Peter Thiel: the billionaire tech entrepreneur on a mission to cheat death
By Mick Brown
2:12PM BST 19 Sep 2014

The co-founder of PayPal and likely the most successful venture capitalist in Silicon Valley is on a mission to change the world through technology – and to find a cure for death.An hour into my conversation with Peter Thiel the conversation turns, as it seems conversations with Thiel often do, to the question of death. ‘Basically,’ Thiel says earnestly, ‘I’m against it.’

Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was the first outside investor in Facebook, is probably the most successful – and certainly the most interesting – venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He lists among his passions chess, the works of Tolkien and ‘intellectual conversations with friends’. And what he calls ‘the problem of death’ is a topic that he returns to often. ‘I think there are probably three main modes of approaching it,’ he says. ‘You can accept it, you can deny it or you can fight it. I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.’

Thiel is an amiable, softly spoken man who gives the impression of thinking out loud. Questions are frequently greeted with a series of ‘ums… aahs… I think… let me put it this way…’, beginning a thought, stopping, trying another, and then another, as if he is testing the best way to be as precise as he can possibly be. ‘Hobbes said that in the state of nature life is nasty, brutish and short,’ he says. ‘And, um, I do think we want to overcome the state of nature. It is true that you can say that death is natural, but it is also natural to fight death. But if you stand up and say this is a big problem, we should do something about this, that makes people very uncomfortable, because they’ve made their peace with death. In some ways it’s a microcosm of the whole complacency of the Western world. I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I’d like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.’

Thiel, whose net worth is reported to be $2.2 billion, is Silicon Valley royalty, and a singular figure even in that rarefied world. He is a gay practising Christian, a libertarian who has thrown money and support behind the political campaigns of the Republican John McCain and the Libertarian Ron Paul, and who sits on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group – the elite band of the rich and powerful from politics, industry and business that convenes each year to discuss nobody-outside-the-inner-circle-quite-knows-what. Above all, he is a man with a utopian belief in the power of technology to change the world.

Through a variety of venture capital funds and his non-profit Thiel Foundation, Thiel has invested substantially in space travel, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and information technology. He has been one of the most public champions of ‘sea­steading’ – the idea of establishing floating communities outside territorial waters and beyond the regulatory powers of governments. His Thiel Fellowship programme encourages clever people under the age of 20 to forgo a college education and start their own companies. And he has poured millions of dollars into what he calls ‘the immortality project’. ‘I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer.’ His belief is such that he has signed up with Alcor, the leading company in the field of cryogenics, to be deep-frozen at the time of his death – as much as an ‘ideological statement’, he says, as in any expectation of being thawed out any time in the near future. ‘In telling you that I’ve signed up for it [cryogenics], there’s always this reaction that it’s really crazy, it’s disturbing. But my take on it is it’s only disturbing because it challenges our complacency.’

Peter Thiel’s fortunes may rest largely in Silicon Valley, but he lives and works in San Francisco. His office is in a low-slung building in the Presidio, the national park close to the Golden Gate Bridge, which is also home to George Lucas’s film business. Thiel’s offices house his hedge-fund business, one of his venture capital funds and the Thiel Foundation. Founders Fund, the venture capital firm that he runs with six partners, is in a neighbouring building. Thiel’s home, in the Marina district overlooking the ocean, is a five-minute drive away. He also owns a home in Maui, Hawaii.

Thiel has invited me to join him for breakfast, prepared by his own chef, which we eat in a glass-walled conference room. Thiel is of medium height, stocky in build, and moves like a man who, even at the age of 46, has not quite got used to his body. He has come from a run – he does a three- or four-mile jog two or three times a week, and enjoys hiking and surfing – and is dressed in a T-shirt, chinos and trainers. He is eating an egg-white spinach omelette – ‘I’m on a crazy diet,’ he grumbles. I am eating a cheese omelette with the yolk left in, a side of bacon and a bowl of fruit, at which he occasionally throws covetous glances.

Almost the first thing Thiel does after we have been introduced is to ask what are the three most interesting things I’ve encountered in the past year. He might learn something new, he explains, ‘and it gives me a better idea of the kind of things you might want to explore.’

‘Peter is very different from most people in Silicon Valley,’ Luke Nosek, one of the co-founders of PayPal, and now on the Founders Fund board, told me. ‘With a lot of people the conversation is about how are we going to make more money; with Peter the conversation is “How are we going to figure this out?” He has a tremendous curiosity about how the world works, and all the philosophical and moral questions around that.’ Another colleague evaluated his ability for ‘casual bar talk’ as ‘very low. The ability to recall a data point – what was gold trading at on day five of the Second World War and what was the impact of that? He has it like a record-book.’

Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, the son of an engineer who moved his family to America when Thiel was one, eventually settling in Foster City, California. He has a younger brother, Patrick. Growing up, Thiel displayed all the traits of the brilliant, slightly nerdish loner.

He was a fanatical chess-player, becaming one of the highest ranked under-21 players in America; an avid reader of science fiction – Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in particular. He played Dungeons and Dragons, and was obsessed with Tolkien; two of Thiel’s businesses are named after Tolkien references: a technology investment fund Mithril (a precious metal found in Middle-earth) and Palantir, his data analytics company, named after the ‘seeing stones’ in The Lord of the Rings.

Full article here.

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