The Contrarian

A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics<BR><BR>Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious.<BR><BR>In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president.<BR><BR>Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.

A New York Times Notable Book <BR><BR>A shocking and assiduously reported biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial, and hugely influential power broker whose techno-authoritarian worldview is coming to dominate our collective reality<BR><BR>“Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian is much more than a consistently shocking biography of Peter Thiel, the most important investor in tech and a key supporter of the Donald Trump presidency. It’s also a disturbing history of Silicon Valley that will make you reconsider the ideological foundations of America’s relentless engine of creative destruction.”—Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound<BR><BR>Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing count-less aspects of contemporary life, from the technologies that mediate our daily existence to the rise of the far-right effort among some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and Washington to untether the U.S. government from the established constitutional order. But despite his being one of the most important forces behind the tectonic shifts in America’s sociopolitical landscape, no public figure is quite so mysterious.<BR><BR>In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator’s singular life and philosophy, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX, and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, including stren-uously backing outsider political candidates, notably a young Senate hopeful named JD Vance and the longshot 2016 presidential contender Donald Trump.<BR><BR>Essential reading for a post-2024 world, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and a deeply insightful portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with peril.

Seit den Tagen der Dotcom-Blase in den späten 1990er-Jahren hat keine Branche die Welt mehr beeinflusst als das Silicon Valley. Von den Technologien, die wir täglich nutzen, bis hin zum empfindlichen Machtgleichgewicht zwischen Silicon Valley, Wall Street und Washington - Peter Thiel hat hinter den Kulissen unzählige Aspekte des modernen Lebens beeinflusst. Er ist Mastermind und Kapitalgeber hinter einer ganzen Reihe von Unternehmen wie Paypal, Facebook oder Palantir. Doch trotz seiner Macht und der Allgegenwärtigkeit seiner Projekte ist keine öffentliche Figur so geheimnisvoll und umstritten.Erstmals zeichnet der renommierte Bloomberg-Journalist Max Chafkin in dieser Biografie den Lebensweg und die Weltanschauung des Innovators nach - von seiner Erziehung als Kind von deutschen Einwanderern und seinen Jahren in Stanford als aufkeimender konservativer Vordenker bis hin zur Gründung von PayPal und Palantir, seinen frühen Investitionen in Facebook und SpaceX und seinen Beziehungen zu anderen Tech-Titanen wie Mark Zuckerberg oder Elon Musk. Er beleuchtet, inwieweit Thiel versucht hat, seine Weltanschauung und Werte über die Grenzen des Silicon Valley hinaus in die Korridore der Macht zu exportieren, beispielsweise durch seine energische Unterstützung rechtsextremer Politiker, darunter Donald Trump im Präsidentschaftswahlkampf.