A New York Times Notable Book A shocking and assiduously reported biography of venture
capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel the enigmatic controversial and hugely influential
power broker whose techno-authoritarian worldview is coming to dominate our collective reality
“Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian is much more than a consistently shocking biography of Peter
Thiel the most important investor in tech and a key supporter of the Donald Trump presidency.
It’s also a disturbing history of Silicon Valley that will make you reconsider the ideological
foundations of America’s relentless engine of creative destruction.”— Brad Stone author of The
Everything Store and Amazon Unbound Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s
no industry has made a greater impact on the world than Silicon Valley. And few individuals
have done more to shape Silicon Valley than Peter Thiel. The billionaire venture capitalist and
entrepreneur has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing count-less aspects of
contemporary life from the technologies that mediate our daily existence to the rise of the
far-right effort among some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and Washington to
untether the U.S. government from the established constitutional order. But despite his being
one of the most important forces behind the tectonic shifts in America’s sociopolitical
landscape no public figure is quite so mysterious. In the first major biography of Thiel Max
Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator’s singular life and philosophy from his
upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative
thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir early investment in Facebook and SpaceX
and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The
Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the
corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley including stren-uously backing outsider political
candidates notably a young Senate hopeful named JD Vance and the longshot 2016 presidential
contender Donald Trump. Essential reading for a post-2024 world The Contrarian is a
revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and a deeply insightful portrait of a tech
industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with peril.
