Tech magnate Peter Thiel is undoubtedly one of the most powerful political figures in America’s private sector. He’s also one of the most controversial.
Thiel is, among other things, a Stanford graduate, a libertarian-conservative political pundit, a tech startup founder, a German immigrant, a gay man, and a mentor to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance.
When Thiel first made a name for himself in the tech scene during the inflation of the dot-com bubble, he was best known as the cofounder and CEO of PayPal, a digital payment-processing platform that rose to prominence alongside eBay. When the latter purchased the former in 2002, Thiel went on to launch Palantir, the company for which he is now best known.
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Thiel’s storied career has also included stints as a lawyer, a hedge fund manager, an editor-in-chief, and even a speechwriter for conservative politician William Bennet (the two met in 1988 when Bennet, who was then Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Education, visited the Stanford campus to speak out against an initiative to update the school’s Western Culture curriculum to include a more diverse array of source material).
It’s been over 35 years since Thiel graduated from Stanford’s undergraduate program, and in the intervening years, his wealth has grown exponentially, landing him in the ranks of the world’s 200 richest individuals.
Here’s how much he’s worth today and why his work, both in technology and politics, is so polarizing.
What is Peter Thiel’s net worth?
As of this article’s last update, Thiel’s net worth was estimated at $14.5 billion by Forbes. Bloomberg estimated his wealth substantially higher at $15.9 billion.
Thiel’s net worth, like that of most multibillionaires, varies constantly, as nearly half of his fortune is held in the form of publicly traded securities, including a reported 4% stake in Palantir Technologies, the software company he co-founded with CEO Alex Karp in the early aughts.
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What is Palantir? What do its products do?
In 2003, Thiel cofounded Palantir (PLTR) , a data-analytics software firm whose products have been used by a variety of clients, including departments of the U.S. federal government, massive tech companies like Amazon, and even foreign militaries.
The company’s name refers to a set of magical crystal orbs used by two maleficent antagonists in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” series to communicate with one another over geographical distance, remotely view events, and gather intelligence to aid in their quest for total power.
Palantir’s products are essentially suites of tools that clients can use to sort through, analyze, and visualize vast amounts of data — and make predictions based on that data. The company’s products were initially designed for the government; its first client was the CIA, although the company now lists myriad private companies among its growing clientele as well.
According to GraniteShares, an investment company that designs ETFs, Palantir’s products allow its clients to “detect patterns and uncover hidden connections in large data sets.” Its products fall into two general categories — Gotham, the company’s defense and intelligence suite, which is used by militaries and government agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere, and Foundry, a data analytics suite used mostly by private companies.
Why is Palantir controversial?
Palantir and its products have been drawing ire from the public for years, but that hasn’t stopped the company’s stock from banking some of the most dramatic gains in the tech industry (308% in 2024 alone).
Palantir's work with the Israeli military
In 2024, Palantir, whose board Thiel chairs, inked a deal with the Israeli Defense Ministry. The Israeli government uses the company’s controversial tech to aid its ongoing military offensive in Gaza, which human rights watchdog Amnesty International has called a genocide (a war crime defined by the U.N. as “acts intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”).
As of early October 2024, the military offensive, aided to an unknown degree by Palantir’s analysis and prediction tools, had claimed the lives of at least 41,000 civilians, the bulk of which were women and children.
Palantir's work with the NSA
Palantir’s products have been controversial since long before their use in Israel’s latest military campaign, however. In 2017, The Intercept reported that Palantir built software for the NSA to support the agency’s controversial (and according to many constitutional law enthusiasts, illegal) XKEYSCORE tool, a digital dragnet that can capture records of virtually anything a user does on their computer, including keystrokes, webcam images, browsing history, and messages. This report was based on documents made public by famed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Palantir's employee surveillance program at JPMorgan Chase
Palantir didn’t just help the government spy on its citizens — it also helped a private bank spy on its employees. In 2018, it was revealed by Bloomberg that Palantir had been testing a product called Metropolis (a precursor to the company’s Foundry suite mentioned above) at JPMorgan Chase.
120 Palantir engineers aided JPMorgan’s insider threat department in using Palantir’s tech to hijack employees’ “emails and browser histories, GPS locations from company-issued smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations,” which were then analyzed to flag certain employees as potential risks to company assets.
Palantir’s algorithm “alerted the insider threat team when an employee started badging into work later than usual, a sign of potential disgruntlement. That would trigger further scrutiny and possibly physical surveillance after hours by bank security personnel.” In other words, Palantir’s product was used by a private company to covertly surveil its own employees, resulting in certain employees being stalked outside of the workplace.
Palantir's work with I.C.E.
In another controversial partnership, Palantir tech was used by I.C.E. (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to track down and arrest family members of children who crossed the U.S.-Mexican border. A Palantir smartphone app called Falcon was also employed by ICE to facilitate widespread workplace raids at 100 7-Eleven locations across the country.
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Why is Peter Thiel controversial? What are his politics?
Peter Thiel isn’t just controversial due to his name being synonymous with Palantir, however. He’s also a polarizing figure in his own right.
Thiel’s divisive persona dates back to his Stanford days, when he founded a student-run publication called the Stanford Review, which published vocally anti-gay articles (despite Thiel’s own sexuality), lambasted diversity initiatives and liberal-leaning professors and student organizations, and even successfully sued the school to overturn its ban on hate speech, although this occurred after Thiel had left the paper.
Long after his time as an undergraduate editor-in-chief, Thiel’s words again earned him public ire. In a strange 2009 essay/manifesto he published entitled “The Education of a Libertarian,” Thiel confusingly asserted that the voting rights granted to women in the 1920s “rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”
Thiel has long self-identified as a conservative libertarian, but in a discussion of his politics in a Politico interview, author Max Chafkin, who has written a book about Thiel, stated, “there are aspects of Thiel’s politics that aren’t libertarian at all; they’re closer to authoritarianism. It’s super-nationalistic, it’s a longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive, or, you know, a dictator, in other words.”
In 2016, Thiel made headlines for donating a reported $1.25 million to then-candidate Trump’s presidential campaign, despite the real estate mogul being relatively unpopular with most of the rest of Silicon Valley’s elites at the time. Thiel did not donate to any candidates during the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, but he has been a vocal supporter Trump’s running mate and Vice President-elect, J.D. Vance, for years.
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How did Peter Thiel get so rich?
Thiel made a decent living, by the standards of the time, working at Paypal as the company grew from its 1998 formation until its 2002 sale. By today’s standards, however, his salary as CEO would be considered paltry. In 1999, his income was only $73,263, according to IRS records.
Interestingly, however, without this comparatively low salary, Thiel would not have had the opportunity to become as rich as he is today — at least not without losing a substantial amount to the taxation most of us are subject to.
A Roth IRA is a retirement account through which an individual can invest post-tax dollars that can be withdrawn tax-free after the age of 59 and a half. Back in 1999, a person could only contribute to a Roth IRA if they made less than $110,000 per year (this limit has since been raised to $146,000). The annual contribution limit for a Roth at the time was $2,000 (it is now $7,000).
Since Thiel made only $73,263, he was able to contribute to a Roth IRA, and he funded it according to the annual limits, mostly with PayPal stock. This tax-free investment vehicle would prove to be a key asset in Thiel’s wealth-building strategy over the decades that followed.
As Thiel’s wealth and notoriety grew, he became what is known as a high-net-worth individual and accredited investor. These are people who are wealthy enough that they are allowed to invest in asset classes that aren’t available to everyday investors — things like private equity in tech startups whose shares, which aren’t traded publicly, may cost a fraction of a cent each and can be purchased by the thousands or even millions. When these companies become successful and go public (in many cases aided by startup incubators and hedge fund dollars), their shares can jump astronomically in value.
As a major player in the tech and finance industries (Thiel ran both an investment firm and a tech startup incubator), Thiel was able to invest in these sorts of companies using money that was already in his Roth IRA. By doing so, Thiel was able to turn what began as a few grand into a tax-free $5 billion over the decades that followed his founding of PayPal.
(This ProPublica article offers a far more detailed explanation of this process and the Roth IRA loophole that allows the nation’s richest to build massive stores of tax-free wealth.)
Looking forward
Born in 1967, Thiel will, in a couple of years, have surpassed the age of 59 and a half, allowing him penalty-free withdrawal access to the billions of dollars tied up in his Roth IRA. He may, however, leave much of the balance in the Roth so that he can continue to use it to make tax-free investments in the years to come.
Trump’s second term as U.S. president is set to begin on January 20th, 2025, at which point Thiel’s political influence, already considerable, stands to expand even further. Thiel advised Trump during his first term beginning in 2016, and with his mentee Vance now a member of the presidential Cabinet, his influence is likely to be felt in some of the policymaking of the next four years.
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