Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist. He is Clarium’s President and the Chairman of the firm’s investment committee, which oversees the firm’s research, investment, and trading strategies. Before starting Clarium, Peter served as Chairman and CEO of PayPal, an Internet company he co-founded in December 1998 and was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in October 2002.
Prior to founding PayPal, Peter ran Thiel Capital Management , the predecessor to Clarium, which started with $1 million under management in 1996. Peter began his financial career as a derivatives trader at CS Financial Products, after practicing securities law at Sullivan & Cromwell.
In addition to managing Clarium, Peter is active in a variety of philanthropic and educational pursuits; he sits on the Board of Directors of the Pacific Research Institute, the Board of Visitors of Stanford Law School, and is an adviser to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Peter received a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University and a JD from Stanford Law School. He is self-described libertarian and a minority investor in Big Think.
Companies that will win at search are those that successfully deal with the problem of fixed costs, said Thiel in his keynote address at Big Think's Farsight 2011 forum.
Hollywood caricatures capitalism as a zero-sum game. But all of Facebook's stakeholders have done extraordinarily well—including Eduardo Saverin.
The venture capitalist agrees with Bill Gates that the free market often fails to encourage long-term innovation. But governments are not the solution.
There has been lots of innovation recently in areas without regulation—heavily regulated fields like transportation, health care, and energy have been much slower to progress.
During the next 20 years, the plan for China and India is basically to catch up to the U.S.—to get 19th century plumbing and 20th century railroads. That is not a strategy that will raise living standards in the...
California is still the best place for tech companies to do business. But colonies on offshore platforms might one day become our centers of innovation.
Technological innovation requires risk and sacrifice, which may be very hard to do if you have an enormous debt burden to try to repay.
How did everyone fail to recognize an $8 trillion housing bubble? Peter Thiel weighs in on what happened, and why he sees the next 20 years as crucial.
Dubai’s current situation shows us that we are quickly shifting from an inflationary toward a deflationary political world, says Peter Thiel, one with much less tolerance the second time around.