The Contrarian
Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
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- R$ 74,90
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- R$ 74,90
Descrição da editora
A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics
Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious.
In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president.
Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Big Tech billionaire has injected toxic Trumpism and other extreme ideals into America's body politic, according to this cutting biography. Bloomberg journalist Chafkin (Design Crazy) depicts Peter Thiel, PayPal cofounder and Facebook financier, as an inconsistent "calculating operator" with an enormous political and social footprint. Many of his impulses inhabit the fringe, Chafkin notes, including his support for "seasteading" countries on ocean platforms and his interest in life-extending blood transfusions from young people. But Thiel is also a force in mainstream Republican politics; he was a big donor to Donald Trump's presidential campaign, and then won federal contracts for his data-mining company, Palantir, which helped Immigration and Customs Enforcement find immigration-law violators. Chafkin's portrait of Thiel is punchy and caustic, asking, "Was Thiel a genius worthy of admiration and study, or a sociopathic nihilist?" (the author leans toward the latter). His zeal to unmask Thiel's allegedly subversive influence is sometimes overwrought: he calls Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's 2019 refusal to censor Trump's campaign claims "exactly what Thiel, and Trump, wanted," while downplaying the free-speech issues involved. Still, this is an engrossing look at one of Silicon Valley's most eccentric and abrasive figures.
