Peter Thiel
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Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967) is a German-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and the AI and data-analytics defense company Palantir, and whose Founders Fund has been one of the most active backers of artificial intelligence and defense startups, including OpenAI, Anduril, and Scale AI [1][2]. His career has intersected with AI at nearly every stage of the field's commercial history: he made early bets on DeepMind and OpenAI, funded the AI-safety milieu around Eliezer Yudkowsky in the 2000s, and through Founders Fund has financed Anduril, Scale AI, and reportedly Anthropic. He is simultaneously one of the industry's most prominent AI contrarians, arguing that the technology is closer in significance to the internet than to artificial general intelligence, and that AI-safety politics could become a vehicle for global authoritarian control, the central theme of his 2025 and 2026 "Antichrist" lecture series [20][22][24]. His political network, most visibly his mentorship of US Vice President JD Vance, gives him unusual indirect influence over American AI policy [25].
Thiel was born in Frankfurt, West Germany, and moved to the United States as an infant; his family spent part of his childhood in southern Africa before settling in California [1][2]. He studied philosophy at Stanford University (BA, 1989), where he founded the conservative student paper The Stanford Review in 1987 and encountered the mimetic theory of philosopher Rene Girard, a lasting intellectual influence. He earned a JD from Stanford Law School in 1992 and worked briefly as a lawyer and derivatives trader before turning to investing [1][2].
In 1998 he co-founded Confinity with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek; the company merged in 2000 with Elon Musk's X.com and became PayPal, which Thiel led as CEO until eBay acquired it for $1.5 billion in October 2002 [1][2]. The alumni network that emerged from the company, the so-called PayPal mafia, includes Musk, Reid Hoffman, David Sacks, and others who became central figures in the AI industry and in technology politics. In August 2004 Thiel became the first outside investor in Facebook, paying $500,000 for a 10.2 percent stake in a convertible note that valued the company at about $4.9 million [1]. He launched the macro hedge fund Clarium Capital in 2002, co-founded Founders Fund with Ken Howery and Nosek in 2005, and later created Valar Ventures (2010), Thiel Capital (2011), and Mithril Capital (2012) [2]. Founders Fund, the first institutional investor in both SpaceX and Palantir, managed roughly $17 billion in assets by 2025 [31]. His startup manual Zero to One (2014), co-written with Blake Masters, became a widely read statement of his views on technology and monopoly [1].
Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies in 2003 and has chaired its board since inception; the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel was an early investor, and the company built its business on data integration for intelligence, defense, and later commercial customers under CEO Alex Karp [3]. In April 2023 Palantir launched its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), which connects large language models to customers' proprietary data and operational systems, and the product became the engine of a dramatic commercial expansion [3]. Palantir joined the S&P 500 on September 23, 2024, and was the index's best-performing stock that year, rising about 340 percent [4][5]. Thiel remained Palantir's largest individual beneficiary: a March 2026 SEC filing put his stake at roughly 4 percent, worth more than $13 billion at the company's roughly $330 billion market capitalization [6].
Thiel's involvement with AI predates the deep learning boom. In February 2006 he provided $100,000 in matching funds to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (later the Machine Intelligence Research Institute), founded by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and his foundation ultimately gave the organization more than $1.6 million; he also co-founded and funded its Singularity Summit conference series beginning in 2006 [7]. That network produced his most consequential early AI bet: at the 2010 Singularity Summit, Demis Hassabis and Shane Legg sought Thiel out to pitch their AGI startup, and Founders Fund became DeepMind's first major investor, with Thiel reportedly putting in about $2.25 million before Google acquired the company in 2014 [8]. In December 2015 OpenAI named Thiel among the donors backing its launch as a nonprofit alongside Musk, Sam Altman, and Reid Hoffman [9].
Founders Fund subsequently became one of the most active investors in AI and AI-adjacent defense technology. It led Scale AI's $100 million Series C in August 2019, the round that made the data-labeling company a unicorn; Thiel said at the time that "Scale AI will last over time because it provides core infrastructure to the most important players in the space" [10][31]. It seeded Anduril Industries, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey with Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens, and in June 2025 led Anduril's $2.5 billion Series G at a $30.5 billion valuation with a $1 billion check, the largest in the firm's history [11]. Founders Fund closed a $4.6 billion growth fund in April 2025 and deployed it in under a year; reporting on the fund's successor indicated its largest positions included roughly $1.25 billion in Anthropic and $1 billion in Anduril, along with stakes in OpenAI and the coding-agent startup Cognition [12][13][14]. By March 2026 the firm was nearing the close of a roughly $6 billion follow-on growth fund aimed largely at late-stage AI companies [13].
| Year | Company or program | Thiel connection |
|---|---|---|
| 2006 | Singularity Institute / MIRI | $100,000 matching grant; over $1.6 million total foundation support [7] |
| 2010 | DeepMind | First major outside investment (reportedly about $2.25 million) after a Singularity Summit pitch [8] |
| 2015 | OpenAI | Named among founding donors of the nonprofit [9] |
| 2019 | Scale AI | Founders Fund led the $100 million Series C [10] |
| 2017 to 2025 | Anduril | Seed backer; led the June 2025 $2.5 billion round with a record $1 billion check [11] |
| 2025 | Anthropic, OpenAI, Cognition | Reported Founders Fund growth-fund positions, including about $1.25 billion in Anthropic [13][14] |
His personal vehicles have signaled more caution. Thiel Macro, his hedge fund, disclosed in a November 2025 13F filing that it had sold its entire stake of 537,742 Nvidia shares, worth over $100 million and previously about 40 percent of its disclosed US equity book, during the third quarter of 2025; the liquidation cut the fund's disclosed US equity holdings from about $212 million to $74.4 million and was paired with a 76 percent reduction in its Tesla position and new buying of Apple and Microsoft, a rotation widely read as a bet against AI-trade froth [15].
The Thiel Fellowship, announced in 2010 as "20 Under 20," pays young people $100,000 over two years to pursue projects instead of attending college; its 271 fellows through 2023 included 11 founders of billion-dollar companies, and the grant was raised to $250,000 starting with the 2026 class [16]. Its AI-relevant alumni include Chris Olah, a 2012 fellow who never completed a university degree and went on to co-found Anthropic and lead its mechanistic interpretability research [17].
Thiel's AI commentary blends long-standing themes: a "stagnation thesis" holding that technological progress outside computing has slowed since the 1970s (popularized by the Founders Fund slogan "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters"), and a skepticism of centralized power [20]. In Zero to One he argued that computers are complements to humans rather than substitutes. At a February 2018 debate with Reid Hoffman at Stanford he quipped that "crypto is libertarian, AI is communist," reasoning that AI's dependence on giant centralized datasets favors surveillance states, noting that "Communist China loves AI" [18]. At the National Conservatism Conference in July 2019 he called AI "a military technology," asked how many foreign intelligence services had infiltrated Google's "Manhattan Project for AI," and said the FBI and CIA should investigate Google's "seemingly treasonous" decision to work in China while lapsing a US defense contract; Google denied working with the Chinese military [19].
On the question of AGI, Thiel has been notably more measured than many peers. In a June 2025 interview with Ross Douthat of The New York Times, he described AI as "more than a nothing burger" but "less than the total transformation of our society," comparing its likely import to the internet of the late 1990s, and worried it might not suffice to end stagnation; the interview drew wide attention when Thiel paused before answering yes to whether he would prefer the human race to endure, while voicing sympathy for transhumanism [20]. He has also turned sharply against the AI-safety movement he once funded: according to journalist Keach Hagey's 2025 book The Optimist, Thiel warned Sam Altman at a Los Angeles dinner shortly before Altman's November 2023 ouster that "you don't understand how Eliezer has programmed half the people in your company to believe in that stuff," referring to Yudkowsky and effective altruism [21].
These themes culminated in a sold-out, private four-part lecture series on the Antichrist that Thiel delivered between September 16 and October 6, 2025 in San Francisco, organized by the Christian nonprofit ACTS 17 Collective [22]. Drawing on Girard, Thiel argued that the Antichrist of the 21st century would not be a technologist but "a Luddite who wants to stop all science," and that a one-world regulatory order could seize power by stoking fears of existential technologies such as AI and nuclear weapons; leaked audio reviewed by Reason described the lectures as framing a choice between technological "Armageddon" and a totalitarian "peace and safety" regime [22][23]. He has cited environmental and safety activists such as Greta Thunberg as examples of the spirit he describes [24]. Thiel reprised the lectures in Rome in March 2026, drawing criticism from Vatican officials [24].
Thiel donated $1.25 million to Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, spoke at that year's Republican National Convention, and served on the presidential transition team [1][2]. In the 2022 midterms he spent about $32 million on Republican candidates, including $15 million to a super PAC backing JD Vance, who had worked at Thiel's Mithril Capital and whose Narya Capital fund Thiel backed; Thiel brought Vance to his first meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in February 2021 [25][26]. Thiel declined to donate in the 2024 cycle, saying at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June 2024 that "if you hold a gun to my head, I'll vote for Trump" [26]. Vance became vice president in January 2025 and has carried a deregulatory AI message; at the Paris AI Action Summit on February 11, 2025 he declared that "the AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety" [27].
Thiel's broader network is threaded through the second Trump administration's AI apparatus. Michael Kratsios, a former Thiel Capital principal and chief of staff to Thiel, was confirmed in March 2025 as director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where he led the July 2025 AI Action Plan [28]. PayPal colleague David Sacks was named White House AI and crypto czar in December 2024. Palantir's federal business has expanded alongside: The New York Times reported in May 2025 that the administration had engaged Palantir to help implement an executive order on inter-agency data sharing, raising surveillance concerns; Palantir disputed the characterization, and the company had booked more than $113 million in federal spending since January 2025 [29][30].
Thiel, who is gay, married his longtime partner Matt Danzeisen in Vienna in 2017 [2]. He acquired New Zealand citizenship in 2011, a fact that drew controversy when revealed in 2017 [2]. He confirmed funding about $10 million of Hulk Hogan's litigation against Gawker Media, which ceased operations in 2016 after a $140 million verdict [2]. A self-described heterodox Christian and chess master, he has homes in Los Angeles and Miami. Bloomberg estimated his fortune at about $23 billion in August 2025, with later estimates tied to Palantir's rally near $27.5 billion by December 2025 [2][6].