Peter Thiel: Power, Palantir and the antichrist
He may not hog the limelight in the same way as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, or many of his other friends and associates, but Peter Thiel has a fair claim to be one of the world’s most influential figures — as well as one of its richest.
Born in 1967 in Frankfurt am Main in what was then West Germany, the Thiel family moved to the US when Peter was just a year old. The family also spent six years in South-African occupied Namibia from 1971 to 1977.
Thiel’s later rise to prominence came on the back of his tech firms and investments. His first major success was Paypal, a digital payments provider with which Musk was initially involved. Thiel then became the first outside investor in Facebook.
Today he also owns part of Musk’s SpaceX, as well as OpenAI, and multiple other companies. Forbes puts his personal wealth at $35.7 billion (€31.1 billion).
