An attempt to understand Peter Thiel

What's this weird guy up to over there

Peter Thiel is the tech world’s éminence grise. He cofounded PayPal and Palantir, was an early investor into Facebook and is a Zuckerberg confidant, and funded the lawsuit that took down Gawker.

He also helped get Trump elected in 2016 and gave JD Vance a job and then funded his senate run, and he is a godfather to the “New Right” conservative movement which has gained considerable steam in tech circles the past few years.

I’d summarize my preconception of Thiel as “philosophical paranoid self-loathing conservative amoral genius billionaire.” But most of my knowledge of him has been secondhand, and I figure I might as well try to understand someone with so much influence.

So, I read this article he wrote in 2007, which apparently is a good introduction to his worldview. It is dense: 28 pages of pretentious, esoteric writing, which I learned partway through is a deliberate (and self-congratulatory) strategy he employs:

The great writers and philosophers of the past used an “esoteric” mode of writing in which their “literature is addressed, not to all readers, but to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.”

I did my best to hack through the philosophical references and words I’d never heard, but who know whether I’m either trustworthy or intelligent enough to “get it.” The main things I took away were these:

Thiel thinks and writes with an extremely wide historical lens

It’s not at all normal for VCs to write about the crossroads Western society met after the Enlightenment, and how one should act in face of this crossroads. Most of these guys are focused on what how to value a B2B SaaS business. I’ve noticed Thiel’s tendency towards a wide aperture in other communications I’ve seen of his, notably this fascinating email exchange between Meta leadership about Mark Zuckerberg and Meta’s role as the representative of the millennial generation:

Hi Nick,

I thought it might be helpful to put some of my thoughts in writing and am taking the liberty of cc'ing a few others here.

In important ways, Facebook is the Millennial company par excellence. It was started by a team of Millennials and remains by far the most successful Millennial company; as measured by market capitalization, the next closest ones are Stripe and Airbnb, which at $35B and $30B, respectively, are each barely 5% the size of Facebook. The product was initially used by Millennial college students and became an important way in which the generational experience of Millennials differed radically from that of older people; and even today, Millennials remain our most active users.

As a result of this history and success, there is a certain sense in which Mark Zuckerberg has been cast as *the spokesman* for the Millennial generation — as the single person who gives voice to the hopes and fears and the unique experiences of this generation, at least in the USA.

This tendency towards defining things in historic terms gives him a sense of gravitas that attracts people. It makes you feel important to be involved in history! I expect this has helped him win disciples, independent of the accuracy of his analysis (I don’t think the read of Zuck being the spokesman for millennials is at all accurate, for example).

He thinks American liberalism replaced fundamental questions about what it means to be a human and live a good life

I don’t actually disagree with this. He finds that American capitalism has ushered in an era where people are thought of as economic actors who tend to “amuse themselves to death,” so much so that it’s almost unthinkable for someone to die for something bigger than themselves or their economic interests.

We no longer ask very big questions but are more focused on improving things in measurable terms.

According to Thiel, the terrorists of 9/11 challenge this worldview, as they were not motivated by economic forces but by religious ideology:

“An outright declaration of war against Islam would be unthinkable; we much prefer to think of these measures as police actions against a few unusual criminal sociopaths who happen to blow up buildings.”

He does not think people are fundamentally good, and thinks that point of view defines modern liberalism

Thiel writes: “one may define a “liberal” as someone who knows nothing of the past and of this history of violence, and still holds to the Enlightenment view of the natural goodness of humanity.”

I have to say, I think this describes my worldview pretty well (although I would argue that in my limited knowledge of the past, it does seem to me like an increasing level of abundance and education can ward off violence pretty well).

Thiel does not subscribe to this view, and believes that humans are destined for violence; in our current era he is arguing that fundamentalist Islamic actors will continue to attack the West and the West must either fight back or perish. This makes his founding of Palantir, a software company designed to help intelligence agencies process and share information, make sense.

He thinks he is smarter than everyone

This is pretty evident in basically all of his communications, but he holds most people in contempt, especially when they are doing the messy work of trying to come to shared agreements:

“Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots, we should consider Echelon, the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services, as the decisive path to a truly global pax Americana.”

On the futility of being a politician in a liberal democracy:

“America’s founders enjoyed a freedom of action far surpassing that of America’s subsequent politicians. Eventually, ambitious people would come to learn that there is little one can do in politics and that all merely political careers end in failure.”

This informs doubts that Thiel and the New Right share about democracy as a system of government.

His support of Trump seems quite strategic

Thiel quotes the philosopher Strauss: “our writer might even state certain truths quite openly by using as mouthpiece some disreputable character. .. . There would then be good reason for our finding in the greatest literature of the past so many interesting devils, madmen, beggars, sophists, drunkards, epicureans, and buffoons.”

Trump is about as perfect a “disreputable mouthpiece” you could design to spread supposed “truths” that would be dangerous for a more serious person to state directly.

He views the world through a Christian lens

The essay closes with this quote:

“For that (future) world could differ from the modern world in a way that is much worse or much better—the limitless violence of runaway mimesis or the peace of the kingdom of God.”

Thiel takes himself and his ideas incredibly seriously, which is scary because he’s powerful and rich and good at influencing people. And I think we’re living through a time where broad unrest combined with the onset of AI will make many people search for answers to very big questions like the ones Thiel addresses, and so his ideology will keep gaining influence.

He, uh, really took Lord of the Rings to heart

I remember visiting my sister at Stanford around 2008 right after this article was written and Thiel’s Palantir was a very hot place to work in Palo Alto. There were awkward-looking software engineers walking around everywhere wearing these shirts, with the “save the shire” quote from Lord of the Rings about defending the Hobbits’ home from the evil Sauron.

I remember thinking this was goofy but fun nerd culture. It does not seem goofy or fun anymore.

Thanks for reading. Would love to hear from anyone who understands these ideas more deeply!