Peter Thiel

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Peter Thiel (2014)

Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967 in Frankfurt am Main ) is an American investor of German origin. He is a partner of the venture capital company Founders Fund in San Francisco and president of hedge fund Clarium Capital in New York . He is co-founder of Mithril Capital Management and co-founder and CEO of Valar Ventures.

Thiel founded the online payment service Paypal together with Max Levchin and Elon Musk and was partly managing director of the company. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Palantir Technologies . Thiel was the first external investor in the social network Facebook .

In 2016, Thiel had private assets of $ 2.7 billion, according to Forbes . In addition to the US and German citizenship, he also has New Zealand citizenship.

Life

Origin and education

Thiel was born in Frankfurt am Main , his father, the chemist Klaus Thiel, is German. When he was one year old, his parents immigrated to the United States. He completed a philosophy degree at Stanford University in 1989 with a BA .

After obtaining a Juris Doctor there in 1992, Thiel worked in New York - first for a federal judge and then at the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell LLP. After less than a year, he switched to Credit Suisse as a derivatives trader . In 1996 he returned to California and founded his own investment fund Thiel Capital Management.

investor

In 1998 Thiel met the computer scientist Max Levchin . He invested $ 280,000 in its startup PayPal and became the company's chief executive officer (CEO). In 2002 Thiel went public with PayPal. With the proceeds of $ 55 million from eBay's acquisition of PayPal that same year, Thiel founded Clarium Capital Management , a global macro fund . This hedge fund managed approximately $ 2.1 billion in early 2007. In 2003 he co-founded Palantir Technologies , a company that develops data analysis software that is used by the US government for intelligence activities and counterterrorism, among other things. At the same time he is chairman and since the end of 2014 the largest shareholder of this company. In June 2004, Thiel became the first investor to join Facebook with a $ 500,000 loan . He later converted it to a 7% share in Facebook. When the Facebook IPO in May 2012, Thiel sold 16.8 million Facebook shares valued at 640 million US dollars. After the investor hold period ended on August 16, he sold an additional 20 million shares for approximately $ 400 million. Thiel has been investing in the growing US cannabis market since the beginning of 2015 .

In addition to his work as a finance manager, Thiel was involved in a variety of ways. As a so-called executive producer , he financed the satirical comedy film Thank You for Smoking . He supported the work of Aubrey de Gray to overcome the aging process in humans with several million US dollars. Thiel also specifically promotes young founders in the technology sector. In 2011, for example, he awarded scholarships to 20 students in the United States, each worth $ 100,000.

politics

His political orientation became apparent during his studies: in 1987 he founded the libertarian , weekly campus newspaper The Stanford Review . Already in the 2008 election campaign he supported the libertarian Ron Paul for the nomination for the Republican presidential candidate. He was Paul's largest single donor in the 2012 presidential election campaign , donating $ 2.6 million to Paul's Super-PAC, and he was also given to the Tea Party movement . In an essay from 2009 he described freedom and democracy as incompatible ( “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” ). He supports Patri Friedman with his project Seasteading , an anti-national, libertarian project of settlements at sea outside of nation states.

Thiel is a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Conference .

His 2012 book The Blueprint, written with Garry Kasparov and Max Levchin, diagnoses a stagnation in technological progress and calls for greater investment in research and development in order to increase global prosperity.

At the 2016 Republican National Convention , Thiel was a delegate for Donald Trump , for whose election campaign he is said to have donated $ 1.25 million. After Trump's election as President of the United States, he acted as one of his advisors.

In a big interview with René Scheu , which was published in the NZZ in April 2019 , Thiel speaks of the synchronization of heads in Silicon Valley. That is the reason for his move to Los Angeles. He calls the actions of the American President Donald Trump “far too little disruptive”, but still wants to support Trump. The populist movement in the US but also in Europe, it leads to an economic stagnation back, the stopping for decades and felt by the people, but will be denied by the economics and politics.

chess

Thiel was also very successful as a chess player, although no tournament games have been recorded since the end of July 2003. With the current Elo rating of 2199, he is still one of the best thousand chess players in the USA.

sexuality

In 2007 he was outed as gay by the US gossip blog Gawker . In the trial of former show wrestler Hulk Hogan against the online portal, he took over Hogan's legal fees of 10 million US dollars. Gawker posted a sex video of the ex-professional athlete and was fined $ 115 million in damages. As a result, Gawker had to stop appearing. After this became known, Thiel announced in an interview that he had financed several lawsuits against Gawker and commissioned his own team of lawyers to win clients over to lawsuits against Gawker; Thiel called this approach " philanthropy ". On July 22, 2016, Thiel gave a speech in Cleveland to thunderous applause from the Republican party congress participants , in which he declared: “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. Above all, I'm proud to be American! ” (“ I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all, I am proud to be an American. ”) .

Awards

In February 2013, Thiel received the TechCrunch Crunchie Award as Venture Capitalist of the Year .

Fonts

In popular culture

In David Fincher's feature film The Social Network (2010), which deals with the genesis of the social network Facebook, Thiel is played by the actor Wallace Langham .

Thiel was an inspiration for the character of Tobias Erkner in Jonas Lüscher's novel Kraft (2017).

literature

  • Thomas Rappold: Peter Thiel: Facebook, PayPal, Palantir - How Peter Thiel is revolutionizing the world . FinanzBook Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-95972-051-9 .
  • Uwe Jean Heuser: Peter Thiel founded PayPal and was Facebook's first investor. In: Die Zeit , No. 53 of December 19, 2018, pp. 21-22

Web links and references

Commons : Peter Thiel  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Thiel at nndb.com, accessed on September 9, 2015
  2. ↑ Clarium Capital | CrunchBase. In: www.crunchbase.com. Retrieved June 23, 2016 .
  3. ↑ a b This genius builds the “most important company in the world”. In: THE WORLD. Retrieved May 1, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Matt Drange: Mark Zuckerberg Decides To Keep Peter Thiel On Facebook's Board. In: Forbes. Retrieved June 23, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Ryan Mac: This Silicon Valley Billionaire Has Been Secretly Funding Hulk Hogan's Lawsuits Against Gawker. In: Forbes. Retrieved June 23, 2016 .
  6. ↑ Peter Thiel is also New Zealander In: n-tv.de (accessed in April 2017)
  7. ↑ Are you a fortune teller? Interview with investor Peter Thiel - HAZ - Hannoversche Allgemeine. In: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung. Retrieved November 12, 2016 .
  8. ↑ Jörg Burger: And how did it continue for ... Peter Thiel, venture capitalist. Zeit Online, December 10, 2007, accessed April 1, 2011 .
  9. ↑ On Innovation, Entrepreneurialism, and Law. In: Stanford Lawyer. Stanford Law School, May 31, 2011, accessed November 2, 2016 .
  10. ^ Christian Bergmann, Christian Fuchs: SAP works for the NSA. Zeit Online, March 10, 2015, accessed March 11, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Ryan Mac: Palantir Aiming To Raise $ 400 Million In New Round. Forbes, December 11, 2014, accessed March 11, 2015 .
  12. ^ "Facebook's first investor Peter Thiel says goodbye" , Depotagent, August 21, 2012
  13. ↑ Internet billionaire Peter Thiel invests in marijuana . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 8, 2015, accessed on February 15, 2016.
  14. ↑ Anna Gielas: The billionaire without whom Facebook would not exist. Cicero , March 27, 2012.
  15. ^ Yvonne Ortmann: Peter Thiel: Portrait of a media-shy star investor. T3N Magazine , December 24th, 13th 2011. Retrieved April 3, 2012.
  16. ↑ US Republican Financiers - Millions for the Candidates
  17. ^ A b Friedman , Education of a Libertarian, Cato Institute Blog , 2009.
  18. ^ Steering Committee . Bilderberg Meetings. Retrieved October 16, 2010.
  19. ↑ a b Andrew Ross Sorkinmay: Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker. The New York Times, May 25, 2016, accessed December 14, 2016 .
  20. ^ Peter Thiel's latest bet. Retrieved December 14, 2016 (English, full text of Peter Thiel's speech at the Republican National Convention).
  21. ↑ Thiel donates for Trump , FAZ , October 18, 2016, p. 23 (edition D1)
  22. ↑ They call him the “shadow president” . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, June 27, 2017
  23. ↑ https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/peter-thiel-donald-trump-handelt-fuer-mich-zu-wenig-disruptiv-ld.1471818
  24. ^ Owen Thomas: Peter Thiel is totally gay, people. In: Gawker. Retrieved May 26, 2016 (American English).
  25. ↑ Patrick Bernau : Peter Thiel against Gawker: Revenge, planned for years . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . May 26, 2016, ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed May 26, 2016]).
  26. ↑ Willi Winkler : You are staring! , in: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 28, 2016, p. 32
  27. ↑ Gruenderszene.de: Party conference speech, Peter Thiel: "I am proud to be gay"
  28. ↑ BusinessInsider.de: Moving speech by star investor Peter Thiel: "I am proud to be gay"
  29. ↑ Congratulations Crunchies Winners! GitHub Wins Best Overall Startup . TechCrunch (January 31, 2013) - Accessed July 30, 2015.
  30. ↑ Trend author Jonas Lüscher: "The rich become immortal and the rest of them are superfluous" . In: bz Basellandschaftliche Zeitung . April 15, 2017 ( basellandschaftlichezeitung.ch [accessed February 17, 2018]).
personal data
SURNAME Thiel, Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Thiel, Peter Andreas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American entrepreneur of German origin
DATE OF BIRTH October 11, 1967
PLACE OF BIRTH Frankfurt am Main , Germany