EPeter Thiel
Born : Peter Andreas Thiel October 11, 1967 (age 48) Frankfurt am Main, West Germany
Residence : San Francisco
Alma mater : Stanford University (B.A.) Stanford Law School (J.D.)
Occupation : Managing partner in Founders Fund
Part time partner in Y Combinator
President of Clarium Capital
Co-founder and Chairman of Palantir Technologies
Former CEO and Co-founder of PayPal
Board member of Facebook
Net worth : IncreaseUS$2.8 billion (September 2015)
Political party : Libertarian
Religion : Christian
Early career
Thiel clerked for Judge J. L. Edmondson of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit for one year after his graduation from Stanford Law School. From 1993 to 1996, he traded derivatives for Credit Suisse Group.In 1996, he founded Thiel Capital Management, a multistrategy fund.
PayPal
In 1998, Thiel co-founded PayPal, an online payments system, with Max Levchin. The company later merged with X.com, then headed by Elon Musk. PayPal went public on February 15, 2002, and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion later that year.Thiel's 3.7 percent stake in PayPal was worth approximately $55 million at the time of the acquisition.
According to Eric Jackson's account of PayPal in his book The PayPal Wars, Thiel viewed PayPal's mission as liberating people throughout the world from the erosion of the value of their currencies due to inflation. Jackson recalls an inspirational speech by Thiel in 1999:
We're definitely onto something big. The need PayPal answers is monumental. Everyone in the world needs money – to get paid, to trade, to live. Paper money is an ancient technology and an inconvenient means of payment. You can run out of it. It wears out. It can get lost or stolen. In the twenty-first century, people need a form of money that's more convenient and secure, something that can be accessed from anywhere with a PDA or an Internet connection. Of course, what we're calling 'convenient' for American users will be revolutionary for the developing world. Many of these countries' governments play fast and loose with their currencies," the former derivatives trader [referring to Thiel] noted, before continuing, "They use inflation and sometimes wholesale currency devaluations, like we saw in Russia and several Southeast Asian countries last year [referring to the 1998 Russian financial crisis and 1997 Asian financial crisis], to take wealth away from their citizens. Most of the ordinary people there never have an opportunity to open an offshore account or to get their hands on more than a few bills of a stable currency like U.S. dollars. Eventually PayPal will be able to change this. In the future, when we make our service available outside the U.S. and as Internet penetration continues to expand to all economic tiers of people, PayPal will give citizens worldwide more direct control over their currencies than they ever had before. It will be nearly impossible for corrupt governments to steal wealth from their people through their old means because if they try the people will switch to dollars or Pounds or Yen, in effect dumping the worthless local currency for something more secure.
Clarium Capital
Thiel launched a global macro hedge fund Clarium Capital, pursuing a global macro strategy. In 2005, Clarium was honored as global macro fund of the year by both MarHedge and Absolute Return, two trade magazines. Thiel’s approach to investing became the subject of a chapter in Steve Drobny’s book, Inside the House of Money. Thiel successfully bet that the U.S. dollar would weaken in 2003, and gained significant returns betting that the dollar and energy would rally in 2005. After significant losses starting in 2009, Clarium dropped from $7 billion in assets in 2008 to around $350 million in 2011.
In 2004, well before the financial crisis of 2007–2010 bore him out in general terms, Thiel spoke of the dot-com bubble of 2000 having migrated, in effect, into a growing bubble in the financial sector. He specified General Electric, with its large financing arm, and Walmart as vulnerable. For example, in 2004, he reported having backed away from buying Martha Stewart's Manhattan duplex for $7 million in the winter of 2003–2004. While the apartment did sell in 2004 for $6.65 million to another buyer, it was on the market but unsold in early 2010 at $15.9 million,[21] and later at the reduced price of $13.9 million.
Facebook
In August 2004, Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in the social network Facebook for 10.2% of the company and joined Facebook's board. This was the first outside investment in Facebook, and Thiel was portrayed in The Social Network (2010) by actor Wallace Langham.
In his book The Facebook Effect, David