THE CONTRARIAN

A revealing portrait of the man “responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly—with little, if any, regard for potential costs or dangers to society.”

Chafkin, a features editor at Bloomberg Businessweek, brings long experience in the tech world to his book debut, a savvy biography of billionaire venture capitalist and outspoken neo-reactionary Peter Thiel (b. 1967). Touting a brand of extreme libertarianism, Thiel has created Silicon Valley’s defining ideology of tech above all else. An arrogant, aloof, high-achieving student at Stanford, Thiel came to see the university’s multicultural liberalism “as uniquely despicable, maybe even dangerous.” After graduating from law school, he worked briefly in corporate law and, in the 1990s, arrived in Silicon Valley, intent on making money. Chafkin recounts Thiel’s rise as a business mogul, surrounded by young men who “recognized him as the leader and would not fight with him.” But wealth was only one goal. Thiel also sought to establish himself as a ruthless power broker in Silicon Valley and to wield influence as a conservative thought leader in Washington, D.C. Among his many business projects, Chafkin recounts his involvement in PayPal, which he saw as a way to strip government from control of its own money; Facebook (at one point, Mark Zuckerberg was the “ultimate Thiel acolyte”); Palantir, a surveillance company whose customers include the Army, Navy, and CIA; and his latest interest: funding research that would allow humans to live forever. A major backer of Trump, he served as a “shadow president” on Trump’s transition team, agitating for “maximal disruption within the White House.” Drawing on interviews with Thiel and more than 150 others, many who insisted on anonymity because they feared Thiel’s retribution, Chafkin deftly portrays his subject as a “calculating operator,” “nihilist,” and predator who has constructed an image “so compelling that it has come to obscure the man behind it.”

A brisk, well-researched life of an enigmatic billionaire.