The Contrarian
Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs
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3.7 • 6 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Notable Book
A shocking and assiduously reported biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial, and hugely influential power broker whose techno-authoritarian worldview is coming to dominate our collective reality
“Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian is much more than a consistently shocking biography of Peter Thiel, the most important investor in tech and a key supporter of the Donald Trump presidency. It’s also a disturbing history of Silicon Valley that will make you reconsider the ideological foundations of America’s relentless engine of creative destruction.”—Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound
Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing count-less aspects of contemporary life, from the technologies that mediate our daily existence to the rise of the far-right effort among some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and Washington to untether the U.S. government from the established constitutional order. But despite his being one of the most important forces behind the tectonic shifts in America’s sociopolitical landscape, 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 philosophy, 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, including stren-uously backing outsider political candidates, notably a young Senate hopeful named JD Vance and the longshot 2016 presidential contender Donald Trump.
Essential reading for a post-2024 world, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and a deeply insightful portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with peril.
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.
Customer Reviews
Great Title
The title attracted me to this book. Having been labelled a Contrarian made me associate with its subject. The fact that it’s theatre was an industry I grew up in sold it. The book felt familiar, but the machinations foreign. The political positions sometimes shocking. The importance of lobbying underlined. “Name something you’ve changed your mind about”. “Zero to One”. In the end, not sure if he is more of a contrarian than a visionary. But the real revelation for me is that I’m at a biography stage of my life. I’ll be reading more.