Peter Thiel

Quick facts

Key positions

Biography

Peter Andreas Thiel was born October 11, 1967, in Frankfurt, Germany, to German immigrant parents who brought him to the United States at age one. From 1971 to 1977 the family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia) during apartheid before returning to the United States. Thiel has rarely addressed this period publicly.

Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford (B.A., 1989). In 1987, his sophomore year, he co-founded The Stanford Review, a conservative campus newspaper that positioned itself against political correctness and multiculturalism. The Review is the institutional origin of Thiel’s long partnership with David Sacks, a fellow Review editor with whom Thiel co-authored The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford (Independent Institute, 1995). After Stanford Law (J.D., 1992), he worked briefly as a securities lawyer at Sullivan & Cromwell and as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse before founding Thiel Capital Management in 1996.

Thiel’s investment vehicles trace a continuous lineage from Thiel Capital Management (1996) through Clarium Capital (2002) — a hedge fund that shrank roughly 90% after wrong-way commodity bets (Bloomberg, January 2011) — to Founders Fund (2005), with Valar Ventures (2010) and Mithril Capital (2012) spinning out of the broader Thiel Capital ecosystem. In a 2019 congressional questionnaire, Michael Kratsios (later Trump White House CTO and OSTP Director) described Founders Fund, Thiel Macro, Mithril, Valar, Clarium, and the Thiel Foundation as “related subsidiaries” of Thiel Capital.

Through these vehicles Thiel anchors a surveillance-and-defense investment network. He co-founded Palantir Technologies in 2003 — a data-analytics firm that became a central platform for U.S. intelligence, military, and immigration-enforcement agencies — and through Founders Fund and Mithril holds positions across defense and surveillance companies including Anduril, Carbyne, and Scale AI. Thiel is also a documented patron of J.D. Vance: he hired Vance at Mithril Capital in 2016, gave roughly $15 million to Vance’s 2022 Ohio Senate race, and personally urged Donald Trump to choose Vance as his 2024 running mate (Bloomberg; Fortune). Bloomberg has documented more than a dozen Thiel-network alumni placed across the second Trump administration.

Sources

• Peter Thiel — Wikipedia — Wikipedia (tier 3) — biographical overview, birth, education, positions
• The Education of a Libertarian — Cato Unbound, April 13, 2009 (tier 1) — Thiel in his own words
• The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford — Independent Institute, 1995 (tier 2) — Stanford Review formation, Thiel–Sacks co-authorship
• Clarium Hedge Fund Shrinks 90% — Bloomberg, January 12, 2011 (tier 1) — Clarium Capital
• Peter Thiel’s Allies in Trump’s Government — Bloomberg, 2025 (tier 1) — Thiel-network government placements, Vance relationship
• Oligarchs and the Trump Admin: Peter Thiel — Revolving Door Project (tier 2) — network placements