A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel the enigmatic controversial
and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech business and
politics 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 countless aspects
of our contemporary way of life from the technologies we use every day to the delicate power
balance between Silicon Valley Wall Street and Washington. But despite his power and the
ubiquity of his projects 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 worldview
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 funding the lawsuit that
destroyed the blog Gawker and strenuously backing far-right political candidates notably
Donald Trump for president in 2016. Eye-opening and deeply reported The Contrarian is a
revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry
whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.
