founded Thiel Capital in 2011, co-founded Mithril Capital in 2012, was investment committee chair in 2012, and was a part-time partner at Y Combinator from 2015 to 2017. He was granted New Zealand citizenship in 2011, which became controversial when made public in 2017. or an "intellectual architect of Silicon Valley's contemporary ethos". Others debate the consistency or morality of his views.
Early life and education
Peter Andreas Thiel was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany on 11 October 1967, to Klaus Friedrich Thiel and Susanne Thiel. The family emigrated to the United States when Peter was one year old and lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father worked as a chemical engineer. Thiel and his mother later naturalized as U.S. citizens, whereas his father did not. The German community in Swakopmund was known at the time for its continued glorification of Nazism.
Thiel excelled in mathematics and scored first in a California-wide mathematics competition while attending Bowditch Middle School in Foster City. When at school, he reportedly charged $500 each to take the SAT for underclassmen, knowing this would cost him his spot at Stanford if discovered.
Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford University. The replacement of a "Western Culture" program at Stanford with a "Culture, Ideas and Values" course that addressed diversity and multiculturalism prompted Thiel to co-found The Stanford Review, a conservative and libertarian newspaper, in 1987. The paper received funding from Irving Kristol. Thiel was The Stanford Review's first editor-in-chief until he graduated in 1989. Thiel has maintained his relationship with the paper, consulting with staff and donating to the newspaper. According to Marc Andreessen, Thiel's time at the Review marked the beginning of a career-long strategy: using provocative verbal cueslater delivered through talks, books and mottosas a way to attract capable individuals to his projects, preferring this method over actively seeking out talent. The Review has spawned a large network of industry leaders, among whom Andrew Granato and the Fortune respectively identify around 300 people who have worked for or received investment from Peter Thiel or Joe Lonsdale, another prominent editor-in-chief and Thiel's mentee. A number of Review alumni have also become public officials, beginning with Jay Bhattacharya and Paula M. Stannard who were editors during Thiel's time as editor-in-chief.
After graduation, Thiel attended Stanford Law School, graduating in 1992 with a Juris Doctor degree. While at Stanford, Thiel met René Girard, whose mimetic theory influenced him.
Career
Early career
After graduating from Stanford Law School, Thiel was a law clerk to Judge James Larry Edmondson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from 1992 to 1993. Thiel then worked as a securities lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell in New York. He left the law firm in under a year. He then took a job as a derivatives trader in currency options at Credit Suisse in 1993 while also working as a speechwriter for former United States secretary of education William Bennett. Thiel returned to California in 1996.
Upon returning to the Bay Area, Thiel capitalized on the dot-com boom. With financial support from friends and family, he raised $1 million toward the establishment of Thiel Capital Management and embarked on his venture capital career. Early on, he experienced a setback after investing $100,000 in his friend Luke Nosek's unsuccessful web-based calendar project. Soon thereafter, Nosek's friend Max Levchin described to Thiel his cryptography-related company idea, which became their first venture called Fieldlink (later renamed Confinity) in 1998.
PayPal
Thiel provided the initial $100,000 for Fieldlink in 1998. In February 1999, they raised $500,000 largely from friends and family ($35,000 was from Thiel's parents). By middle 1999, they raised $4.5 million, with Nokia Ventures contributing $3 million.
With Confinity, Thiel realized they could develop software to bridge a gap in making online payments. Although the use of credit cards and expanding automated teller machine networks provided consumers with more payment options, not all merchants had the necessary hardware to accept credit cards. Thus, consumers had to pay with exact cash or check. Thiel wanted to create a type of digital wallet for consumer convenience and security by encrypting data on digital devices, and in 1999 Confinity launched PayPal.
PayPal promised to open up new possibilities for handling money. Thiel viewed PayPal's mission as liberating people from the erosion of the value of their currencies due to inflation.
When PayPal launched at a press conference in 1999, representatives from Nokia and Deutsche Bank sent $3 million in venture funding to Thiel using PayPal on their PalmPilots. PayPal then continued to grow through mergers in 2000 with Elon Musk's online financial services company X.com, and with Pixo, a company specializing in mobile commerce. These mergers allowed PayPal to expand into the wireless phone market and transformed it into a safer and more user-friendly tool by enabling users to transfer money via a free online registration and email rather than by exchanging bank account information. PayPal went public on 15 February 2002 and was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion in October of that year. Thiel remained CEO of the company until the sale. His 3.7% stake in the company was worth $55 million at the time of acquisition. In Silicon Valley circles, Thiel is colloquially referred to as the "Don of the PayPal Mafia".
Clarium Capital
Thiel used $10 million of his proceeds to create Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund focusing on directional and liquid instruments in currencies, interest rates, commodities, and equities. Thiel stated that "the big, macroeconomic idea that we had at Clarium—the idée fixe—was the peak-oil theory, which was basically that the world was running out of oil, and that there were no easy alternatives." In 2004, Thiel spoke of the dot-com bubble having migrated, in effect, into a growing bubble in the financial sector, and specified General Electric and Walmart as vulnerable. In 2005, Clarium saw a 57.1% return as Thiel predicted that the dollar would rally. Clarium's assets under management grew after achieving a 40.3% return in 2007 to more than $7 billion by the first quarter of 2008, but fell later in the year and again in 2009 after financial markets collapsed. By 2011, after missing out on the economic rebound, many key investors pulled out, reducing the value of Clarium's assets to $350 million, two thirds of which was Thiel's money.
Palantir
In May 2003, Thiel incorporated Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company named after the Tolkien artifact. He continues as its chairman, as of 2022. Thiel stated that the idea for the company was based on the realization that "the approaches that PayPal had used to fight fraud could be extended into other contexts, like fighting terrorism". He also stated that, after the September 11 attacks, the debate in the United States was "will we have more security with less privacy or less security with more privacy?" He envisioned Palantir as providing the government the technology to find terrorism without operating illegally.
Although the software only analyzes data collected by the customers, some criticize it for enabling surveillance. Professor Vasilis Galis notes that the software is not a mere tool, but shapes policing culture with new policing norms.
According to Geoff Shullenberger (managing director of Compact) and Moira Weigel (Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard), Peter Thiel and Alex Karp built Palantir on the basis of their understanding of Leo Strauss and the Frankfurt School.
After the first meeting with Zuckerberg in August 2004, Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in the startup (then "a three-person dormroom") for a 10.2% stake in the company and joined Facebook's board. This was the first outside investment in Facebook and valued the company at $4.9 million. He also bought Zuckerberg a car. The investment was originally in the form of a convertible note, to be converted to equity if Facebook reached 1.5 million users by the end of 2004. Although Facebook narrowly missed the target, Thiel allowed the loan to be converted to equity anyway. Thiel said of his investment: "I was comfortable with them pursuing their original vision. And it was a very reasonable valuation. I thought it was going to be a pretty safe investment."
Facebook employees reported that Thiel's influence was unusual for a board member who was not also the CEO. Some criticized Thiel for pushing his mentee Zuckerberg and the company to the right. Zuckerberg credited Thiel with helping him time Facebook's 2007 Series D, which closed before the 2008 financial crisis.
Facebook's initial public offering was in May 2012, with a market cap of nearly $100 billion ($38 a share), at which time Thiel sold 16.8 million shares for $638 million. In August 2012, immediately upon the conclusion of the early investor lock-up period, Thiel sold almost all of his remaining stake for between $19.27 and $20.69 per share, or $395.8 million, for a total of more than $1 billion. In 2016, he sold a little under 1 million of his shares for around $100 million. In November 2017, he sold another 160,805 shares for $29 million, putting his holdings in Facebook at 59,913 Class A shares. As of April 2020, he owned less than 10,000 shares in Facebook.
On 7 February 2022, Thiel announced he would not stand for re-election to the board of Facebook owner Meta at the 2022 annual stockholders' meeting and would leave after 17 years in order to support pro–Donald Trump candidates in the 2022 United States elections.
Founders Fund
In 2005, Thiel created Founders Fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital fund.
The fund focuses on defense-related startups and technology. After Facebook, even though it was a big financial success, Thiel made the Founders Fund pivot to hard tech, with the reasoning that while companies like Twitter might have a high value, they would not take "civilization to the next level." The Economist notes that the fund and Thiel, personally, have a history of incubating startups that do hypersensitive work related to national security. The fund casts Palantir, Anduril and the newly minted nuclear startup General Matter as the three parts of a trilogy, to which it hopes to add others, among which a plan for onshoring ultraviolet light lithography.
Business Insider reports that, among Thiel's inner circle (who know well the billionaire's fondness for Tolkien's works), the fund is nicknamed "the Precious", in reference to the One Ring of Sauron.
In addition to Facebook, the Founders Fund made early-stage investments in numerous startups, including Airbnb, LinkedIn, RapLeaf, Geni.com, Yammer, Spotify,), Stripe, Bullish Global (the parent company Block.one had also received investment from Thiel ), AltSchool, Trade Republic, PsiQuantum (photonic quantum computing), and Rigetti Computing (superconducting quantum computing). Thiel also backed DeepMind, a UK start-up that was acquired by Google in early 2014 for £400 million. Founders Fund is an important backer of the Berlin-based platform ResearchGate.
Since 2012, Founders Fund had been quietly buying bitcoin, with the investment totaling around $20 million" (Bloomberg remarked that, "the investment amounts to a rounding error for Thiel's firm."). The company sold the majority of its crypto holdings for $1.8 billion in March 2022 (with bitcoin making up two-thirds of its holdings), right before the market crashed.
Also in 2017, Thiel was one of the first outside investors in Clearview AI, a facial recognition technology startup that has raised concerns in the tech world and media for its risks of weaponization.
In 2024, alongside General Catalyst and Red Cell Partners, the Founders Fund incubated the defense incubator Valinor Enterprises. The co-founders are former Palantir's senior vice president Julie Bush (CEO), Trae Stephens, General Catalyst's Paul Kwan and Red Cell's Grant Verstandig.
In 2024, the Founders Fund led a massive US$85 million seed round for the UAE's decentralized, open-source AI platform SentientAGI (Sentient Foundation), which seeks to challenge Perplexity and OpenAI's closed models as well as handle the problem of AI proliferation, which concentrates power in the hands of large players like Google and Amazon. In 2024 it also invested in Impulse Space (in-space transportation services), Ramp, Crusoe (AI infrastructure using clean energy).
In 2025, the Founders Fund invests in Erebor (a new digital bank which is founded by Palmer Luckey and has quickly reached a US$2 billion valuation), EnduroSat (Bulgarian startup that produces Gen3 satellites at scale), Varda (space medicine and hypersonic testbed startup, founded by the Thiel Fellow Delian Asparouhov, Trae Stephens and Will Bruey, and incubated at the Founders Fund), Hadrian Automation.
Anduril Industries
Anduril is a defense hardware startup that was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey (who is Thiel's mentee), Joe Chen, Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm and Brian Schimpf (the latter three are Palantir and Founders Fund alumni). The Founders Fund backed the company since its inception, leading its 2017 seed round. The $1 billion (part of the $2.5 billion Series G funding round) the Founders Fund invested in Anduril in June 2025 was the largest investment in the fund's history. In December 2024, it was reported that Palantir and Anduril were forming a consortium of new generation defense companies (which included SpaceX, OpenAI, Scale AI, Saronic Technologies and others) that they would lead in order to challenge the dominance of traditional defense companies. In July 2025, when the Trump administration's budget bill included a provision that required border surveillance towers to be "tested and accepted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deliver autonomous capabilities", Edith Olmsted of The New Republic made the criticism that the government favoured Peter Thiel's business, as the provision (which only Anduril fulfilled) effectively ruled out Anduril's rivals, namely General Dynamics and the Israeli-based Elbit Systems.
General Matter
General Matter emerged from stealth in April 2025, focusing on "production and handling of High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU)." Scott Nolan, who formerly worked for SpaceX, left the Founders Fund to focus on the company and become the CEO, Thiel is also on the company's board of directors, which is noted by the Economist to be a rare occurrence these days.
Valar Ventures
Valar Ventures is an internationally focused venture firm Thiel cofounded with Andrew McCormack and James Fitzgerald in 2010. Miami-headquartered Novo and Fortú (digital bank which focuses on underbanked Latino and Hispanic communities), fintech unicorn Qonto, fintech startup Hero, accounting automation software startup Regate (all three are Paris-based), Vienna-based crypto unicorn Bitpanda, Lagos- and London-based banking startup Kuda Bank, Indonesian fintech startup Bukuwarung, Nigerian banking platform Maplerad, Mexican banking startup Albo, banking unicorn N26, B2B paytech Mondu, spend management platform Moss, tax filling unicorn Taxfix, instant payment API startup Ivy (N26, Mondu, Moss, Taxfix and Ivy are all Berlin-based; Ivy is founded by the Thiel Fellow Ferdinand Dabitz), Dubai-based fintech startup Baraka. Valar also invested in New-Zealand based companies including in the software firm Xero, undersea communication company Pacific Fibre and e-reader platform Booktrack.
Recent investments include Arkansas-based Panacea Financial (digital fintech for medical practitioners), Riyadh-based SILQ ("largest B2B commerce platform across the Gulf and South Asia", resulted from the recent merger between Bangladesh-based Shop-Up and Saudi-based Sary), Canadian startup Neo (fintech), London-based fertility care startup Gaia.
Thiel Capital
Thiel Capital is a venture capital fund founded by Thiel in 2011 and based in Los Angeles, also referred to as Thiel's family office. It provides "strategic and operational support" for many of Peter Thiel's initiatives and ventures. It incubated and launched Founders Fund, Mithril, Valar, the Thiel Fellowship and Breakout Labs, and also sponsors Crescendo Equity Partners.
The firm's investments include Alloy Therapeutics (with Founders Fund and 8VC), EnClear Therapies (Jason Camm became a board member in 2020), the German unicorn ATAI Life Sciences (found by Thiel's friend, the biotech billionaire Christian Angermayer; Jason Camm also became a director in 2020), Compass Pathways (also partly owned by ATAI), Pilgrim (dual-use biotech startup founded by Thiel Fellow Jake Adler), Hugoboom, Rhea, Bullish Global (Founders Fund and Angermeyer are also investors), FTX (also received investment from Rivendell LLC), QA Wolf, Rollup (software platform to develop complex hardware), Neros (military drone startup found by Thiel Fellow Soren Monroe-Anderson), Regent Craft (electric seaglider, invested together with Founders Fund). Thiel Capital is also an investor (including post-IPO financial investment as major backer) of the dual-use German laser communications startup Mynaric. Angermayer also backs Mynaric.
Hugoboom's app 28 requires users to input the first day of their last period to calculate the menstrual phases. The app's pro-life rhetoric and scientific basis is controversial.
Some of the firm's notable (past) employees include former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, American politician and entrepreneur Blake Masters, Kevin Harrington (Senior Director for Strategic Planning at the United States National Security Council) and Michael Kratsios.
Quantum-Systems and Stark
Thiel Capital's investment in the Gilching-based drone startup Quantum-Systems as well as Thiel's subsequent backing of the Berlin-based attack drone startup Stark are sometimes considered controversial, due to Thiel's politics. In May 2025, Quantum-Systems became Europe's first dual-use unicorn and third defense unicorn, after fellow Bavarian startup Helsing and the Portuguese Tekever (Thiel has a role in the success of Helsing too and the startup is considered a part of the "Thiel ecosystem", although he does not directly invest in it). Thiel's mentee Moritz Döpfner brokered the deal with Quantum-Systems on Thiel's behalf and sits on its board. His venture fund Doepfner Capital also invests in Stark.
Mithril Capital
In June 2012, he launched Mithril Capital Management, named after the fictitious metal in The Lord of the Rings, with Jim O'Neill and Ajay Royan. Unlike Clarium Capital, Mithril Capital, a fund with $402 million at the time of launch, targets companies that are beyond the startup stage and ready to scale up.
Thiel holds shares in the space-based intelligence company BlackSky through Mithril. It also invests in Helion Energy.
1517 Fund
The 1517 Fund was founded in 2015 by Danielle Strachman and Michael Gibson, who were both in the founding team of the Thiel Fellowship. The fund provides cash grants and investments, aiming at extending the support already granted by the Thiel Fellowship. It targets "dropouts, renegade students, and deep tech scientists". Peter Thiel backs the fund.
Its portfolio companies include Luminar Technologies, Loom, Inc., Atom Computing and Durin Mining Technologies among others.
America's Frontier Fund
Thiel is the co-founder of America's Frontier Fund, together with Eric Schmidt. The New York Times writes that, America's Frontier Fund is an organization committed to bring manufacturing back to the US, especially that of semiconductors, and the leaders are determined to carry out this mission whether the state helps them or not. InfluenceWatch notes the fund's bipartisan character, with the participation of Ashton B. Carter and H.R. McMaster and the fact that the two founders are left and right-of-center respectively. The chief executive is Gilman Louie.
In December 2024, it got approval to get funding from the Small Business Investment Company Critical Technology Initiative (SBICCT), which is "a joint effort by the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Department of Defense." In July 2025, it reportedly raised US$315 million for its first fund.
It backs Venus Aerospace, a company develops hypersonic flight using rotating detonation rocket engine (since November 2024) and Foundation Alloy.
The fund is characterized by Intelligence Online as "China-sceptic".
Rivada Space Networks
Around the early 2020s, the Bavarian startup Kleo-Connect successfully developed a highly advanced satellite technology, which is considered much more suitable for governmental and military use than that of Starlink, which was originally conceived for civilian use only. It was feared the technology would fall into the hand of the PLA through its Chinese investors (who invested in the startup since 2018) though. Thus, the German government banned the sale of the company to China, but 144 lawsuits worldwide deterred investors from helping the company to expand the constellation. The founders decided to bring in the US's "highest conservative circles" (which led to the formation of Rivada Space Networks, which drew its personnel mainly from Kleo-Connect, in 2022), among which Karl Rove participated as an investor and lobbyist, and former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo joined the board of the mother company in the US, alongside others like Richard Myers, Jeb Bush, James Loy, Lord Guthrie and the Democrat Martin O'Malley. Rivada Networks's chairman Declan Ganley notes in particular the power of Thiel's name (whose investment in the firm remains undisclosed) in negotiation with investors. The United States Department of Defense is also an investor. Newt Gingrich is noted to have lobbied for the firm too. By 2025, the "politically connected company" has already expanded to 33 countries and collected 16 billion dollars in investments, despite having not launched its satellites (deployment is set to begin in 2027 with initial tests set for 2026). Thiel reportedly works to help the company's development, especially regarding its legal battles.
SNÖ Ventures
Thiel is an investor and strategic partner of the Oslo-based SNÖ Ventures, having joined the firm in 2021, accompanied by a group of international strategic advisors. In 2024, the fund made its first investment in the defense tech sector, an early funding for the Swedish startup Nordic Air Defence, which developed counter-drone missile technology and is staffed with former employees from Palantir and Quantum Systems. Arctic Today sees this as an evidence of Sweden's strong transatlantic bond which is "seeping into defence", which is also shown in Daniel Ek's Prima Materia's investment in Helsing (which is a strategic partner of Palantir), which happened three months before Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Elevat3
In 2020, Thiel became a strategic partner and anchor investor of Elevat3, which is set up by Christian Angermayer's Apeiron Investment Group to invest in startups in German-speaking countries. The fund focuses on "life sciences, deep tech, fintech (financial technology), property and insurance". The fund has a partnership with the Founder Fund. In 2020, Thiel invested into the Neunkirchen-based startup Neodigital through the fund. The fund also backs other European startups such as the London-based aggregator startup Olsam. In 2022, through Elevat3 and in partnership with the Founders Fund, the Apeiron Group bought shares from the Chinese Fosun International and others to become a shareholder in the Hamburg-based NAGA Group. Thiel also holds shares in (which will be renamed as SQD.AI Strategies AG), the first dedicated German crypto holding treasury, through the firm.
Crescendo Equity Partners
Seoul-based Crescendo Equity is a private equity firm which focuses on mid-cap manufacturing and technology companies in Asia.
According to the official website, "Crescendo was established in 2012 with the sponsorship of Peter Thiel". The fund is co-founded by Peter Thiel, Matt Danzeisen (who serves as a member of its investment committee and representative to selected portfolio companies), The fund invests in Line Next (a unit of the Line Corporation), a joint venture between Softbank and Naver. The Business Korea credits Crescendo Equity Partners with transforming Korea's HPSP, which it invested in since 2017, into a global player in the semiconductor equipment sector. In 2025, Crescendo initiated the sale of its 40.9% controlling equity stake in the semiconductor firm, often dubbed Korea's ASML. The three major global PEF firms, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR), Carlyle, and Blackstone, which are dubbed the "big three buyout funds", have submitted their bids. The firm also plays an important role in the Korean semiconductor industry through investments and support of other companies like , . and Movensys (originally known as Soft Servo Group or Soft Motions & Robotics; the name was changed to Movensys in 2021 after Crescendo's investment). The firm also invests in companies that make metal equipment, including Seojin System and Model Solution.
Pronomos Capital
Thiel began to explore investing in charter cities on land after his interest in seasteading faded. Thiel is the anchor backer of Pronomos Capital, a firm "set up like a venture capital fund" that seeks to establish experimental, semi-autonomous cities in vacant lands, with acceptance from the countries involved. The founder of the firm is Patri Friedman. Projects backed by the firm include Próspera in Honduras. The Próspera project attracted companies like Oklo Inc. (nuclear startup backed by Thiel's Mithril and Sam Altman) and biotech startups, but led to legal struggles when the new Honduran government changed the laws in 2022. In 2025, when the Danish government was integrating Palantir into the country's military, police and intelligence services, a major argument put forth by opponents was that the Praxis project (backed by Thiel through Pronomos) was a threat to Greenland. Other arguments were concerned with Thiel's politics in the US and Palantir's association with American and other European intelligence services, as well as the security risk that might arise from handing citizens' data to Palantir. The Danish National Police answered with a reference to a 2021 response to the Folketing, but otherwise, the Police, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service and Minister of Justice Peter Hummelgaard refused to comment on the matter.
Thiel Bio
The firm was found in 2023 by Jason Camm (Chief Medical Officer of Thiel Capital). The regulatory filing does not disclose the name of the single investor who provides US$100 million or Thiel's involvement beyond the use of his name. The fund has invested in Ataraxis AI and EnClear Therapies together with the Founders Fund. Reports about investments in October 2025 (infection therapeutics company Peptilogics and cancer treatment startup HistoSonics) confirm that the firm is Thiel's. Hannes Holste from Thiel Capital is a partner.
Rivendell companies
Thiel owns multiple entities named Rivendell, such as Rivendell One LLC, Rivendell 7 and Rivendell 25. Rivendell 7 and Rivendell 25 are personal investment vehicles, which are also used to hold Palantir shares. ProPublica reports that Thiel's $1,700 PayPal investment and later investments In Palantir and Facebook through a Roth IRA had grown tax-free to over $5 billion by 2019. The Roth was held in Rivendell Trust since 2018. Thiel bankrolled the satellite imaging startup HySpecIQ, known for serving government agencies but struggling financially, through Rivendell Fund. Rivendell entities are known to participate in his German or Korean investments.
Other business enterprises
According to a 2020 article from Bloomberg, Thiel was at the time an investor in funds managed by 8VC and in the bank Disruptive Technology Advisers. A 2017 Globe and mail article names Thiel as a limited partner at Social Capital. He also sponsored Sam Altman's first venture fund, Hydrazine Capital as well as J.D.Vance's Narya Capital. He also backs Doepfner Capital, the venture fund of Moritz Döpfner, the son of Mathias Döpfner. He funded 90% of Zeev Ventures's first fund and has backed it ever since. The Founders Fund was also a backer of the second fund of the Indonesia-focused Intudo. The involvement helped Intudo to validate its mission. Founders Fund is also among the backers of the Israel-based Mensch Capital. Thiel also backs the Singaporean venture investment firm Syfe Group through Valar. The Founders Fund also invested in the Seattle-based private equity fund Privateer Holdings in 2015, thereby becoming the first institutional investor in the cannabis industry.
His first investment in a hedge fund managed by an outside manager was made in 2011: the firm was Grandmaster Capital Management, founded by Patrick Wolff, former Clarium and Thiel Macro executive. Also in 2011, he backed the second fund of Joshua Kushner's Thrive Capital.
In 2019, Thiel, together with Mark Cuban and Marc Andreessen, backed the San Francisco-based crypto investment fund 1Confirmation.
Thiel gives backing to Vivek Ramaswamy's financial firm Strive Asset Management, also described as an activist fund. The firm aims to free "corporate America" of what they deem to be "stakeholder capitalism" ESG mandates created by the three companies BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street and accuse them of causing the energy crisis. The firm does not deny climate science.
In 2021, Thiel backed the first fund of A-Star Partners, founded by Kevin Hartz, former partner at Founders Fund. In 2022, he backed B2B-focused Wischoff Ventures founded by solo GP Nichole Wischoff.
Thiel is also a major backer of the venture debt firm Tacora, founded by Keri Findley. Its inaugural fund in 2022 raised US$350 million in total, including US$250 million from Thiel. Bloomberg comments that, "It's an unusually large investment for Thiel, the size of which hasn't been previously reported." Findley was originally an associate of Danzeisen, whom she met because she and Thiel Capital both invested in SoFi. Thiel agreed to fund her after she discussed the idea with him at a casual dinner.
Alexandra Ulmer and Joseph Tanfani from Reuters remark that Thiel was an instrumental force behind the creation of 1789 Capital, which was co-founded in 2022 by Omeed Malik and Chris Buskirk, a confidant of Thiel's. Blake Masters is also a board member. The fund is intended to create a "parallel economy", a network that combines "businesses, media outlets and political organizations" associated with the America First movement. In 2024, it recruited Donald Trump Jr. as a partner.
He personally invests in Quora (leading its Series B), Reddit, and nuclear startup Seaborg Technologies (now Saltfoss Energy).
AbCellera
He served on AbCellera's board from 2020 to 2024, when he resigned for personal reasons. Both sides stated that there was no disagreement, with Thiel saying that he was proud to have helped the company and AbCellera's founder Carl Hansen thanking him for his mentorship. He also retains his stake in the company, as of November 2024.
Y Combinator
In March 2015, Thiel joined Y Combinator as one of 10 part-time partners. In November 2017, it was reported that Y Combinator had severed its ties with Thiel.
Enhanced Games
thumb|Aron D'Souza in 2025
In 2024, Thiel became the lead funder of the Enhanced Games, a proposed multi-sport event that will allow athletes to use performance-enhancing substances without being subject to drug tests. The founder is the Australian lawyer Aron D'Souza, who came to know and become Thiel's confidant in the process of leading the Gawker case for him. Angermayer, who was introduced to D'Souza by Thiel, also invested, even though, as per Wired, Thiel and Angermayer were not normally interested in sports. The startup agrees to cover legal expenses for any clean athletes who participate in the event and are banned from mainstream competitions as a result.
Carbyne
In 2018, the Founders Fund invested in the Israeli company Carbyne (emergency service).) show that in 2014, Jeffrey Epstein leveraged his relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to get access to Thiel. Epstein arranged for Barak to meet Thiel in New York on June 9, 2014. In 2016, Epstein pitched Reporty (later Carbyne) to Valar, but the proposal got rejected on account of being premature (Epstein invested in total 40 million in Valar in 2015 and 2016).). Valar's McCormack said they would try to reengage when the startup was more developed. In 2018, the Founders Fund joined Carbyne's $15 million Series B. Byline Times suggests that Epstein was one of contact points that Thiel used for his political network in the UK, including with on the Labour Party (UK), although there is no record of Thiel's social visits to Epstein's homes or flights on his jet.
Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal in 2023 show that there were scheduled meetings (half a dozen between 2014 and 2016) between Thiel and Epstein, including with others such as Woody Allen and Obama's advisor Kathryn Ruemmler. Reid Hoffman, Thiel's friend from the PayPal Mafia and a big Democratic donor was the one who directly introduced Thiel to Epstein (for years Epstein acquaintances had tried to invite Thiel to meet Epstein but were rejected) and also participated. Documents from the US House of Representatives showed Epstein invited Thiel to his private island in 2018. A spokesperson for Thiel said he never visited the island. In 2025, Snopes criticized a claim on the internet that Epstein offered girls to Thiel and others as misleading by omitting context.
Journalist Whitney Webb claims Palantir is a CIA front, and links Thiel to the CIA, Mossad, and Epstein's alleged plan for an "Orwellian nightmare." Webb has shared these theories via the Chinese website of MintPress Newsknown for being part of the "Russian web of disinformation"and Trineday, a publisher founded by conspiracy theorist Kris Millegan. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs lists her as a MintPress journalist.
Euronews writes that there is no known major financial connection between Thiel and Epstein, but Thiel seemed to treat Epstein as a contact point. The San Francisco Standard comments that around the time, other Israeli officials (acting independently of Barak) tried to build contact with Thiel as well, often aiming at a "lucrative" job at Palantir.
Gawker lawsuit
In May 2016, Thiel confirmed in an interview with The New York Times that he had paid $10 million in legal expenses to finance several lawsuits brought by others, including a lawsuit by Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) against Gawker Media for invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and infringement of personality rights after Gawker made sections of a sex tape involving Bollea public. The jury awarded Bollea $140 million, and Gawker announced it was permanently closing due to the lawsuit in August 2016. Thiel referred to his financial support of Bollea's case as one of the "greater philanthropic things that I've done."
Thiel said he was motivated to sue Gawker after they published a 2007 article publicly outing him, headlined "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people." Thiel stated that Gawker articles about others, including his friends, had "ruined people's lives for no reason," and said, "It's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence." He highlighted his support for the Intimate Privacy Protection Act and said that athletes and business executives have the right to stay in the closet as long as they want to. Later though, in 2025, Denton said that Thiel was right and did him a favor in forcing the sale of Gawker Media.
Views and political activities
thumb|Peter Thiel and [[David Graeber discussing technology, democracy and the future in 2014]]
Philosophical views
Thiel is described by different authors and media sources in different ways. He identifies as a libertarian. plutocratic reactionary, militarist techno-libertarian, and libertarian authoritarian. His attitude towards democracy has been described as democracy-skeptic, partly antidemocratic, or post-democratic. French economist Yann Algan links Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to the concept of "liquid democracy" and the rise of libertarian AI governance, which Algan defines as "a radically decentralized, algorithm-driven democracy", which "prioritizes efficiency and individual freedom over democratic safeguards".
Thiel's biographer Max Chafkin notes that his thinking is a mix of libertarianism and authoritarianism, but describes what Thiel truly believes and wants as a mystery.
Thiel describes himself as a political atheist. but opines that "people should spend less time trying to change the system than simply creating things outside it". German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk also remarks: "Peter Thiel can be seen as more of a philosopher king. He acts very coolly and strategicallya dazzling figure, far outside our left-liberal perception patterns", while Ross Douthat from New York Times describes him as "most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years". Commenting on Douthat's description, Luke Munn of the University of Queensland notes that, "Thiel's influence on politics is at once financial, technical and ideological [...] his potent cocktail of networks, money, strategy and support exerts a rightward force on the political landscape."
In 2025, the author wrote an article for Die Zeit, describing Thiel's theories as obscure and incoherent at first glance, but often displaying an accurate intuition, while noting that both the man and his ideas "simultaneously fascinates, repels, and outrages." Later the author René Martens wrote on Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, criticizing Mangold and Die Zeit for masking their admiration with pseudo-criticism and called Thiel a disciple of Carl Schmitt.
In 2009, The Guardian stated that Thiel was a member of the neoconservative, Reaganite/Thatcherite "TheVanguard.org". The outlet said Thiel believes the Enlightenment led humanity from nature's rule to a world where nature has been conquered, and also noted Thiel's philosophy disregarded art, beauty, love, pleasure, and truth.
On the question of exotericism versus esoteticism, Paul Leslie writes that in "The Straussian moment", Thiel tries to "weave together Schmitt's political theology—with its emphasis on the friend/enemy distinction—and Strauss's advocacy for esoteric wisdom and hidden hierarchies." In the article "Exotericism and the Untroubled Race for the Future", Thiel discerns between ancient esotericism, in which "thrice-great Hermes revealed his magical recipes only to a few" and "modern esotericism of grantwriting". He remarks, though, that exotericism takes time, and Goethe was "perhaps [...] the last human being to command the sum total of human knowledge."
Writing for the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 2024, James Rushing Daniel wrote that: