Peter Thiel is an Internet entrepreneur, venture capitalist and author. He is the co-founder of PayPal. He is also a co-founder of Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. He was ranked No. 315 on the Forbes 400 in 2017, with a net worth of $2.6 billion. He studied philosophy at Stanford University and graduated a with a B.A. He went on to the Stanford Law School, and received his J.D.
Peter Thiel founded Thiel Capital in 1996 and co-founded PayPal in 1999. He also served as the chief executive officer of PayPal until it was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Thus Peter was also a member of the so-called PayPal mafia. A term used to denote some twenty odd early members of PayPal. Other members of that “Mafia” were Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, Russel Simmons, Max Levchin, Dave McClure and Premal Shah among other entrepreneurs.
After PayPal was sold to Ebay, he founded Clarium Capital and then launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company. His Founders Fund was launched in 2005 along with PayPal partners Ken Howery and Luke Nosek. In 2004, he acquired 10.2% of stake in Facebook. He sold the majority of his shares in Facebook for more than $1 billion in 2012. He is also a co-founder of The Stanford Review.
Peter Thiel provided $100,000 to back the Singularity Challenge donation drive of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence which is a nonprofit organization that promotes the development of artificial intelligence. As an act of philanthropy, Peter announced that he would donate $3.5 million to support anti-aging research through the nonprofit Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation. In 2010, Thiel created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually awards $100,000 to 20 people who are under the age of 20. His Thiel Foundation is a supporter of the ‘Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)’. CPJ promotes the right of journalists so that they can report the news freely without fear of reprisal. In college Peter Thiel co-authored along with David Sacks, the 1995 book The Diversity Myth: ‘Multiculturalism’ and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford
