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    Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life
    Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life
    Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life
    Ebook90 pages53 minutes

    Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life

    By Richard Byrne Reilly

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    About this ebook

    Investigative journalist Richard Byrne Reilly has published the first biography of Peter Thiel, the controversial billionaire and contrarian behind some of the world's most powerful and disruptive technology companies. "Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life," an unauthorized microbiography published as an eBook, illuminates the world view of the man who co-founded PayPal and Palantir, became both the first outside investor in Facebook and the first institutional investor in the newly-legalizing marijuana industry, and is now a pledged Donald Trump delegate. "Players, Companies, Life" recounts the board meeting where Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo's $1 billion offer for Facebook; proffers Thiel's brutal appraisals of tech giants; and tells how a chess grand master's strategy inspired his approach to investing. Above all, Players is an inspiring blueprint on the value of optimism -and how to attain your goals.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRichard Byrne Reilly
    Release dateJun 13, 2016
    ISBN9781311111494
    Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life
    Author

    Richard Byrne Reilly

    Richard Byrne Reilly is an award-winning investigative journalist and author who has covered technology, venture capital, security, intelligence, military, celebrity and crime. His work has appeared in the National Enquirer, New York Magazine, the New York Post, FoxNews.com, the San Francisco Examiner, Red Herring, VentureBeat, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and many European publications. Reilly's first book, The Frigate Bird, a gonzo spy thriller set in northern Massachusetts with cover art by Raymond Pettibon, was released in 2013. A Bay Area native, he lives on California's Central Coast.

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      Book preview

      Peter Thiel - Richard Byrne Reilly

      This page was intentionally left blank.

      Richard Bryne Reilly

      Peter Thiel: Players, Companies, Life

      The unauthorized microbiography of technology’s greatest entrepreneur

      Copyright 2016 © Richard Bryne Reilly

      Art by John Ritter @ ritterillustration.net

      All rights reserved

      richardbyrnereilly.com

      Typeset with love by reedsy.com

      For Stephie. Much love and thanks for the save.

      Contents

      Foreword

      Introduction

      I. PLAYERS

      Elon Musk

      Steve Jobs

      Technologists

      Tim Cook

      Marissa Mayer

      Edward Snowden

      Bitcoin

      Mark Zuckerberg

      Warren Buffet

      Vladimir Putin

      Hollywood

      Sean Parker

      China

      Ronald Reagan

      Eric Schmidt

      Reid Hoffman

      Carl Icahn

      Cleantech

      Hillary Clinton

      Democracy

      Techwomen

      Jesus Christ

      Eduardo Saverin

      II. Companies

      Palantir

      Tesla

      California

      PayPal

      Microsoft

      Apple

      Rocket Internet

      Amazon

      Groupon

      Facebook

      NSA

      Alibaba

      Friendster

      Uber

      SpaceX

      Twitter

      IBM

      College Inc.

      HBO’s Silicon Valley

      Lyft

      III. Life

      Frozen after death

      Billionaire

      Lawyer

      Outsider

      How to lose money

      Big mistake

      Personal wealth

      Luck

      Artificial Intelligence

      Happiness

      Drugs

      Biggest fear

      Buzzwords

      Big data and cloud computing

      Coding

      Architects

      Libertarian

      The next bubble

      Big on biotech

      Competition

      The Valley

      Failure

      Mission focus

      Endgame

      About the Author

      Foreword

      The entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel is quietly and publicly building the future he would prefer in the companies he builds and funds and the causes he supports. The cofounder of PayPal, the Silicon Valley company that invented online payments, and Palantir, a spookily prescient data analysis firm with ties to the United States Intelligence Community. Thiel was also the first outside investor in Facebook.

      Through his venture firm Founders Fund and hedge fund Clarium Capital, he has pursued a singular idea: that technology can solve big problems in novel ways, replacing tired ways of doing business with elegant and more efficient solutions. Thiel rejects the small-mindedness of most of the Valley’s entrepreneurialism. The motto of Founders Fund is: We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.

      But Thiel is not satisfied with successful, albeit ambitious, investments that expand human possibilities by allowing us to do new things. He studied 20th-century philosophy, and later law at Stanford, and he is committed to a Left Coast cyber-libertarianism that seeks to encourage businesses to flourish.

      He also has invested in a variety of eccentric, religio-technological causes including antiaging research that seeks to deliver us from dying, and machine learning research that advances the so-called Singularity, a science fiction scenario, positing all human history is rushing toward a moment where the capacities of artificial intelligences exceed the capacities of humans.

      German by birth, and gay (although deeply ambivalent about being identified as such, except as a matter of fact), he has reliably supported Republican candidates in presidential and state elections. He funds the Thiel Fellowship, whose sole purpose is to give talented undergraduates enough money to drop out of prestigious universities.

      Thiel is almost impossible to categorize or pin down. But the talented journalist and novelist Richard Byrne Reilly has hit up on the best approach to capturing the technologist’s restless, critical, original intelligence by letting Thiel speak for himself. In Players, Companies, Life, Reilly has created an innovative, impressionistic cut-up of a biography, allowing Thiel to tell his story in his own words.

      In sixty-seven short chapters, Reilly provides just enough crucial context before allowing Thiel to explain

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