The Contrarian
by Max Chafkin
Bloomsbury Publishing

Max Chafkin, who has spent 15 years reporting on the world of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs, start-ups and investors, has compiled rigorous research on one of the venture capitalists who has helped develop companies that have largely defined our culture and economy over the last 25 years.

Not many people outside America would have heard of Peter Thiel who, with very little tech ability or money of his own, backed some of the biggest and most successful tech companies including Facebook, PayPal, Palantir and SpaceX. He also managed to surround himself with a mafia of right wing loyalists who influenced political policies in their favour during the Trump administration.

Although he was a closeted homosexual at the time, it was at Stanford University that his writing for the Stanford Review revealed his antigay, antifeminist and misogynistic beliefs. After graduating as a lawyer and being publicly outed by Gawker magazine, Thiel patiently waited until he could back a legal challenge by someone else to bankrupt the magazine and its editor.

Chafkin’s goal is to try to understand how Thiel has managed to consistently make the right bets, even when they seemed crazy. He notes that with no social graces or charisma, Thiel has the special ability to identify and nurture young talent and “using his friends, his business partners and his portfolio companies as a major means to an end”.

It hasn’t been an easy task as Thiel is famous for not letting anyone, even his closest allies, know what he is thinking and seems to play out life like a giant chess game. Planning several moves ahead and discarding pieces as the game progresses, Thiel has managed to make billions of dollars without paying tax.

Although Thiel is seen as a free thinker rather than a calculating operator, Chafkin looks past his personal branding to expose a creation whose “networking and capacity for storytelling, constructed an image so compelling that it has come to obscure the man behind it”.

In this epic true tale of a world where millions are made and lost, this self-proclaimed privacy advocate founded one of the world’s largest surveillance companies. Thiel has managed to find regulatory loopholes, flaunt transgressions and change norms in an essentially male world, with disturbing ramifications for America and the rest of the world as well.

Lezly Herbert

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