Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Vitality: Excerpt

Peter Thiel at Stanford.
Tell: Courtesy the creator

Within the future across the spring of 1988, several contributors of the Stanford College chess group traveled to a occasion in Monterey, California, in an frail Volkswagen Rabbit. To secure across the Santa Cruz Mountains, they took California’s Route 17, a four-lane motorway that is thought to be as one of many allege’s most lethal in consequence of its tight curves, inferior weather, and wild-animal crossings. The chess group had no verbalize motive to high-tail, nonetheless the 20-year-frail driver of the Rabbit weaved out and in of lanes, nearly rear-ending autos as he slipped past them. For big parts of the high-tail, he floor the accelerator.

Peter Thiel used to be on the wheel. Thin, dyspeptic, and humorless, he had appeared love an alien to his classmates since arriving at Stanford two and a half years earlier. He didn’t drink, didn’t date, didn’t crack jokes, and he appeared to have both an insatiable ambition and a type, deeply held, that the field used to be in opposition to him. He used to be spicy and monstrous. He used to be, recalled one classmate, Megan Maxwell, “a outlandish, outlandish boy.”

Thiel seemed up when, predictably, the lights of a police cruiser appeared in his rearview assume. He pulled the Rabbit over, rolled down the window, and listened as a allege trooper asked if he knew how rapidly he used to be going. The plenty of young men within the car — relieved to occupy been stopped nonetheless also fearful of how this could perhaps play out — seemed at every other nervously.

Thiel addressed the statie coolly in his ordinary uninflected baritone. “Nicely,” he stated, “I’m now not sure if the thought that of a velocity restrict makes sense. It will more than likely be unconstitutional. And it’s indubitably an infringement on liberty.”

Unbelievably, the trooper appeared to just acquire this. He told Thiel to slack down and occupy a pleasant day. Even more unbelievably: As soon as he drove out of look, Thiel hit the gas pedal again, perfect as onerous as sooner than. To his astonished passengers, it used to be as if he believed that now not easiest did the laws of California now not apply to him — nonetheless that the laws of physics didn’t either. “I don’t endure in solutions any of the games we played,” stated the teammate who used to be using shotgun, a man who’s now in his 50s. “But I would now not ever neglect that power.”

Someone who has followed Thiel’s profession will procure noteworthy to acknowledge within the Route 17 reach across. The reflexive contrarianism, the unearned self assurance, the impossibly favorable final result — they really feel familiar, both in Thiel himself and the companies he helped secure. In the present day, for sure, that scrawny chess nerd is the billionaire co-founding father of PayPal and Palantir and arguably the ideal venture capitalist of his technology, with a sideline as patron of such far-accurate causes as the 2016 candidacy of Donald Trump. Thiel (who did now not comment for this article, which is tailored from my new biography, The Contrarian) is presumably the largest impact within the field’s most influential industry. Diversified Silicon Valley personas will likely be better known to most folk, at the side of Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and even about a who don’t on a typical basis start rockets into dwelling. But Thiel is the Valley’s factual idol — the one person whom tech’s young aspirants and millennial moguls most see to flatter and to emulate, the cult chief of the cult of disruption.

The blitzscaling strategy he and his workers pioneered at PayPal created the narrate playbook for an whole technology of start-ups, from Airbnb to WeWork. His most legendary bet — loaning $500,000 to a socially inept Harvard sophomore in alternate for 10 percent of a internet role referred to as TheFacebook.com — is well-known much less for the orders-of-magnitude economic return he realized and more for the phrases he embedded within the deal. Thiel ensured that Ticket Zuckerberg will likely be the company’s absolute dictator. No one, now not even Facebook’s board of administrators, could perhaps perhaps ever overrule him. Identical maneuvers occupy been adopted at loads of Thiel’s portfolio companies, at the side of Stripe and SpaceX, and this day, across the industry, it’s more the norm than the exception.

Thiel hasn’t perfect acted in a obvious formulation and left it for others to seem and apply. He taught his founders-in-working in direction of at Stanford, codifying the teachings from the immediate of companies based by his ragged workers — the so-referred to as PayPal Mafia. He later aloof his thinking in a book, Zero to One. It grew to develop into a ideal vendor, partly because it promised a course to Thiel-scale wealth and partly because it developed the idiosyncrasies that had been fresh within the college-age Thiel into a full-blown ideology. The book argues, amongst other issues, that founders are godlike, that monarchies are more ambiance friendly than democracies, and that cults are a higher organizational model than management consultancies. Extra than anything, it celebrates rule-breaking. Thiel bragged that of PayPal’s six founders, four had constructed bombs in high college.

The solutions occupy been accessible, nonetheless they occupy been, undeniably, diversified. For decades, Silicon Valley had been dominated by the mythology of Steve Jobs. The acid-shedding hippie CEO had argued that technology is in general a originate of ingenious expression, and he contented a technology of entrepreneurs that they should always unexcited secure merchandise that will enhance the lives of their clients. This used to be the “‘bicycle for the solutions’ payment system,” says Roger McNamee, the founding father of the venture-capital firm Elevation Partners, and it filtered into many of basically the most a success companies of the ’90s and ’00s.

Thiel despises the counterculture (he dates the verbalize starting up of American decline to Woodstock) and is contemptuous of the notion of creativity for its have sake. For Thiel, the aim of founding an organization is to govern your have future. “A startup is the largest endeavor over which that it’s good to perhaps perhaps presumably occupy obvious mastery,” he wrote. A new technology of entrepreneurs, coming of age within the wake of the monetary disaster, embraced his solutions. Thiel told them to flout norms and see lucre, now not impact. “Most efficient one ingredient can allow a commerce to transcend the day-to-day brute fight for survival,” he wrote. “Monopoly income.” Per chance his single ideal student has been Ticket Zuckerberg, who constructed a monopoly in his industry and frail it to crush opponents and payment gradually elevated prices to advertisers — all whereas telling the field that this if truth be told predatory habits used to be a social accurate.

With Thiel’s encouragement, tech would “cross rapidly and wreck issues,” as the Facebook motto set it, and executives believed it used to be better to quiz forgiveness than permission. The industry that developed will likely be outlined by these clichés, convincing itself that “disruption” wasn’t perfect an uncomfortable outcome of innovation nonetheless an result in itself. Thielism would tag up even at companies the set he used to be now not an investor: at Juul, the e-cigarette company that marketed to adolescents; at Robinhood, which tempted newbie merchants with unstable investment merchandise; and at Uber, which paid drivers now not as a lot as minimal wage and violated statutes with apparent glee.

McNamee, an early adviser to Zuckerberg who turned apostate and printed Peter Thiel used to be now not a standard boy. Within the guts-class San Francisco suburb of Foster City, his high-college classmates occupy been awed by his intelligence nonetheless chanced on him inscrutable and haughty — qualities that made him a target for abuse. “It’s evident in retrospect that what we occupy been doing used to be bullying,” one of his popular tormentors told me. “I’ve repeatedly thought he could perhaps need a list of oldsters he’s going to execute somewhere and that I’m on it.” Thiel obtained more assured as he matured bodily, though he used to be now not confident so noteworthy as disdainful, walking around with an expression that stated, in step with a pal, “Fuck you, world.”

Thiel never if truth be told swore, nonetheless once, all one of many easiest ways by his freshman year at Stanford, he quoted one of his roommates doing so all one of many easiest ways by an argument. The roommate responded by printing a commemorative signal and taping it to the ceiling. It had the date, January 1986, and declared, “Below this role, Peter Thiel first stated the phrase fuck.” It stayed there for the leisure of the semester, eliciting laughs from the leisure of the hall — other than for Thiel, who didn’t look and wasn’t told. In Would per chance perhaps just, he used to be all packed up and making ready to leave the dorm for the closing time when anyone pointed to the signal. Wordless, Thiel moved his desk below the paper, stepped up, tore it down, and left for the summer. “God,” a college acquaintance told me. “We occupy been such dicks to him.”

The mockery wasn’t about politics, now not now not as a lot as now not on the starting up, nonetheless that used to be how Thiel processed it. He had been raised by Evangelical German immigrants and fancied himself an aspiring William F. Buckley. It wasn’t weird to be conservative at Stanford — it housed the Hoover Institution — nonetheless Thiel thought to be because it a hothouse of lefty antagonists. “He considered liberals by a lens as those who weren’t good to him,” stated a classmate. “The kind folk treated him at Stanford had a big impact. That’s unexcited with him.” Thiel started to embody a new identity — that of the accurate-fly provocateur. He joked about starting up a unfounded charity, Liberals for Peace, that will lift cash per a imprecise agenda after which attain fully nothing other than pay him. And he told classmates that concern about South African apartheid, presumably the one buzziest concern on American campuses, used to be overblown. “It works,” he told Maxwell. (Thiel’s spokesman has stated that Thiel doesn’t endure in solutions being asked his views on apartheid and never supported it.)

In 1987, Thiel poured his sense of grievance into the start of a accurate-fly newspaper, the Stanford Overview. It used to be his first entrepreneurial venture and the starting up of a network that will within the ruin secure higher and dominate Silicon Valley. Thiel’s main innovation with the Overview used to be to join the parochial concerns of a minute elite — conservative Stanford undergraduates— to mainstream nationwide politics. Thus the now not indispensable $29 per year dues charged by the student senate grew to develop into a microcosm of tax-and-exercise liberalism and a notion so that it’s good to add non-white authors, love Zora Neale Hurston, to Stanford’s Western Custom direction grew to develop into a civilization-degree likelihood. A fundraising letter later despatched to older alumni warned that a professor used to be instructing a direction on Shaded hairstyles. It ended in a flood of donations. These styles of antics helped blueprint the honor of Ronald Reagan’s secretary of Training, who got right here to talk at a Overview occasion and made nationwide recordsdata recapping it on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.

Thiel’s newspaper used to be also fixated on intercourse. The first concern featured a satirical column, “Confessions of a Sexual Deviant,” a couple of young straight man who’d chosen to be celibate. Per the Overview, it used to be almost most per chance now not to consult with a men’s restroom without witnessing a homosexual intercourse act or to monstrous the quad and not using a need fistfuls of free condoms pressed into your hand. In 1987, presenting homosexuality as an habit, a columnist wrote that “unnatural” homosexual men had “yielded to temptation so repeatedly that the fires of lust burn within them, making it certainly complicated for them to govern themselves.” At some stage in Thiel’s last year on campus, his shut perfect friend and Overview collaborator Keith Rabois stood originate air the dwelling of a Stanford residential fellow and shouted on the tip of his lungs, “Faggot! That you just can perhaps perhaps presumably be going to die of AIDS! You’re going to secure what’s coming to you!”; two days later, the Overview printed “The Rape Agonize,” with an impassioned protection of a student who’d pleaded “no contest” to statutory rape.

Thiel would hump on to valorize Rabois as a free-speech martyr in a book, The Diversity Myth, co-written with the architect of the special concern, David Sacks. It’s tempting to psychologize the book, with its lurid complaints regarding the supposed occurrence of “glory holes” across the Stanford campus. And a few who know Thiel speculate, convincingly, that his mid-’90s homophobia used to be an expression of self-hatred. (Thiel is homosexual, as is Rabois.) But the book’s incendiary qualities could perhaps perfect occupy without reveal been a constituted of Thiel’s single-minded desire to provoke a reaction. He wished to secure his mark, and he indubitably knew that the prospect of most fashionable graduates defending the man who had shouted “Die, faggot!” on the quad of an elite university would secure noticed.

But Thiel’s years after Stanford — he obtained both an undergraduate and a law degree there — occupy been a misfire. A job at a white-shoe firm did now not translate into a Supreme Court docket clerkship, as he’d anticipated, and a stint as a derivatives trader at Credit ranking Suisse in Ny didn’t pan out. He made plans to cross dwelling, to a role brimming with overachieving young men contented of their very have genius and relentless in their resolution to secure prosperous: Silicon Valley. “He wasn’t humbled by the ride in Unique York,” stated a pal who used to be shut to him on the time. “He used to be ready to clutch issues over.”

It started on a sweltering summer day in 1998. Thiel used to be in a college room at Stanford’s engineering center, attempting to talk up an ungainly nonetheless spicy coder. Max Levchin used to be 23, and he’d reach to a lecture Thiel used to be delivering on currencies primarily for the air conditioning. The two young men obtained to talking, and within a day, Thiel, who had been managing a pool of capital he’d raised from pals and household as a hedge fund, told Levchin that he wished to invest in his embryonic start-up. It made design for Palm Pilots. On the tip of that year, they started experimenting with a formulation for owners of the devices to transmit IOUs to at least one one more. They referred to as the service PayPal, and Thiel, who took over the venture sooner than the year used to be out, posthaste saw its subversive chances.

Whereas you obtained cash by procedure of PayPal, that it’s good to perhaps perhaps transfer your balance to a monetary institution. Otherwise that it’s good to perhaps perhaps retain the funds within PayPal and expend them to pay folk. This, Thiel realized, made the service a roughly untrackable digital forex. It used to be the identical of a Swiss monetary institution record in a single’s pocket, he believed, boasting to a Wired reporter that it can perhaps perhaps result in “the erosion of the nation-allege.” Thiel staffed the company with ragged Stanford Overview editors and imposed his libertarian solutions in programs big and minute. PayPal workers occupy been free to tag up leisurely to conferences so long as they paid $1 for every minute they occupy been tardy, and Ayn Rand used to be one thing love required studying.

The corporate leased its first place of work above a stationery retailer and a French bakery in downtown Palo Alto. On the time, the Valley used to be so stuffed with competing payments companies that there used to be a 2d one on the identical floor. X.com used to be better funded than PayPal, with a successfully-known investor — Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital — and a charismatic founder who’d already sold one other start-up for some $300 million. His title used to be Elon Musk.

Musk didn’t know that the engineers across the touchdown occupy been also working on digital cash transfers. (The signal on their door bore the title of a father or mother company.) X and PayPal shared a trash bin within the alley within the lend a hand of their building, and PayPal engineers later bragged to a group of X workers that they chanced on documents that described X’s payments design, which frail the on-line, in preference to Palm Pilots, as successfully as a system for generating referrals by giving clients cash. They incorporated the guidelines into PayPal’s strategy. Some X workers I spoke with took this boast literally, though Musk solid doubt on the yarn. “It’s that that it’s good to perhaps perhaps presumably judge of, I yelp,” he told me. “But it’s a tiny love announcing, ‘You stole my thought for going to the moon.’” Despite the proven fact that he has long since moved on to running Tesla and SpaceX, Musk has sophisticated feelings about Thiel, partly in consequence of what took role subsequent.

Shifting PayPal’s focal level to the on-line and paying new customers referral prices juiced the company’s narrate. Just a few of Thiel’s coders made a tiny design app to track what number of folk had created new accounts, which appeared on his show as a tiny field titled “World Domination Index.” At any time when a new user joined, the app played the sound of a bell. In November 1999, PayPal’s customer inferior used to be about a thousand. By spring, the index used to be as a lot as 1 million. That used to be a nearly unparalleled rate of narrate, nonetheless it intended that PayPal had spent one thing love $20 million on referral prices out of the $28 million it had raised. The losses, and the similarity of their companies, persuaded Thiel and Musk to combine their companies.

Thiel left rapidly after the merger. “I wouldn’t utter we’re oil and water, nonetheless there are some barely mountainous differences,” Musk, who grew to develop into CEO, told me. “Peter likes the games­manship of investing — love we’re all playing chess. I don’t solutions that, nonetheless I’m basically into doing engineering and secure. I’m now not an inves­tor. I if truth be told feel love the expend of folk’s cash is now not frigid.” A one who has talked to every man regarding the opposite set it more succinctly: “Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart.”

Tell: Penguin Press

It appeared as if Musk obtained the vitality fight, nonetheless Thiel had laid a entice, inserting in most of his deputies — at the side of Levchin and the creator of the Overview’s “Rape Agonize” — within the government ranks. Musk didn’t perceive he used to be surrounded by a group that used to be more trusty to Thiel than to him. Later that year, Musk left town for a two-week high-tail. Whereas he used to be within the air, a group of Thiel-aligned conspirators confronted the company’s main backer, Moritz, at his place of work on Sand Hill Road. They demanded their patron be set to blame.

After Moritz reluctantly agreed, Thiel pressed his lend a hand. At a board meeting, in step with several folk aware of what took role, he urged that PayPal turn over all its cash to Thiel Capital, the hedge fund he used to be unexcited running on the aspect, so as that he could perhaps perhaps clutch advan­tage of the business upheaval of the post‒dot-com bubble. Moritz assumed Thiel used to be joking, nonetheless Thiel calmly outlined that he had a notion to bet on passion rates falling. Thiel’s thought used to be shot down, nonetheless Moritz used to be enraged. Risking a start-up’s cramped cash on speculation — in particular speculation that had the aptitude to in my notion enrich the CEO — used to be one thing no venture capitalist, nor any self-respecting tech entrepreneur, would even clutch into record suggesting. The truth that Thiel would propose it now not long after snagging the CEO job in a formulation that used to be now not exactly honorable used to be doubly galling. It sug­gested to Moritz and others on the board a lack of a factual compass.

Thiel and Moritz persevered to conflict. It might probably perhaps perhaps additionally just occupy been partly deepest — Moritz had originally invested in Musk’s company, now not Thiel’s. But it also mirrored the programs all one of many easiest ways by which Thiel used to be diversified from Moritz, Musk, and barely noteworthy every indispensable figure in Silicon Valley who’d reach sooner than him. “At coronary heart,” Moritz told me, “Peter is a hedge-fund man” — now not an entrepreneur. Founders occupy been anticipated to pour all of themselves into their companies in expose to grow as mountainous as that that it’s good to perhaps perhaps presumably judge of and, now not now not as a lot as at the same time as you aquire into the mythology of Silicon Valley, to change the field for the upper. By this logic, Thiel should always unexcited’ve been bleeding for PayPal, now not scheming to grow his investment portfolio. But Thiel didn’t care about Silicon Valley’s sense of propriety. And it opened up a universe of programs that his predecessors had never been brazen ample to establish out.

Below Thiel, PayPal’s willingness to put out of your mind banking solutions grew to develop into a key strategic lend a hand. Fi­nancial institutions are required to ascertain that clients are who they are saying they’re by checking identifications, nonetheless PayPal, which contended it wasn’t technically a monetary institution, made tiny effort to achieve so. (When a reporter successfully-known to Thiel that loads of his opponents complied with the guidelines, he referred to as them “insane.”) It also did tiny to stop folk from the expend of the cash they set into their accounts for illicit capabilities. The refund mechanism that PayPal frail to return clients’ cash used to be technically banned by the credit-card companies. When those companies complained, PayPal merely supplied an apology and negotiated. In the present day, the usage of unsustainable or ethically uncertain programs to secure a start-up insurmountably higher than its rivals is is referred to as “narrate hacking.” It’s widely credited to Thiel and his executives and successfully-known by entrepreneurs across the industry. They’re all chasing what Thiel obtained. The year after he grew to develop into CEO of PayPal, eBay obtained the company for $1.5 billion.

Twenty years later, Thielism is the dominant ethos in Silicon Valley. That’s partly because Thiel has been effective at seeding the industry with protégés — none of them more prominent than Ticket Zuckerberg. Having pursued a grow-at-all-prices, penalties-be-damned growth strategy, the Facebook CEO is now attempting to secure his have coin. Diem (née Libra) is a cryptocurrency that, if all goes in step with notion, will feature as a originate of alternative for the U.S. dollar within Facebook (roughly 3 billion customers), WhatsApp (2 billion), Instagram (1 billion), and its other apps, as successfully as those of any other companies that adopt it. The trouble has generated mighty concern from the U.S. Federal Reserve, which is understandably dedicated to the dollar, and from critics across the political spectrum, who verbalize shock on the audacity of an organization with Facebook’s track record for privacy violations attempting to set itself on the guts of global commerce.

Longtime Thiel mates, though, weren’t a great deal surprised at all. “No one appears to occupy connected the dots to Peter’s real big vision for PayPal,” a source who’d labored with Thiel for years wrote to me in June 2019, rapidly after the forex used to be announced. This person, and others I spoke with, saw Thiel’s ideology — and his apparent belief that corporate vitality should always unexcited subsume the authority of governments — in Facebook’s actions. “There’s an instantaneous impact,” this source stated.

Thiel doesn’t retain watch over Zuckerberg, and their relationship is sophisticated, to utter the least. Thiel unloaded most of his inventory as soon as the company went public. (The shares occupy been falling and morale used to be low. To rally the workers, Zuckerberg invited Thiel to an all-fingers meeting at headquarters, nonetheless he perfect ended up insulting them. “My technology used to be promised colonies on the moon,” Thiel told them. “As an quite quite loads of we obtained Facebook.”) But within the years since, Thiel has remained a depended on confidant to Zuckerberg — regardless of in my notion cultivating Facebook antagonists, at the side of James O’Keefe, the accurate-fly provocateur who produced undercover movies attempting to expose Facebook’s supposed bias in opposition to conservatives, and Charles Johnson, who helped start the face-recognition company Clearview AI.

Clearview assembled its big database of faces by scraping pictures from Facebook profiles, which Facebook considers a violation of its phrases of service. Johnson told me that when he raised cash from Thiel, he supplied Clearview as both a promising commerce and as a backdoor formulation to “execute” Facebook by exposing its lax privacy standards. Thiel, who as a Facebook board member has an obligation to act within the company’s ideal interests, invested in Clearview anyway. Johnson also says that Thiel frail him as a conduit to leak emails between Thiel and Reed Hastings, one other Facebook board member, who’d criticized Thiel for backing Donald Trump.

At any fashioned company, such disloyalty could perhaps perhaps presumably be grounds for dismissal. But it used to be Hastings, now not Thiel, who resigned from the board, and Zuckerberg never punished his mentor. Per two ragged Facebook staffers, this used to be partly because he appreciated Thiel’s unvarnished advice and partly because Zuckerberg saw Thiel as a political ally. Zuckerberg had been criticized by conservative media sooner than the 2016 election and, with Thiel’s encouragement, had sought to cater to them.

In 2019, whereas on a high-tail to Washington to reply to questions from Congress about his digital forex, Thiel joined Zuckerberg, Jared Kushner, Trump, and their spouses on the White Dwelling. The specifics of the discussion occupy been secret — nonetheless, as I file in my book, Thiel later told a confidant that Zuckerberg got right here to an working out with Kushner all one of many easiest ways by the meal. Facebook, he promised, would proceed to preserve faraway from fact-checking po­litical speech — thus allowing the Trump marketing campaign to utter regardless of it wished. If the company followed by on that promise, the Trump administra­tion would lay off on any heavy-handed guidelines.

After the dinner, Zuckerberg took a fingers-off technique to conservative sites. In leisurely October, after he detailed the policy in a speech at Georgetown, Facebook launched a recordsdata app that showcased what the company referred to as “deeply reported and successfully-sourced” stores. Among the many list of suggested publications used to be Breitbart, Steve Bannon’s role, even supposing it had promoted itself as allied with the alt-accurate and had once incorporated a part dedicated to “Shaded crime.” Facebook also appeared to cross out of its formulation to aid the Day-to-day Wire, a youthful, hipper model of Breitbart that will develop into one of many largest publishers on the platform. Facebook had long considered itself as a government unto itself; now, in consequence of the working out brokered by Thiel, the positioning would push what the Thiel confidant referred to as “allege-sanctioned conservatism.”

Zuckerberg denied that there had been any take care of Trump, calling the notion “barely ridiculous,” though Facebook’s actions within the speed-as a lot as the election would secure the denial seem now not fully credible. At some stage in Shaded Lives Matter protests, Twitter hid a post by the president that appeared to condone violence: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”; Face­book allowed it. Within the times main as a lot as the January 6 revolt on the U.S. Capitol, Facebook largely brushed off calls to restrict the spread of “Stop the Steal” groups, which claimed that Trump had if truth be told obtained the election.

Within the months since, journalists, policy-makers, and even some Facebook workers occupy struggled to showcase why the company stays detached to the objections of regulators and lawmakers as successfully as those raised by general sense. Why is Facebook — and so noteworthy of what comes out of what once appeared love the crown jewel of American capitalism — such an clearly malevolent force?

The solutions to those questions are partly structural, for sure, entertaining regulatory disasters that allowed Zuckerberg to dominate social-media advertising and marketing. But they’re also ideological. Both figuratively and literally, Thiel wrote the book on monopoly capitalism, and he recruited a military of followers, at the side of Zuckerberg. That is to utter that the Facebook founder, love almost every a success techie of his technology, isn’t a liberal or a conservative. He is a Thielist. The principles attain now not apply.

This article has been as a lot as this level to consist of more context on Thiel’s 2019 dinner with Zuckerberg and Kushner.

Excerpted from The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Vitality, by Max Chafkin. Printed by procedure with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random Dwelling, LLC. Copyright © 2021 by Max Chafkin.