Peter Thiel: Paypal mafioso

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Welcome to Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service.

Each episode, we pick a billionaire and find out how they made their money.

And then we judge them.

Are they good, bad, or just another billionaire?

I'm Simon Jack, the BBC's business editor.

And I'm Sing Singh.

I'm a journalist, author, and podcaster.

And this episode, the last of the current series,

is a man who is probably the smartest person I've ever interviewed.

Really?

Well, we have to get into that because the thing that fascinates me most about Peter Teal, whom we're talking about this episode, is the fact his nickname is the Dungeon Master.

A very smart guy, no doubt, got some very strange ideas about life, death, society, or the lack of it and he wants to live forever he basically thinks he can keep himself alive till he's 120 by which time we'll have invented a cure for death i mean i don't want to live forever i have to be completely honest especially not if it means spending the rest of eternity with someone called the dungeon master no well at 57 peter teal is worth nine billion us dollars He's also, by the way, made his fortune investing in some of the world's biggest tech companies, and that includes household names like Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify and LinkedIn.

He actually made an appearance if you've seen the film The Social Network.

He's in it.

And actually apart from Elon Musk, his name has probably come up the most on the show.

Probably because of his involvement at early stages with some of those huge tech successes.

In fact, we will tell the story of how he ousted his old friend at one time, Elon Musk, from their company PayPal.

Yeah, he's really truly one of Silicon Valley's most intriguing characters and playing an increasingly important role in politics as well.

Yeah, we're trying to think who he would be in the billionaire cinematic universe.

And I thought Doctor Strange.

Oh, that's good, because he's not charismatic enough to be Tony Stark, is he?

No, he's not.

I think Elon Musk styles himself on Tony Stark.

Like I say, Doctor Strange for me.

So what's he like in real life?

He is

clipped.

He speaks in a very interesting, metallic kind of voice.

And he stutters a bit.

Usually when you interview a CEO, they sort of trot out some corporate pattern that they think would be exactly nonsense.

Exactly.

Whereas him, he goes, um, okay.

And you can see his eyes scanning the horizon for the answer.

So you really feel you're getting a bespoke.

thought-through answer from somebody who's thought a lot about these things.

Interesting, because he does describe himself as a contrarian.

Yeah, and a libertarian who's made billions from big state surveillance.

And we'll get into what that means a little bit later on.

He's an intellectual who says he hates politics, but seems to get stuck in quite a bit.

He's one of Trump's biggest donors.

He's been called a kingmaker.

And speaking of living forever, he signed up to be cryogenically frozen in the hopes of his second coming.

Yeah, like I say, he's invested in a cure for aging and floating city-states.

That's right in tune with his idea of trying to escape what he sees as the harness of nation-states.

And get this, he'll even give you $100,000 if you drop out of university to launch a tech startup.

He's also argued that diversity initiatives are, quote, very evil and very silly and doesn't seem convinced that women being given the vote was an entirely good thing.

So is he a genius free thinker, the impression he left on me when I spoke to him, what, 14 years ago?

Or is he a libertarian bogeyman, an enemy of democracy?

And does that make him good, bad, or just another billionaire?

So here's a little clip of him with an interview he did with the BBC back in 2010.

Have a listen.

I think we are living in a world in which the problems of overbearing states have become very dominant and in which the problem of political correctness has become very acute.

So I think we need to somehow recreate a frontier in which people can think for themselves.

But let's go back to the beginning.

Peter Thiel was born in 1967 in Frankfurt, Germany, but his family moved to Cleveland in the States when he was one, much like some of the other European billionaires that we've covered on the show, including George Soros.

And Sergey Brin, of course, Mr.

Google.

One of Peter's most vivid childhood memories, apparently, is when, aged just three, he first became aware of death.

He was sitting on a cowhide rug in his parents' apartment in Cleveland and asked where the rug came from.

And his parents said, a cow.

Well, what happened to the cow?

It died.

Peter's dad then revealed that death was something that happened to all cows, people too.

Peter recalls it was a very, very disturbing day and he's been disturbed by it ever since.

I mean, some kids get their bubble burst about Santa Claus, but this guy has to get it about death and mortality.

I mean it's quite intense.

Well let's have a little listen to him.

Here's Peter again talking about that very subject.

So I think seeing death as a problem that needs to be conquered and that can be conquered is very contrary and bizarre because our entire culture is one where people have become complacent about it and they talk themselves into saying this has to happen anyway.

And so it's something that I think we should start thinking about.

And instead of rationalizing it or ignoring it, we should fight it.

Fight death.

There we go.

His father was a chemical engineer and his job meant the family moved several times while Peter was a child, including stints, working for mining companies in Africa.

All this meant that Peter attended seven different elementary schools, including an elite or white prep school during apartheid South Africa.

In 1977, age 10, the family settled back in the U.S.

in Foster City, a suburban community in the San Francisco Bay Area.

You don't get more all-American in a city called Foster City.

No.

And the Bay Area.

Gosh, we've spent a lot of time in the Bay Area.

I think we should do a special episode recorded from the Bay Area by this point.

Peter's parents were devout Christians, and Peter has, by the way, remained a Christian his whole life, saying that Christianity is the prism with which I look through the whole world.

Again, this is really odd.

If you think a devout Christian wants to cheat death, are those two things consistent?

I don't know.

I mean, you'd think if you're a Christian, you believe that when you die, you go up to heaven.

You're basically cheating yourself out of an eternity spent in heaven, kicking back with Jesus.

For young Peter, TV was banned until junior high school.

That's when he's about 12 years old.

But he found other ways to amuse himself.

And this is the source of the dungeon master nickname because Peter was your archetypal 80s geek.

He loved science fiction.

He played Dungeons and Dragons, the role-playing game, and his favourite book was Lord of the Rings.

Yeah, he was also skinny, socially awkward.

He was a loner, which meant he was bullied.

And kids can be really cruel.

One of the things that they did to him was they put up for sale signs in his front lawn and asked when he'd be leaving town.

I remember someone at my school didn't didn't like our English teacher and put his house up for sale in the local newspaper and had people knocking on his door.

It's an old trick.

Anyway, but he was a maths and chess prodigy.

By age 12, he was ranked seventh in the whole of the US at chess.

In fact, his chess kit had a sticker on it saying born to win.

And when he did occasionally lose, he would sweep the pieces off the board.

And he later said, show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser.

Yeah, what a little brat.

With a drive to win, though, you have to give him that.

But he gave up competitive chess because, in his words, taken too far, chess can become an alternate reality.

Again, that's kind of an odd question because he's right behind some of the meta ideas to create a metaverse.

This alternate reality in which one loses sight of the real world.

My chess ability was roughly at the limit.

Had I become any stronger, there would have been some massive trade-offs with success in other domains in my life.

Instead, during high school, he got into libertarianism.

He was an admirer of Ronald Reagan and read Ayn Rand.

Ayn Rand, I think, is a really important person, actually, for several of these billionaires.

Ayn Rand Rand wrote a couple of books, The Fountain Head, and Atlas Shrugged.

And a lot of people in finance and in entrepreneurialism use it as a bit of a Bible.

And roughly, the philosophy is that rational self-interest is the best way to proceed in life, making sure that you personally are fulfilling yourself to the nth degree and that all other things should get out of the way.

And that self-interest is the highest moral purpose a human being can have.

And basically, the government should just protect your right to pursue that.

I was going to say it also kind of lines up really nicely with capitalism, right?

Yeah, I mean, Randism, if you like, is an extreme expression of free market capitalism.

Unfortunately, Ayn Rand is no longer with us, so we can only really project what she might think of being so influential in the finance world and on libertarians like Peter.

In 1985, he headed to Stanford University to study philosophy, and he stayed on there to go to law school.

Now, during that time at Stanford, again, an institution which made a lot of appearances in these stories, he made some important friends and future colleagues, like future LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Now, Peter and Reid would have intellectual discussions in which Peter would actually quote Margaret Thatcher, saying, there's no such thing as society, there are individual men and women.

Yeah, he was also influenced by the French philosopher and Stanford professor René Girard's concept of mimetic desire.

In English, that is, how people unconsciously learn to want the same thing as those around them.

And Peter said at the time, thinking about how disturbingly herd-like people become in so many different contexts, as an investor entrepreneur, I've always tried to be contrarian, to go against a crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.

He cut a very controversial figure.

Classmates remember him describing South Africa's apartheid as a sound economic system, though a spokesman has denied that he supported apartheid.

And while at Stanford, he was the president of the Stanford Federalist Society, a group for libertarians and conservatives.

Yeah, he also founded and edited a university newspaper.

That's a good thing to do.

It was called the Stanford Review, but it was a bit different from most university newspapers in the sense that it was very conservative.

An early issue featured a front page on professors who are closet Marxists.

But in Max Chafskin's biography on Peter, he surmises that he'd chosen to reject those who'd rejected him after speaking to a classmate of his who remembered that he viewed liberals through a lens as people who were not nice to him.

Yeah, so is this just the kind of kid who got sand kicked in his face and vows revenge by taking on not them but their values?

Unlike some of his billionaires, he actually finished Stanford.

And when he graduated from Stanford Law School in 1992, he became an associate of corporate law firm in New York.

But he quit because he was turned down for a Supreme Court clerkship that he desperately wanted.

And he described it as being the unhappiest period of his whole life, which lasted seven months and three days.

Very precise.

Yeah, he described this period as a quarter-life crisis.

I didn't ask the question of why I was doing this nearly enough.

In retrospect, I was too competitive.

He then worked as a derivatives trader at at credit suisse for three years i think you might have to unpack what derivatives are derivatives of the expected value of something at some time in the future so if i know that i'm going to need lots and lots of orange juice or soybeans because i'm a food producer i want to lock in the price i'm going to have to pay when i take delivery of it so i will buy the right to buy this at a certain price at some time in the future now in the meantime that contract can fluctuate depending on let's say the soybean harvest fails and suddenly the price will shoot up i still have the right as the buyer to buy it at the price I agreed, but you have lots of speculators who buy and sell these contracts because they fluctuate in value.

That's a derivative trader.

And that's what Peter was doing for all those years.

Yeah.

And you can do it in all sorts of things, interest rates,

stocks, bonds.

All of them have derivative contracts associated with them.

Clearly, though, working as a trader at Credit Suisse wasn't taking up all his time because during this time, he co-authors an incendiary book called The Diversity Myth, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at at Stanford.

Quite the mouthful.

Yeah, so culture wars raging right back then.

The book was critical of political correctness and multiculturalism in higher education.

And Peter was arguing that the extreme focus on racism, as he put it, was responsible for creating even more social tension.

And the co-authors describe the term rape as sometimes including seductions that are later regretted.

Oh, and this book is going to come back to haunt him.

It also defended an incident at Stanford a few years earlier in which his fellow student, a man called Keith Raboy, tested the limits of free speech on campus by shouting homophobic slurs outside an instructor's home, including the words, hope you die of AIDS.

But Peter is actually gay.

However, at the time of the book, he hadn't come out.

Now, interestingly, he actually didn't come out to his own friends until 2003 when he was in his mid-30s.

And he said to one friend, do you know how many people in the financial world are openly gay?

He says he didn't want his sexual orientation to get in the way of his work.

Rape in all forms is a crime.

I regret writing passages that have been taken to suggest otherwise.

But let's go back to 1994.

So it's Christmas and Peter's hanging out with his old pal Reed Hoffman, escaping the holiday rush and, you know, intellectually sparring and talking about Silicon Valley instead.

They were thinking about all the different tech companies that they could start and there was a sense that something important was happening.

It made sense to try and do something there in that space.

So by 1996, Peter quits Wall Street and he moves back to the San Francisco Bay Area.

And he starts his first hedge fund.

That's an investment fund which buys shares and companies and called it Teal Capital Management.

And through friends and family he raises a million dollars.

Sounds quite a lot, but you know, in the grand scheme of things, not very large for a hedge fund.

And he's ready to begin his career as an investor.

Okay, in 1998, Peter meets a 23-year-old Ukrainian-born computer programmer who just arrived in the Bay Area.

His name was Max Levchin, and he'd heard Peter give a talk on currency trading at Stanford and they met for smoothies the next day, very Californian.

Now, Peter was impressed with Max, and he invested in his idea, becoming co-founder and CEO of a company they called Confiniti.

And the idea was an electronic payment system designed to make e-commerce, which was emerging at that time, easy, consistent, and secure.

They would eventually call that system PayPal.

Yes, and that is exactly the PayPal that you're thinking of.

And other investors were very soon brought around.

At the launch party in 1999, Nokia invested $3 million, sending the money via PayPal through to Peter's Palm Pilot.

Who remembers a Palm Pilot?

I do not know what a Palm Pilot is.

It was an early kind of file of facts, if you remember those from the 80s, which was a big bounder with all the old details in your calendar, basically compressed into a digital device.

These days, everything a Palm pilot would do would be a small app on your phone.

But at that time, it was seen as quite groundbreaking.

And it's around this time that we could probably safely say that Peter Thiel is a millionaire.

But what's he going to do with it?

In fact, he's got several million in his PayPal account.

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This was the early days of the internet.

There was a period when people said, I'm not sure I want to punch my credit card or my debit card details.

I remember my parents warning me about this.

Right, so people had a reluctance to do commerce on the internet.

They felt a little bit vulnerable.

Systems like PayPal seemed to be a secure, you know, walled garden where you could do that with some degree of safety.

So PayPal was the right product at the right time for the burgeoning e-commerce on the internet.

And in fact, you can kind of clock this from the way Wired magazine, which is obviously the magazine at the cutting edge of technology, was describing it in 1999.

An application that will allow individuals to, quote, beam sums of money between handheld devices such as mobile phones, palm pilots and pages.

As Peter promoted it at the time, all these devices will become one day just like your wallet.

Every one of your friends will become like a virtual miniature ATM.

But for libertarian Peter, there's another goal to PayPal.

So he wanted to create the new world currency, a kind of web-based currency that has the potential to undermine government tax structures and could lead, as he put it, to the erosion of the nation-state.

A claim that some people make for Bitcoin today, basically getting you out of the supervision of central banks and nation states and sanctions and whatever.

I don't know whether Peter Thiel has any Bitcoin, but I'd be amazed if he doesn't.

And if you want to learn more about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, you can find out more in an episode we've done about the FTX founder Sam Bankman Freed.

Yeah.

So Peter and Max began recruiting like-minded friends from their old universities, including 10 former Stanford Review members.

All of them maths geniuses, workaholics, no frat boys, no jocks, also nobody with an MBA.

Crucially, the culture was very anti-establishment.

A former PayPal chief financial officer said the difference between Google and PayPal was that Google wanted to hire PhDs, while PayPal wanted to hire people who got into PhD programs and then dropped out.

Rock on.

But to make a success of it, they used some, shall we say, creative techniques that could be called growth hacking.

Max created a bot to target eBay sellers posing as a potential buyer before telling them to set up PayPal in order to get paid.

So, yeah, I would pay you, but you've got to set up this account first.

The early team actually became known as the PayPal Mafia with Peter as the Don.

And over the next decade, this group would go on to launch some of the biggest tech companies in the world: LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Yammer, Tesla.

Quite a lot of acorns dropped out of the PayPal oak tree and went on to become pretty big trees themselves, including, for example, Elon Musk.

More on him shortly.

So you can actually look up an image of the PayPal Mafia because Fortune magazine did a photo shoot with them dressed like the Coleone family.

And actually, if you do find it, it is extraordinary that they all agree to pose like this.

They are fully decked out and they look like they're from the Sopranos.

Yeah.

And in 2000, Peter got into business with a guy called Elon Musk, who had founded his own digital payment company, x.com, around the same time as Confiniti.

Now, they both roughly had the same market share, but both were losing money, so the two competitors merged, becoming known as PayPal.

But behind the scenes, all was not well.

Peter and Elon were battling for control.

Elon was initially made the CEO, but within months, there was a boardroom coup.

And while Musk was on honeymoon, this was, by the way, his first vacation in years, the board ousted him and he was replaced with Peter as the CEO.

Beware of going on holiday.

Elon quipped, in fact.

That's the problem with vacations.

And in Peter's biography, an unnamed source told Max Chafkin, Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart.

Brilliant.

Musk has explicitly said, Peter's philosophy is pretty odd.

It's not normal.

He's a contrarian from an investing standpoint and thinks a lot about the singularity.

We'll discuss that in a moment.

I'm much less excited about that.

I'm pro-human.

Singularity, go.

Okay, so tell me if I'm wrong, but the singularity is when artificial intelligence, robots, whatever you want to call it, will merge with human existence, correct?

And will kind of leap forward in technology.

Well, it means different things to different people.

The dictionary definition is that the singularity is the point in time when advances in artificial intelligence can create machines that are smarter than humans.

But for some people, it means the moment when they sort of merge and you can upload your human experiences to a machine and essentially become immortal.

So, like I say, it means different things to different people.

But I did ask him about this when I met him.

And I said, Do you actually think that?

And he said, Yeah, I think it'll happen within my lifetime if my lifetime is 120 years, which is why he takes protein pills, doesn't have any sugar, keeps his gut biome, whatever.

He takes all these extraordinary health things because he wants to be alive at the point when this happens.

So, he'll be 120 in which year?

If he's 57 now,

so that's 63 years from now.

So, that makes it 2087.

Would I be alive then to see the singularity?

Actually, you know what?

Cart me off to the retirement home.

I don't think I want to see this happen.

Okay, well, some people listening may well be.

So you'll have to tell us from beyond our grave whether it happened or not.

Yeah, maybe they'll be able to upload our consciousness from all the recordings you've done of a good bad billionaire.

There we go.

We're practically immortal already.

There we go.

Let's get back to Peter Thiel.

Over the next couple of years, PayPal would sign up more than 20 million users.

But it was burning through cash, as a lot of startups do.

In fact, it burnt through $180 million in funding before breaking even.

And remember, during this period, we had the dot-com crash where a lot of other tech companies bit the dust.

But PayPal managed to bounce back.

And it really did change the way people use the internet.

People became more confident about sending money on the scary thing known as the internet.

Yeah, and having a PayPal account wasn't some kind of niche thing for nerds.

A lot of people had it, millions of people had it.

So in 2002, Peter took PayPal public.

That's when you sell shares to the public in an IPO.

Shortly after it, he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion.

And Peter took $55 million personally.

And he resigned on the day of the acquisition, which seems like quite a bold move.

Doesn't usually happen.

Usually when a company acquires another one, the person who's being acquired will stay on for a year or two to sort of smooth the transition.

They can earn their way out.

Often they won't be able to use the proceeds of the sale immediately.

They'll have to wait for a lock-up period.

So him quitting with his money on day one is kind of unusual.

Always a contrarian.

So after selling PayPal, Peter focused on investing.

So he set up a hedge fund called Clarium Capital with $10 million, mostly his own money.

And with that, he was able to place bets that fitted his own views of the world, his contrarianism, like buying Japanese government bonds when others were selling.

And the hedge fund soon became a giant and he gets a reputation of being a bit of a genius investor.

And that could have been where the story ended.

He could have become just another Warren Buffett.

But a recent seismic world event had deeply impacted Peter's thinking at that time.

The September 11 terrorist attacks had completely challenged his libertarian beliefs.

He published an essay called The Straussian Moment, based on Leo Strauss's philosophy, known primarily for reviving sort of classical political philosophy through analysis of works by ancient thinkers.

And Peter wrote, A religious war has been brought to a land that no longer cares for religious wars.

Today, mere self-preservation forces all of us to look at the world anew, to think strange new thoughts, and thereby to awaken from that very long and profitable period of intellectual slumber and amnesia that is so misleadingly called the Enlightenment.

Hmm.

So it's in this context that he makes his next big move in 2004.

He founds a company called Palantir, named after a seeing stone in Peter's beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy, and he invests $30 million in it.

And Palantir becomes a very controversial company.

In fact, it's a global surveillance company.

It's designed to find terrorists and other criminals by detecting small, minute patterns in vast amounts of digital data.

So, libertarian Peter becomes a contractor.

with the government.

Palantir was used by the CIA, the New York Police Department.

It was also controversially awarded a contract with the British National Health Service in 2023, which provoked protests over patient data security.

And more immediately, its technology has been used by the Israeli military in Gaza.

Palantir's chief exec Alex Karp said, our work in the region has never been more vital and it will continue.

And according to Vanity Fair, Palantir has been labeled by some journalists as one of the most terrifying companies in Silicon Valley.

So libertarian Peter wanting to throw off the yoke of big government is actually enabling them to surveil its own citizens, both at home and abroad.

So it's in the same year as founding Palantir, Peter makes another investment that will prove incredibly profitable.

That friend from Stanford, Reid Hoffman, introduces him to a 20-year-old Harvard dropout, a guy called Mark Zuckerberg.

Yeah, remember him?

Peter gives Mark $500,000 in exchange for 10% of the company.

This was the first outside investment in Facebook, and you could say the rest is history.

In fact, you can recap the whole saga in our episode about Mark Zuckerberg.

Peter then goes full throttle with his investment.

He launches a venture capital firm, Founders Fund, in 2005.

Founders Fund sought riskier, more out-of-the-box companies, as they put it, that really have the potential to change the world.

Its online manifesto began with, we wanted flying cars.

Instead, we got 140 characters.

That's quite a funny manifesto to be fair.

A little bit of a pop there at Twitter, now known X, also now owned by his old friend Elon Musk.

And the sort of stuff that Peter invests in or backs is definitely out there.

Some examples, he becomes the largest contributor to a think tank formerly called the Singularity Institute, which is interested in identifying and managing potential risks to humanity from artificial general intelligence.

And the general means that it can roam free and do whatever it likes rather than being set specific tasks.

He also gives $3.5 million to the Methuselah Foundation.

Its goal is to reverse human aging, and the person running it thinks humans will one day live to be a thousand.

There's also the Alcor Life Extension Foundation that had been freezing corpses in liquid nitrogen since 1976.

I wonder what kind of storeroom they've got.

They've been in the game for very early on, and I really hope they don't have any kind of energy failure anytime soon.

Yeah, he also invests one and a quarter million dollars in something called the Seasteading Institute, founded by Milton Freeman's grandson, Milton Freeman, a great libertarian free market prophet, if you like.

And seasteading refers to the founding of new independent city-states that are on floating platforms in international waters so you can get away from the exertion of control by nation-states.

And Palantir, presumably.

Yeah, but as well as these wackier businesses.

He also invested in some companies you've probably heard of.

Lyft, TaskRabbit, LinkedIn, Stripe, Airbnb, Spotify, some household names there.

He even invested in Elon Musk's SpaceX, although he apparently passed on investing in Tesla.

According to Musk, Peter told him he didn't fully buy into the climate change thing.

But these are some of the biggest tech companies in the world.

So whilst he's investing big money, he's also making huge returns.

And by the summer of 2008, for example, Facebook was valued at 15 billion dollars, and his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, had assets of more than $7 billion.

And that meant that in 2008, Forbes lists Peter Thiel as worth $1.2 billion.

Well done, Peter Thiel.

Age 40, you are a billionaire.

So let's take a story beyond a billion.

Due to Facebook's seemingly inexorable growth, Peter's personal fortune keeps growing and growing.

We didn't get everything right.

The 2008 financial crisis nearly decimated his hedge fund Clarium Capital.

Some thought his hedge fund was poised to do well because it was a crisis that Peter himself had long been predicting.

But instead, Clarion went from $7 billion in assets to a few hundred million.

To paraphrase a colleague, he's an exceptionally competitive person.

He was on the cusp of entering the greats of the investing gods, but he just missed it.

And by 2010, he closed the New York office and moved Clarium back to San Francisco.

But he is still a billionaire and not above getting involved in personal vendettas.

So throughout the 2000s, there was a US news site called Gorka, which was posting gossip about celebrities in the media.

And Gorka also owned Valleywag, which was a Silicon Valley gossip blog of which Peter was a regular subject.

Including a 2007 blog entitled, Peter Thiel is Totally Gay, People.

And while friends and colleagues knew he was gay at this point, he saw it as a public outing.

Okay, he's going to nurse that grievance because jump forward a decade, Peter secretly gives $10 million to the wrestler Hulk Hogan to help him sue Gorka after Gorka made public a sex tape involving Hulk Hogan.

So Gorka lost the legal battle and the whole thing drove Gorka and its owner to bankruptcy in 2016.

But Peter called funding that lawsuit one of the greater philanthropic things that I have done.

I saw Gorka pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest.

I thought it was worth fighting back.

And not long after Peter got married to his longtime partner in Vienna, it's reported that guests came expecting to celebrate Peter's 50th, but were instead surprised to be attending his wedding.

But he's about to get involved in something more high-stakes and and more divisive than just bringing down a gossip column or gossip site, and that is politics.

Now, from many of his statements about his suspicion of the state and big government, you might be surprised that he would even get involved in politics at all.

Yes, in a Fox Nation interview, he said, I would like us to be honest about how terrible politics is.

As someone who is generally libertarian, I would like to live in a world that is less conflict, less politics.

And in a widely read 2009 essay on the libertarian think tank Cato Institute's website, he argued that freedom and democracy were no longer compatible.

Instead, only technology can make a real difference in the world.

We are in a deadly race between politics and technology, he wrote.

The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.

God, there's quite a lot to unpack in that.

It's quite a passage there.

I think it would take us a whole podcast episode to break that down.

In 2016, he was one of the very few people from Silicon Valley to support Donald Trump.

Yeah, speaking at the Republican Republican National Convention, he also served on Trump's executive transition team.

And now journalists have noted concerns that his counter-terrorism company, Palantir, benefited from this support when it was awarded lucrative government contracts.

An anonymous former dinner guest of Peter Thiel's told Vanity Fair, Trump is a means to an end for Thiel.

As human beings, they couldn't possibly be more different.

And somewhat ironically, given that Trump had urged total allegiance to the United States just a month after he won the election, Peter was revealed to have become a citizen of New Zealand, a popular second home to the super-rich who are very keen to avoid living out the apocalypse.

Yeah, it was the thing to have at a certain time having a bunker beneath the ground in New Zealand in case there was a zombie or atomic bomb or collapse of civilization.

Exactly.

There's a lot of preppers who make their way to New Zealand.

Now, that support of Donald Trump has meant that Peter has become a divisive figure in the world of tech.

In 2018, he publicly renounces Silicon Valley itself, calling it a one-party state and comparing its woke worldview with Saudi Arabia's domestic strain of fundamentalist Islam called Wahhabism and he moved to Los Angeles.

And in 2022, he leaves the board of Facebook's parent company, Meta, after being one of its longest-serving members.

I remember when I chatted to him in 2010, it was around the time of the Facebook IPO.

He had sold 90% of his shares in Facebook.

And I asked him why he'd done that.

He said, we still have, you know, a substantial shareholding, but you sold 90% of it.

I said, said, why did you do that?

Is it because you don't believe in this?

He said, I saw how much Facebook paid for Instagram.

They paid a billion dollars for a company with 12 employees.

And I thought, if you're so vulnerable, you have to pay a billion dollars to a company that has only just started.

That means there's something vulnerable about your business model.

But turns out Peter Thiel isn't so smart.

Turned out to be one of the best acquisitions in the history of technology.

And if he'd held on to his shares, he would be a lot richer than he is today.

It's so funny because what I think is emerging from this portrait of Peter Thiel is he's got these ruthless investor instincts, right?

He's very savvy, but at the same time, he has these quite out there worldviews and the two don't really seem to connect.

Yeah, I think that also he's almost kind of a pathologically contrarian.

So if everyone's saying that Facebook is going to be the next big thing and he's already profited from it, he almost feels kind of compelled to disagree, even when it's actually to his own detriment.

Interesting.

I mean, he really is one of the more complicated people we've covered on this podcast.

So he's just left the board of Meta, the parent company of Facebook.

And one of the other rumors about his reason for leaving was to focus on influencing the U.S.

midterm elections.

This is according to the New York Times, who spoke to an anonymous source with knowledge of Peter's thinking.

And in those midterms, he supported J.D.

Vance's run for Ohio senator and was reportedly the one who introduced Vance to Trump, Vance now being his vice presidential nominee.

Yeah, he also funded 15 other hard-right Trump supporting Senate and House candidates, many of whom backed the lie that Trump won the 2020 election.

And alongside funding candidates, Thiel has also funded a dating app to help Republicans meet a like-minded partner.

It was designed by former Trump staffers and it's called The Right Staff.

I like the name.

It prides itself on only having two gender options, ladies and gentlemen, no pronouns necessary.

And it includes profile prompts like a random fact I love about America is dot dot dot.

And favorite liberal lie is dot dot dot.

It seems that Pete's political motivation may have dried up pretty recently, though, as of the 15th of October, so really recently, it's emerged that Peter Thiel has not funded Trump's 2024 bid.

In fact, in an interview with The Atlantic late last year, November, Peter said voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help.

The national reckoning he had hoped for with Trump's presidency, in other words, did not materialize.

Yeah, he said there are a lot of things I got wrong, saying it was crazier and more dangerous than I thought.

Now, J.D.

Vance views differently.

He told the Financial Times recently, I'm going to keep on talking to Peter and persuading him that, you know, he's obviously been exhausted by politics a little bit, but he's going to be really exhausted by politics if we lose and Kamala Harris is president.

Yeah, and Peter has said, I'm still very strongly pro-Trump, pro-JD, JD Vance.

I've decided not to donate any money politically, but I'm supporting them in every other way possible.

I'm sure they're a bit less grateful for those other ways than they would be for some cold hard cash.

On the business side, Peter has also been cashing out of Palantir, selling $600 million of stock in the global surveillance company just this September.

And he's made a cool $1 billion selling shares this year alone.

So that brings us right up to date.

His current worth, we think, is $9 billion.

So now we judge him.

Is he good, bad, or just another billionaire on our various categories?

Yes, we rank our billionaires from zero to 10.

The first category is wealth.

How rich is he and how does he spend it?

$9 billion is a lot of money.

But for someone who has been involved in all of these companies, PayPal, Facebook, Palantir,

Lyft,

Airbnb, LinkedIn, etc.

In a way, I would have expected him to have been richer than this, I've got to say.

He could do better.

He sold out of Facebook too early.

That's what I was saying.

I mean, his wealth has more than doubled in just a year, so that's not nothing.

Yeah.

And some people, fair to say that some people think actually that number could be a little off, that 9 billion number, because he is thought to be very skilled at avoiding tax exposure, as many of our billionaires are.

And, you know, he does enjoy spending it.

He's got a half million dollar McLaren supercar.

He's got his own butler.

Butler, okay.

Well, let's judge him right now.

So 9 billion doesn't get him above $5 in the absolute wealth stakes.

But the McLaren supercar and the butler, the wanting to live forever, he's wearing it pretty well.

He's just, you know, his oddness, I think, also sort of amplifies his absolute wealth.

Right.

I mean, supercars, butlers, hired staff, quite par for course with billionaires.

But I think you're right.

The wanting to live forever, that really edges it for me.

Yeah.

Okay, so I'm going to give him a seven for wealth, because even though he's not top of the tree, he acts like he is and he hangs out with all the people who are.

That's very true.

I agree.

Seven out of ten.

Okay.

Villainy.

What have they done to get to the top?

Profiles of Peter are pretty damning of him sometimes.

They often describe his image as explicitly villainous.

He actually likes being seen as a bit of a villain.

I mean, the laundry list is long.

Vanity Fair says that he's seen as a right-wing supervillain.

The New Yorker says that he's a villain out of central casting.

Even the Financial Times has described him as a libertarian coop and bond supervillain.

Right.

And that's what we're trying to get at in this.

So I think he ticks a lot of boxes in the villainy category almost deliberately and by his own choosing.

So I think that he will be pleased to know that I'm going to give him an eight out of ten for villainy.

I mean, he really does seem to revel in the fact that so many people seem to think of him as this kind of right-wing villain.

Yeah.

And he said some pretty unpleasant things when he was back at university as well.

So I might even nudge him up to a nine.

As I say, he won't mind that, but actually, you know, his own actions have justified a high score in these stakes.

He says this big talk about, you know, freedom and independence and libertarianism and being allowed to go your own way while at the same time founding and investing in companies that explicitly designed to not let people go their own way and to actually keep tabs on them.

And this is one of the things about him.

To me, he has a slight contempt for his fellow human beings.

He thinks that most of us are lemmings or sheep or

whatever disparaging analogy you want to make, and that free thinkers go the other way and everyone else should get out of the way.

And the oppression of government and rules and democracy and blah, blah, blah is all there to frustrate the potential of the individual.

In a way, that's kind of his hallmark throughout this, which is weird because he's been very influential in producing websites like Facebook, which thrive on herd mentality and surveillance.

And surveillance.

And yeah, so exactly.

A truly complex individual.

Okay, I'm going to go nine for villainy.

I think I'd agree with you, nine.

And it pains me to say he'll probably enjoy that.

Yeah.

So let's move on to the sort of diametric opposite of that, philanthropy.

What's he done on that on that score?

Well, in 2010, he set up the controversial Teal Fellowship, which was originally named 20 Under 20.

You can kind of see why they changed that name.

Yeah.

Every year he awards $100,000 to young tech entrepreneurs under the age of 20 if they drop out of university to launch a startup.

Critics have said it's an attack on education.

It's an attempt to steal away the best and the brightest.

Peter, on his part, has argued they could return to school at the end of the two-year fellowship.

Okay, so that's an interesting one.

Whether that's philanthropy or whether that's a kind of tech incubation kind of laboratory, you could argue about.

But he's also got a more traditional philanthropic arm called the Teal Foundation set up in 2006.

It focuses on science, technology, long-term thinking about the future.

But as Fortune magazine points out, it's no ordinary charity.

It supports for-profit companies and the new frontiers of science we've mentioned in this episode, like seasteading and prolonging the human life.

And the philanthropy, as we've said often, is not an absolute number.

It's about the proportion of their wealth they give away.

And Forbes estimates he's given away between 1 and 5%.

So that is not a huge effort on the philanthropy front compared to some others.

No, I'd give him a 1 out of 10 for this.

1 out of 10 for philanthropy.

He's really not doing well.

And also, I mean...

They're all quite self-serving, self-serving, these things, aren't they?

Exactly.

You know, you can imagine that he's not thinking about the millions of starving children around the world when it comes to creating a new city-state on floating water.

We'll give him a one for philanthropy, if that.

Let's leave it at one.

Power.

Interesting one, this.

Well, I would say that he is an incredibly powerful person.

I mean, he's kind of become this almost boogeyman, right?

Well, the boogeyman to some, profits to others.

And, I mean, New York magazine, for example, said Teal's increasing prominence as both an intellectual in and benefactor of the conservative movement and his status as a legend in Silicon Valley makes him at least as important as more public tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg.

In fact, he still holds sway over Zuckerberg.

So, you know, he's clearly a powerful person.

He is a person that even people richer than him, people seemingly more influential, turn to as a kind of father figure or kind of wise old owl.

So in that way, he wields a lot more influence than his own private wealth would suggest.

That is a really interesting thing to know.

Actually, in Vanity Fair in 2019, they wrote that in the Los Angeles Game of Thrones, he's Littlefinger, a.k.a.

He's the person pulling all the strings.

The hottest ticket, they said, is an invite to a dinner hosted by one of the people who helped get Donald J.

Trump elected in 2016.

And that person is Peter Thiel.

I would score him quite highly on that.

Yeah, no, for sure.

Oh, I would say like maybe eight out of 10.

Yeah, eight or even nine.

I'm going to give him.

Because one of our tests when we did Rupert Murdoch was that could he influence elections?

Could he pick up the phone to a head of state and influence elections?

I think he gets a yes in both those categories, I would say.

And of course, you've got to remember Facebook's involvement with the Cambridge Analytica stuff.

I'm going to give him a nine for power.

Okay, eight from me, nine from you.

Now we come to our last category, legacy.

What do we think will be his legacy?

Well, the thing is, if he's right about some things, this category doesn't exist because he'll still be with us for the rest of time.

I mean, I'm shook by that statement.

You know, maybe this category is irrelevant when it comes to him.

If you're a mortal, the legacy category is irrelevant.

It's TBD.

TBD.

So let's assume that he's not going to live forever.

I mean, his legacy, I think the legacy he leaves will be in the footprints of the companies he's founded.

And also, his Ayn Rand-inspired, extreme libertarian kind of view of the world is one shared by quite a lot of tech.

superpowers that we have and influence their thinking about how the world should be ordered.

And collectively, they have an enormous amount of power over the world.

So I think Peter Thiel will go down as actually punching way above his weight in terms of absolute wealth.

I think he will be seen as an architect of a mindset that has become incredibly powerful.

So I'm going to give him an eight.

Wow, I'm sure Rand would be very pleased with him being called an architect.

Well, Ayn Rand, right, still very influential.

A lot of these people treat her books as Bibles.

And I think the people who think Ayn Rand was influential, they will certainly think that of a Peter Thiel.

So as I say, eight out of 10 for legacy for me.

I think eight out of ten is

a good notch for him to land at.

I mean, he may very well edge up to nine or ten.

You know, he's still got quite a long way to go, especially if he lives far longer than the rest of us.

Yes, it's going to be interesting.

Maybe there'll be a whole new generation of good, bad billionaire listeners who haven't even been born yet who will have a Peter Thial episode.

Yes, our AI-generated voices that live on long after the BBC has crumbled.

I don't mind as long as we get paid.

Just kidding.

So is he good, bad, or just another another billionaire?

Well, is he good, bad, or just another billionaire?

Well, interestingly, one anonymous entrepreneur who spent time with Peter told Vanity Fair: Does he believe that chaos is a ladder he can climb?

He's playing chess while we're playing checkers.

Yeah, another anonymous long-time investor in Peter's firms told biographer Max Chafkin he wanted to watch Rome burn, which is interesting.

A lot of people talk about the

right, the Steve Bannons of this world as basically kind of enjoying some sort of rapture as the democracy disintegrates.

Right, they're chaos agents, basically.

Yeah, although it's been noted that Teal's ideological shifts have matched his financial self-interest at every turn.

That's another interesting perspective.

I mean, when you put that all into context, he is an incredibly fascinating, complicated guy.

But I also cannot avoid that in my heart of hearts, I think he is a bad billionaire.

Yeah, I think you've got to be right.

I mean, I get to interview a lot of chief execs and founders, investors, and whatever, and people say, who's the smartest person you ever interviewed?

And I would say for many years, I would say Peter Thiel he's also one of the most unusual I think the contradictions in what he's done do it for me you know I'm all libertarian but I'm going to make sure that the government has got detailed surveillance on you at all times

and also if you believe this then it's fine but I personally don't believe that the highest moral purpose is the pursuit of self-interest.

And I do believe in a society.

And from a personal point of view, if you don't believe in that,

I can't say that you're a good person.

So for me, he's a bad billionaire.

So, Peter Thiel, you are unfortunately, although I think you will enjoy this, a bad billionaire.

He'll love it.

And that, believe it or not, brings us to the end of season two.

Say it ain't so.

I mean, we've covered some truly exceptional billionaire stories.

We love hearing from you, so please do rate and review us.

In your review, let us know whose stories scandalized you the most, what business tips you've learned, which were your favourite rags to Richard's tales and who was this season's biggest villain and we'd like to thank everyone who's listened which has also helped us win a small award gold at the british podcast awards for best business podcast so thank you to the listeners for that thank you to the listeners thank you the judges thank you to our excellent producers so when you look back on this series what sticks in your mind i mean i think there'll be plenty of people whose stories will still be developing in the many years to come.

I mean, Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, springs to mind.

Yeah, sure, that's going to have an increasing influence on all of our lives.

You need an AI to predict how it's going to work out.

I also think, you know, in terms of sheer extravagance, I loved learning about Mukesh Mbani funding his son's super luxury wedding.

Yeah, with $600 million.

Although, one of the killer stats in that is that as a percentage of his wealth, he actually spent less of a percentage of his wealth than many normal Indian families do.

Unfortunately, most families can't afford to fly out Rihanna and Beyoncé.

And also, if you remember on that episode, I predicted that in five years' time, Mukesh Mbani will be be the richest person in the world.

That's my bet.

So I am not confident enough to make any bets on any of our billionaires because who knows where the land of wealth will take them in the years to come.

Good, Bad Billionaire will be back for a third season in 2025.

Hooray, which billionaires could we measure up?

And judge, there's 2,781 billionaires in the world with a combined $14.2 trillion, so plenty to choose from.

Could it be John DeMoe, the Big Brother reality TV billionaire?

Disney star Selena Gomez.

Even Elon Musk.

Well, Well, we want to hear from you.

Whose billions would you like us to delve into in season three?

Or head to the BBC World Service's Facebook page and join the conversation under the Good Bad Billionaire post.

Your pick could make it onto season three of Good Bad Billionaire, so look out for new episodes dropping into your feed in the new year to find out if your billionaire made the cut.

See you very soon.

Bye for now.

Good Bad Billionaire was produced by Louise Morris.

James Cook is the editor, and it's a BBC Studios production for BBC World Service.

For the BBC World Service, and the podcast commissioning editor is John Minow.

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