Life After Facebook

Peter Thiel wants to save the world. Or, at the very least, to "take our civilization to the next level," as he frequently puts it. Almost every problem--the shortcomings of our political and educational systems, the lingering financial disaster, market bubbles, energy crises, the failed promises of the developing world, resource-based wars--stems from what he calls "stalled technological innovation." What a better place this would be, he often muses, if we could press the reset button and go back to the late 1950s and '60s and realize the predictions of science fiction that failed to materialize: ubiquitous space travel and colonization, robots à la the Jetsons, underwater cities, desalinization, reforestation of deserts and much more. Because we're all running harder and harder just to stay in place, the only salvation is big scientific breakthroughs.

It would be easy to write off Thiel as a "wackaloon," as one political blogger has called him. Indeed, Thiel is putting serious money behind companies and groups bent on extending life, colonizing on ocean platforms, commercializing space, promoting so-called friendly artificial intelligence and leapfrogging DNA sequencing, among other causes. Freedom, he has said, is incompatible with democracy. In one of his most provocative acts, he has offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to college kids if they drop out of school and start a business or pursue a breakthrough. "People think of the future as something other people do," Thiel says backstage at a December philanthropic fundraiser in San Francisco. "But there's something weirder about a society where people don't think about the future."

Harder to write off are Thiel's solid accomplishments. He cofounded, ran and sold PayPal to eBay. Thiel and his PayPal cohorts have since launched or funded many of the most innovative startups of the last decade. Among them: YouTube, LinkedIn, Slide (widgets to share images), Yelp (user reviews), the Founders Fund (a venture capital firm with a string of successes), Palantir Technologies (software to ferret out terrorists and financial scamsters), SpaceX (rockets), Tesla Motors (electric cars) and Kiva (microloans).

Thiel made the first sizable investment in Facebook. That $500,000 check is now a 3% share of the social network, a stake reduced by selloffs and dilution that is still worth $1.5 billion. Its cofounder Mark Zuckerberg still considers Thiel a valued consigliere. "Whenever I am not psyched about the way things are going and there don't seem to be a lot of good choices, I can get some advice by talking to him," says Zuckerberg. "He's most helpful . . . when he calls you because he sees something."

Investors in Thiel's Clarium Capital Management may not feel so charitable. Assets in the hedge fund, once as high as $6 billion in mid-2008, have been chopped down to $460 million (a quarter of that is Thiel's own money). Clarium has had three consecutive losing years--down 23% in 2010, 25% in 2009 and 4.5% in 2008--by betting wrong, variously, on rising oil prices and a sinking dollar. Oddly enough, Thiel's forecasts were right; his timing was punishingly off. It's as if he were so fixated on his vision of the future that he couldn't let go, even in the face of market realities. "It was a crazy ride up and ride down," says Thiel. Investors who have stuck with Clarium since mid-2008 have lost 65% of their money.

Are his big successes mere luck? "PayPal wasn't a fluke, Facebook wasn't a fluke, Founders Fund wasn't a fluke," says Netscape founder and investor Marc Andreessen, who sits on Facebook's board with Thiel. "Peter aggressively seeks opportunities to invert the conventional wisdom."

There's nothing conventional about Thiel's wisdom--or anything else. He is a complex package of contradictions: entrepreneur, venture capitalist, libertarian, lawyer, gay, Christian, highly educated, contemptuous of formal education. Asked to solve the paradox of Peter Thiel, he struggles. "Let me see what I, let me see if I can come up with a clever answer on the spot to that sort of question, I, I, I . . ." He picks at the Diet Coke can his assistant brings to the dark wood table in Clarium's conference room, with a view of San Francisco's park-like Presidio. "You know, I don't think, I don't think that there are, um," he pauses. "Uh, okay, let me elide it with abstracting it one level, so, um, to the extent that there are contradictions I am much more aware of them than people whose"--short pause--"views fit into a very standard matrix and where they have a lot of other people agree with them, and where there may be a lot of contradictions that run through everybody in society but that are hidden for that reason."

Except in his case, they're not so hidden. Thiel, in a striped dress shirt unbuttoned two holes from the top and dark slacks, puts down the Coke. "I don't think they're logical contradictions, but all the questions around these things are ones where to the extent you have an unusual combinations of beliefs or views or whatever, you're forced to think about them more than if you don't."

About all you can say, with any assurance, is that Thiel has never quite fit in with the world around him. He was born in 1967 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His father, a chemical engineer, kept the family moving; Peter went in and out of seven schools from Ohio to Namibia before the family settled in Foster City, Calif., 20 miles south of San Francisco. Like lots of boys, he devoured J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Ring series, absorbing its lessons about the allure of evil and the limits of power. But Thiel's brain seemed to work faster than most of his peers'. "He knew the name of every country in the world by the time he was five," says Ken Howery, a partner of Thiel's at the venture capital firm Founders Fund and a close friend. A chess player, Thiel was ranked seventh in the country as an adolescent. In college the kit that held his pieces had a "born to win" sticker on it.