The Hoover Institution, which is this big conservative think tank, it literally looms over the entire campus. I mean, I think Stanford, compared to some of the other kind of elite universities, is probably more conservative. And to read that - this sort of creative output, you would think Stanford is this kind of crazy left-wing place where conservatives are being discriminated against constantly. Thiel wrote a lot, and he edited a student newspaper there. How did he fit in there? What kind of interactions did he have?ĬHAFKIN: It's funny. And as a result, he was bullied to some extent as a child and I think sort of comes into the world feeling a little bit aggrieved and maybe justifiably aggrieved.ĭAVIES: So he ends up going to Stanford, where, you know, a lot of the student body is liberal. And, you know, as a result, I don't think he had a lot of friends. They bounced from Cleveland to South Africa and Namibia and then finally wound up in Silicon Valley. What kind of kid was he?ĬHAFKIN: I mean, he was a lonely and very smart and very serious boy.
This means a group of pals who stuck together and pursued some common interests. And what you start to see is this kind of influence network growing where employees are bouncing from one PayPal Mafia company to the next.ĭAVIES: I guess we should quickly add that when we talk about the PayPal Mafia, we are not talking about an organized crime syndicate. And they all either have Peter Thiel's money in them or they're run by friends of Peter Thiel. There's just this really long list of really important kind of influential companies that came out of Silicon Valley at the same time. It finds its way into YouTube, Yelp, LinkedIn. So the PayPal Mafia finds its way into SpaceX, Elon Musk's company. And so that group includes Thiel and some of his co-founders, you know, Max Levchin and Elon Musk. It was a group of people, you know, an informal collection of entrepreneurs and investors - basically led by Peter Thiel - that were moving money around and doing some really interesting and, you know, in retrospect, amazing things with it. But the thing that makes Peter Thiel kind of really interesting and who, especially back then, you know, from the perspective of a tech reporter in the mid-2000s was this thing called the PayPal Mafia. I think, most famously, he's the first investor in Facebook. You know, he invested in a bunch of well-known companies. You mentioned the kind of top line biography. But what do you mean that he was hanging in and over these stories? And we're going to talk about his career some. You write that, when you were a tech reporter, that Thiel seemed to hang behind or above or somewhere in the middle of almost every story I reported about the tech industry. His new book is "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel And Silicon Valley's Pursuit Of Power." Well, Max Chafkin, welcome to FRESH AIR. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Inc and The New York Times Magazine. Max Chafkin is a features editor and tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek.
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And he's shown an interest in some unconventional ideas, like establishing independent city states that float on the ocean, free from oppressive governments, and fighting aging by getting blood transfusions from young people. He's known for secretly financing wrestler Hulk Hogan's invasion of privacy lawsuit which bankrupted the website Gawker. He's also a libertarian conservative who broke with most tech industry figures by embracing the candidacy of Donald Trump. He co-founded PayPal, made a fortune running a hedge fund and was an early investor in Facebook, where he still serves on the board of directors. Bloomberg Businessweek tech reporter Max Chafkin has a new book about one of Silicon Valley's more unusual figures, Peter Thiel. The American tech industry is known for producing some interesting characters as CEOs - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. I'm Dave Davies in today for Terry Gross.
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