SO I read this book to determine if I should retain my PLTR stock. Yesterday, shortly before I finished reading The Contrarian, I sold it all at a loss of $311.69. This was shortly after I learned that PLTR had won multiple ICE contracts, realizing that a former client of mine, who protested renewal of the ICE contract for a detention center in McHenry, IL, would be disappointed in me for supporting their company. Then I read that Palantir's software was very helpful (though it could have been better utilized, it seems) for COVID-19 contact-tracing. It's a weird technology but it was used to locate terrorist targets in combat zones; I'm probably off but I think it serves as a kind of geo-location device for individuals that do not already have a GPS signal on them that can be hacked, using data analytics--and it's very precise. PLTR may, or may not, have played any role in the capture and execution of Osama Bin Laden; it seems more likely they did not, but it played to say they did.
***
It seems this book mostly gets negative reviews for being a kind of "liberal hack job," but I strongly disagree. For as much as it demonizes Thiel, it also glorifies him. The Contrarian in the 2020's could be what Wall Street was in the 1980s, if only kids today read more; Gordon Gekko is a villain in the film, but also a cultural hero, as a fictional archetype. Peter Thiel is kind of like a real-life version of him--but he is also so much more, and that is why he should not burn this book, but put it in a prominent place on his bookshelf: we should all be so lucky to be the subject of such an excellent book, even if much of it is critical.
Because as much as Chafkin does criticize Thiel as inconsistent, befuddling, xenophobic, misogynistic, vindictive, etc., not all of those are bad, and he acknowledges him as a brilliant maneuverer. In fact, when Thiel is vindictive, it is more humorous than not (against Google, for one). Perhaps that is not funny to the many Gawker employees who had to find new jobs, but Chafkin fairly portrays Gawker as the trashy institute of tabloid journalism it was. Perhaps Bloomberg has better morals, or integrity. (I do not fault paparazzi for their life choices, but one must know that making a living by breaking into people's private lives is a risky proposition.)
And maybe it is interesting that Chafkin works for Bloomberg. We have Bloomberg and Stacey Abrams to thank for the Biden administration, but one could not call Michael Bloomberg the antithesis of Peter Thiel; their politics may differ, but Bloomberg is older now, he may have shifted in his political beliefs (I don't know enough about him, even though he was my Mayor for many years), and he generally seems more "hands off" than other media moguls, i.e. Rupert Murdoch or Jeff Bezos. It would behoove Bloomberg to be on Thiel's good side, and it would behoove most people in general: you do not want to fuck with this man, and I think Chafkin walks a fine line where Thiel could still be on speaking terms with him after this book, because its clear--though he has retreated more recently from the public-eye--he will continue to hold our country in his vice grip, and Chafkin respects that power.
Of course, that's overstated. Peter Thiel is not Donald Trump--he is an actual billionaire that went to Stanford and Stanford Law, that rejected the practice of law after failing to secure a Supreme Court clerkship, that loves to read The Prince and other classics, and has written several books that are inflammatory to liberals. He is not a technologist, but he has controlled a large swathe of Silicon Valley for the past two decades.
There are too many things to discuss in this book, suffice to say it should be dissected theme-by-theme, for Chafkin's book reads like a streaming-network television series: Season 1 is in Germany, South Africa, Ohio, California, and New York, and ends with Thiel quitting his white-shoe firm job at Sullivan & Cromwell, but that's only 40 pages; Season 2 has Thiel making his first moves in Silicon Valley, eventually starting PayPal with support from X.com guest-star Elon Musk--it ends with 9/11; Season 3 would include the sale of PayPal to eBay, Palantir's origins, Thiel's ascendance as a member of the moneyed elite and embracing his burgeoning eccentricities--it ends with Gawker outing him as gay; Season 4 would be comprised of the entire timeline of that case, along with the Thiel fellows ("20 under 20"), sea-steading, increasing embrace of alt-right radicals, investments in life extension, etc., ending with Trump's campaign announcement; Season 5 would cover Thiel's role in the administration, and end with the pandemic, which proved Thiel right when he often wrote that the apocalypse was upon us. Maybe my timelines are screwed up, but that seems like a pretty good show to me, and it would not be unheard of because Thiel has already turned up as himself in The Social Network and as a parody in Silicon Valley.
***
Thiel is often portrayed as cold, calculating and humorless, a person with few friends, many enemies, and scores of sycophants. His work on The Stanford Review, a conservative newspaper he founded while in undergrad, is unearthed in this book (not for the first time), and it is apparent that many of the ideas of the alt-right (though Thiel was not nearly as extreme, he later sees value in such alliances) are nothing new; it is important to recall the "PC" movement in the 1990s to see that the "woke movement" in the late 2010's is simply a more virulent version of the same. The mobs may have descended in the 90's if Twitter had been available but back then they needed to put themselves out there in person with their real name. One of Thiel's proteges, Keith Rabois, two years younger and a writer on the Review, once shouted "Faggot, you are going to die of AIDS. You're going to get what's coming to you, damn faggot!" (34) as a stunt in order to try to get kicked out of student housing so he could say the school did not protect freedom of speech. This is the type of trolling that still goes on today, just online where people have no guts. Thiel would not be nearly as crass, but he would couch similar ideas in his polemics. He's not quite a troll himself (at least not an "in-your-face" one, unlike his co-founder), but he doesn't denounce any of this because it plays into his agenda.
Thiel is often portrayed as cold, calculating and humorless, a person with few friends, many enemies, and scores of sycophants. His work on The Stanford Review, a conservative newspaper he founded while in undergrad, is unearthed in this book (not for the first time), and it is apparent that many of the ideas of the alt-right (though Thiel was not nearly as extreme, he later sees value in such alliances) are nothing new; it is important to recall the "PC" movement in the 1990s to see that the "woke movement" in the late 2010's is simply a more virulent version of the same. The mobs may have descended in the 90's if Twitter had been available but back then they needed to put themselves out there in person with their real name. One of Thiel's proteges, Keith Rabois, two years younger and a writer on the Review, once shouted "Faggot, you are going to die of AIDS. You're going to get what's coming to you, damn faggot!" (34) as a stunt in order to try to get kicked out of student housing so he could say the school did not protect freedom of speech. This is the type of trolling that still goes on today, just online where people have no guts. Thiel would not be nearly as crass, but he would couch similar ideas in his polemics. He's not quite a troll himself (at least not an "in-your-face" one, unlike his co-founder), but he doesn't denounce any of this because it plays into his agenda.
Though his politics may be odious to many, his business-sense was spot-on, if somewhat nefarious and manipulative. For example, PayPal marketed itself to eBay sellers as a more efficient way of being paid, enticing them to open accounts with a complimentary $10 balance, so that sellers would encourage the buyers to also use PayPal:
"In November [1999], PayPal's user count was a few thousand. By January, the World Domination Index [a software app the company used to track new sign-ups] had risen to 100,000, and just three months later, it was up to 1 million. That was a more or less unprecedented rate of growth, even in Silicon Valley, but it meant that PayPal had spent something like $20 million on referral fees out of the $28 million raised so far. Early employees tell stories of walking in and seeing that thousands of users had signed up overnight--and feeling a sense of awe and terror." (60)
Around this time, eBay begins courting PayPal for an acquisition, first offering $300 million for the company in late 2000, then $900 million in 2002. By July, the deal was done, and Thiel owned 4% of the company after its IPO (the first after 9/11), which meant he was due stock "worth more than $50 million." (90) Now, I believe that Chafkin means $50 million in 2002, when PayPal was trading around $20. Today it's at $214.
But Thiel had been lucky:
"As PayPal was preparing to file to go public, Thiel traveled to New York with chief financial officer Roelof Botha for a meeting with banks from Morgan Stanley. It was September 10, 2001. The meeting that afternoon was a total failure. PayPal confused the bankers--was it a technology company or an unlicensed bank, they wanted to know--and neither man cut an especially impressive figure. Thiel was a thirty-three-year-old conservative political wannabe; Botha was, at twenty-seven, absurdly young and inexperienced for a public company CFO.
The Morgan Stanley bankers indicated they weren't interested, and Thiel and Botha took a car to John F. Kennedy International Airport in the rain, feeling dejected. Their sense of misery grew when their plane, the last United flight of the day, was delayed for hours on the tarmac. Eventually, the crew offered passengers the option to disembark and take a morning flight, but Thiel and Botha opted to sit, grimly, and wait while several passengers elected to get off.
They eventually made it home to San Francisco very early the next morning. Hours later, Thiel learned that a San Francisco-bound United aircraft from Newark airport--flight number UA 93--had been hijacked and had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. It seemed possible that at least some of the people they'd been with the night before were now dead." (87-88)
The Morgan Stanley bankers indicated they weren't interested, and Thiel and Botha took a car to John F. Kennedy International Airport in the rain, feeling dejected. Their sense of misery grew when their plane, the last United flight of the day, was delayed for hours on the tarmac. Eventually, the crew offered passengers the option to disembark and take a morning flight, but Thiel and Botha opted to sit, grimly, and wait while several passengers elected to get off.
They eventually made it home to San Francisco very early the next morning. Hours later, Thiel learned that a San Francisco-bound United aircraft from Newark airport--flight number UA 93--had been hijacked and had crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. It seemed possible that at least some of the people they'd been with the night before were now dead." (87-88)
***
The subject of death in Thiel's mind is simple: it is evil, and we should do everything we can to fight against it, and eliminate it. The descriptions of his interest in the life-extension industry comprise some of the most amusing sections of the book. I love one passage in particular so much that it is necessary to excerpt:
"In 2008, Founders Fund had invested around $500,000 into Halcyon Molecular, a startup founded by William Andregg, who'd started the company with his brother Michael when he was just nineteen, with a modest plan of developing inexpensive genomic sequencing technology in order to cure aging. In 2009, during his freak-flag stage, Thiel met with the Andreggs and was almost instantly enamored with their enthusiasm and approach. Thiel is not normally emotive, but was on this occasion. 'He actually jumped up and down,' William Andregg recalled. 'He was like, "We have to solve this or we're all gonna die." That was the first conversation.'
Thiel would personally invest $5 million in the live-forever company and was a constant presence at the company's offices, with Founders Fund kicking in another $5 million on top of that. 'He was spending so much, it was like, 'Okay there's only so much advice you can give,' Andregg said. 'We had to start doing actual work.'" (138)
Thiel would personally invest $5 million in the live-forever company and was a constant presence at the company's offices, with Founders Fund kicking in another $5 million on top of that. 'He was spending so much, it was like, 'Okay there's only so much advice you can give,' Andregg said. 'We had to start doing actual work.'" (138)
There is also some discussion of parabiosis, which is the procedure of transferring blood from a younger person to an older person for a rejuvenating effect, and Thiel was asked, "true or not true?" by Andrew Ross Sorkin, in the last interview he gave before the pandemic, and he responded, "I want to publicly tell you I am not a vampire."
And there are other cheeky moments throughout the book. When Palantir went public, one of the requirements of California law included at least one female board member, and Palantir settled on Alexandra Wolfe Schiff, a longtime friend and author of a flattering book about the Thiel fellowship:
"To those who knew Thiel well, the nomination of Wolfe Schiff seemed particularly brazen. Wolfe Schiff, who lives in New York, had often stayed at Thiel's house during visits to the West Coast, and during the mid-2000s, before Thiel was fully out, she'd posed as Thiel's girlfriend at Davos, according to the journalist Felix Salmon. Shortly after the announcement, an associate sent Thiel a text asking if he'd intended the Wolfe Schiff appointment as a troll. After all, offering Wolfe Schiff as the first woman on the Palantir board was quite the fuck-you to the PC police. Thiel's response: a winking emoji with its tongue sticking out." (312)
***
It's very difficult to know how to end this review. Whenever I flip back through the book to find an excerpt, I find myself wanting to include the paragraph before, and the one before that, etc. Most of this book is gold. My only criticism is that it sometimes gets repetitive: we can only hear that Peter Thiel is a contrarian so many times. Chafkin asserts this in several different formulations, but perhaps most potently near the end:
"The contrast between Thiel's professed hatred of death and his apparent indifference to the many hundreds of thousands of deaths from COVID was one of the many examples that I encountered in the reporting of this book where Thiel's most deeply held beliefs seemed at odds with his Machiavellian actions. That these inconsistencies have mostly gone unnoticed, and that Thiel is regarded as a contrarian free-thinker rather than a calculating operator, is a testament to his singular facility for personal branding. He is self-created, a Silicon Valley Oz, who has, through networking and a capacity for storytelling, constructed an image so compelling that it has come to obscure the man behind it....
The Thiel mythology contains a good deal of truth: He has created companies that have defined our culture and economy over the past quarter century. The industry that Thiel helped build is responsible for trillions of dollars of wealth creation and hundreds of thousands of jobs. He has been the rare futurist who actually managed to accelerate the future--and for that, at least, he deserves history's respect.
And yet this is only half the story because Thiel has also contributed to a reactionary turn in our politics and society that has left the United States in a much more uncertain place than he found it when he went into business for himself in the mid-1990s. He is a critic of big tech who has done more to increase the dominance of big tech than perhaps any living person. He is a self-proclaimed privacy advocate who founded one of the world's largest surveillance companies. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity who has surrounded himself with a self-proclaimed mafia of loyalists. And he is a champion of free speech who secretly killed a major U.S. media outlet. 'He's a nihilist, a really smart nihilist,' said Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly activist and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. 'He's entirely about power--it's the law of the jungle. "I'm a predator and the predators win."' That, more than anything, may be the lesson that Thiel's followers have learned--the real meaning of "move fast and break things." (329-330)
The Thiel mythology contains a good deal of truth: He has created companies that have defined our culture and economy over the past quarter century. The industry that Thiel helped build is responsible for trillions of dollars of wealth creation and hundreds of thousands of jobs. He has been the rare futurist who actually managed to accelerate the future--and for that, at least, he deserves history's respect.
And yet this is only half the story because Thiel has also contributed to a reactionary turn in our politics and society that has left the United States in a much more uncertain place than he found it when he went into business for himself in the mid-1990s. He is a critic of big tech who has done more to increase the dominance of big tech than perhaps any living person. He is a self-proclaimed privacy advocate who founded one of the world's largest surveillance companies. He is a champion of meritocracy and intellectual diversity who has surrounded himself with a self-proclaimed mafia of loyalists. And he is a champion of free speech who secretly killed a major U.S. media outlet. 'He's a nihilist, a really smart nihilist,' said Matt Stoller, the anti-monopoly activist and author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy. 'He's entirely about power--it's the law of the jungle. "I'm a predator and the predators win."' That, more than anything, may be the lesson that Thiel's followers have learned--the real meaning of "move fast and break things." (329-330)
So in a way, The Contrarian could be seen as a much shorter modern day Power Broker (a comparison I probably should not make without having read the latter, but one that feels accurate). It is probably not destined to be a timeless classic, but it's an engaging text and gets to the heart of Thiel's success, which is not unlike the success stories of many other people in power today: surround yourself with the "Right" people (lame pun intended). Play into people's insecurities and fears. Disdain democracy and regard America as a corporation in need of a CEO-Dictator. Have wild ideas and get people's attention. Take things personally and vow revenge. Reject progressive immigration policies. Donate to Super PACs and get friendly Senators elected. Deny, downplay or minimize climate change. Respect the right to freedom of speech and look away when it veers closer to "hate speech." Read Ayn Rand and be an Individual. Value yourself above all others.
Chafkin acknowledges that Thiel has created hundreds of thousands of jobs. Unlike Trump, he did not control the American response to the pandemic, and did not contribute to hundreds of thousands of deaths. Trump may be evil, but certainly does not see himself as such. Thiel may be evil, but really not very evil, and probably sees himself as such. That self-awareness is his strength, and the depiction of how he turned various personal weaknesses into advantages makes The Contrarian an important book for any would-be entrepreneurs with outsized ambitions. We are often counseled to Think Big and this book shows one way--perhaps the way in our present era--to do that.
Grade: A
