Peter Thiel

Peter Andreas Thiel was born in Frankfurt am Main, Hesse on 11 October 1967, to Klaus Friedrich Thiel and Susanne Thiel. The family migrated to the United States when Peter was one year old and lived in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father worked as a chemical engineer. Thiel's biographer Max Chafkin comments that leaving the booming Frankfurt, which was West Germany's financial capital, for Cleveland which was representative of the American countercurrent, had an impact on the family. Klaus worked for various mining companies, which created an itinerant upbringing for Thiel and his younger brother, Patrick Michael Thiel. Thiel and his mother later naturalized as U.S. citizens, whereas his father did not.

Before settling in Foster City, California, in 1977, the Thiel family lived in South Africa and South West Africa (modern-day Namibia) in the time of apartheid. Peter changed elementary schools seven times. He attended a German-language school in Swakopmund for two years that required students to wear uniforms and employed corporal punishment, such as striking students' hands with a ruler. He said this experience instilled a distaste for uniformity and regimentation later reflected in his support for individualism and libertarianism. The German community in Swakopmund was known at the time for its continued glorification of Nazism. Thiel was noted as a smart, but lonely, withdrawn boy, with whom others would not mingle because they knew he would not stay long in the town.

Thiel played Dungeons & Dragons and was an avid reader of science fiction, with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein among his favorite authors. He is a fan of J. R. R. Tolkien's works, stating as an adult that he had read The Lord of the Rings more than 10 times.

Thiel excelled in mathematics and scored first in a California-wide mathematics competition while attending Bowditch Middle School in Foster City. At San Mateo High School, he read Ayn Rand and, influenced by his parents, admired Nixon and Reagan. He was valedictorian of his graduating class in 1985. When at school, he reportedly charged $500 each to take the SAT for underclassmen, knowing this would cost him his spot at Stanford if discovered.

Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford University. …

After graduating from Stanford Law School, Thiel was a law clerk to Judge James Larry Edmondson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit from 1992 to 1993. Thiel then worked as a securities lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell in New York. He left the law firm in under a year. He then took a job as a derivatives trader in currency options at Credit Suisse in 1993 while also working as a speechwriter for former United States secretary of education William Bennett. Thiel returned to California in 1996.

Upon returning to the Bay Area, Thiel capitalized on the dot-com boom. With financial support from friends and family, he raised $1 million toward the establishment of Thiel Capital Management and embarked on his venture capital career. Early on, he experienced a setback after investing $100,000 in his friend Luke Nosek's unsuccessful web-based calendar project. Soon thereafter, Nosek's friend Max Levchin described to Thiel his cryptography-related company idea, which became their first venture called Fieldlink (later renamed Confinity) in 1998.

Thiel provided the initial $100,000 for Fieldlink in 1998. In February 1999, they raised $500,000 largely from friends and family ($35,000 was from Thiel's parents). By middle 1999, they raised $4.5 million, with Nokia Ventures contributing $3 million.

With Confinity, Thiel realized they could develop software to bridge a gap in making online payments. Although the use of credit cards and expanding automated teller machine networks provided consumers with more payment options, not all merchants had the necessary hardware to accept credit cards. Thus, consumers had to pay with exact cash or check. Thiel wanted to create a type of digital wallet for consumer convenience and security by encrypting data on digital devices, and in 1999 Confinity launched PayPal.

PayPal promised to open up new possibilities for handling money. Thiel viewed PayPal's mission as liberating people from the erosion of the value of their currencies due to inflation.

When PayPal launched at a press conference in 1999, representatives from Nokia and Deutsche Bank sent $3 million in venture funding to Thiel using PayPal on their PalmPilots. PayPal then continued to grow through mergers in 2000 with Elon Musk's online financial services company X.com, and with Pixo, a company specializing in mobile commerce. …

In May 2016, Thiel confirmed in an interview with The New York Times that he had paid $10 million in legal expenses to finance several lawsuits brought by others, including a lawsuit by Terry Bollea (Hulk Hogan) against Gawker Media for invasion of privacy, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and infringement of personality rights after Gawker made sections of a sex tape involving Bollea public. The jury awarded Bollea $140 million, and Gawker announced it was permanently closing due to the lawsuit in August 2016. Thiel referred to his financial support of Bollea's case as one of the "greater philanthropic things that I've done."

Thiel said he was motivated to sue Gawker after they published a 2007 article publicly outing him, headlined "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people." Thiel stated that Gawker articles about others, including his friends, had "ruined people's lives for no reason," and said, "It's less about revenge and more about specific deterrence." In response to criticism that his funding of lawsuits against Gawker could restrict the freedom of the press, Thiel cited his donations to the Committee to Protect Journalists and stated, "I refuse to believe that journalism means massive privacy violations. I think much more highly of journalists than that. It's precisely because I respect journalists that I do not believe they are endangered by fighting back against Gawker." Owen Thomas, the author of the Gawker article, stated that he did not think it was an outing in the conventional sense, as Thiel had been open about his homosexuality, but the "strangely conservative" Silicon Valley had refused to talk about it. Thiel said that the problem was less about the outing itself, but the troubles it caused with regard to his business in Saudi Arabia and his parents.

On 15 August 2016, Thiel published an opinion piece in The New York Times in which he argued that his defense of online privacy went beyond Gawker. He highlighted his support for the Intimate Privacy Protection Act and said that athletes and business executives have the right to stay in the closet as long as they want to.

In an open letter to Thiel after losing the case, Gawker's Nick Denton accused Thiel of making them "stripped naked", together with the warning "in the next phase, you too will be subject to a dose of transparency. …

Thiel is described by different authors and media sources in different ways. He identifies as a libertarian. He has been called an Ayn Rand libertarian, plutocratic reactionary, militarist techno-libertarian, and libertarian authoritarian. His attitude towards democracy has been described as "skeptical", partly antidemocratic, or post-democratic. French economist Yann Algan links Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to the concept of "liquid democracy" and the rise of libertarian AI governance, which Algan defines as "a radically decentralized, algorithm-driven democracy", which "prioritizes efficiency and individual freedom over democratic safeguards". Thiel's biographer Max Chafkin notes that his thinking is a mix of libertarianism and authoritarianism, but describes what Thiel truly believes and wants as a mystery.

Thiel describes himself as a political atheist. He opines that trying to radically alter the current U.S. government is unrealistic. He also suggests that Curtis Yarvin methods will lead to Xi's China or Putin's Russia. He does not deny the value of statesmanship though, but opines that "people should spend less time trying to change the system than simply creating things outside it".

Journalist Murad Ahmed from Financial Times calls Thiel "philosopher king at the very top of Silicon Valley" (with France 24 using a similar description). German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk also remarks: "Peter Thiel can be seen as more of a philosopher king. He acts very coolly and strategically – a dazzling figure, far outside our left-liberal perception patterns", while Ross Douthat from New York Times describes him as "most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years". …

Thiel resided in San Francisco, California, until 2018, when he moved to Los Angeles. He had criticized San Francisco for being "intolerant of conservatives, insular and overpriced". Both Thiel Capital and Thiel Foundation followed him to Los Angeles, but the Founders Fund remains in San Francisco. Mithril's headquarters moved to Austin. Thiel owns homes all over the world, with his main residence in Miami.

Thiel married his long-time partner, Matt Danzeisen, in Vienna, Austria, on Thiel's 50th birthday (October 2017), when he was reported to have proposed to Danzeisen. Danzeisen started his career as an investment banker at Bank of America Securities. By 2007, when the couple were dating, Danzeisen was vice president of BlackRock. By 2021, he was chairman of Bridgetown 1 and Bridgetown 2, sponsored by Thiel Capital and Richard Li's Pacific Century Group. Sam Altman also sat on the board. Danzeisen also participates in other Thiel enterprises related to the family of Li Ka-shing (father of Richard Li), such as the Malta-based EUM. In 2017 Danzeisen was working as head of private investments at Thiel Capital, with a primary focus on North America and Asia. Thiel and Danzeisen have two young daughters, aged five and three as of June 2024, born through a surrogate. Adrian Wooldridge from Bloomberg reported in August 2025 that Thiel had four children. In 2023, in an interview with the Atlantic, Thiel noted that Danzeisen had tried to dissuade him from donating money to Republicans.

Thiel was in a long-term relationship with model Jeff Thomas until Thomas's suicide in March 2023. Media coverage of Thomas's death drew widespread attention, partly because of Thomas's involvement with Democratic researchers led by David Brock and Jack Bury. Puck.news wrote that the anti-Thiel campaign exposed an undercurrent in modern politics in which there is an increasing tendency towards using people's private problems to achieve political goals.

In 2026, Thiel visited South America, combining "a family vacation" with other activities. He met with leaders like Javier Milei, Santiago Peña, José Antonio Kast. He also visited Venezuela and Ecuador. He intended to stay in Argentina for two months, buying properties in Argentina and Uruguay.

Thiel began playing chess at the age of six and was at one time one of the top junior players in the United States. …