The Contrarian

Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power

By: Max Chafkin

Narrated by: Will Damron

Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

A New York Times Notable Book

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.

©2021 Max Chafkin (P)2021 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"A judicious biography. . . . Unfailing diligent. . . . The Contrarian isn’t just about Thiel; it’s about Silicon Valley’s political coming-of-age, too.”—New York Times

“In writing a biography of Thiel, the deck was stacked against Max Chafkin . . . who daringly took to the task. His new book . . . charts the billionaire’s rise from his early days as a precocious chess champion who never quite fit in to a world-conquering tech visionary and political firebrand.”—Fortune, “The Best Books of 2021”

“Peter Thiel is one of tech’s most powerful people and one of its most enigmatic. That’s why Max Chafkin’s new biography of Thiel is so welcome. The Contrarian is a deep study of a Valley anomaly. . . . Chafkin digs deep to help us understand his subject.”—Wired

The chess player

Being a huge fan of his Zero to One, I found this book interesting for other reasons.
First it gives a background to Thiels religious and conservative views from his childhood so you can start to understand him.
Then it gives a very interesting perspective for me as a European into US politics and the conservative media world of reality distortion that seems to be a fun game to do at Stanford for people that takes extreme conservative standpoints. Just to identify themselves with something else and build an identity and eventually a career out of it. I know people that are exactly like this and sort of Mensa material, but here they don’t work very well with the rest of society. In the US they seems to flourish and move into power. Very strange, but also very interesting to understand.

My understanding of Thiel after reading this is that he plays simultaneous chess with almost everything he does. Something he loved to do in his teenage years but now with real people, money, companies and politics.

The book is very critical of Thiels work, but it’s well written, almost like a detective story to uncover Thiel, and the voice reader is one of the best. Thus I finished this book in record times.

I do think the book will need an update of the later chapters in a few years as it spends a lot of time with Trump, the Pandemic and Silicon Valley that might be viewed differently in a few years.

Biased But Interesting

At points the author seems subjective and neutral but near the end you really get to see the left leaning lens in which this story is told through. I wish the author would’ve used Thiel’s narrative to tell a different story other than the typical mainstream media take.

book review

He repeated alot of debunked propaganda that has been spread especially about Trump. still a good read

Slightly Biased, Decent Book

Anyone should be able to tell the author is not a fan of Peter Thiel, with that said this is an interesting book. Peter Thiel and others clearly possess alot of influence over certain things, but the author gives the impression that Peter Thiel somehow conspired Covid 19, 911, and the housing crash simply because Thiel and his companies made money off the disasters. I don't believe Thiel has any founded political ideology because he's smart enough to know it's all smoke and mirrors for a greater objective.

Snore fest; Elon Musk’s story is way better.

Well researched and gives nuanced perspectives but even at the end Thiel seems just as distant and puzzling a character as in the beginning. As for the value of his impact on the valley and the world; questionable. Use your credit for Elon’s book by Isaacson instead.

Eye-opening and Alarming

Not someone who has followed Silicon Valley closely, I was aware of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk and the biggest and most revolutionary of the tech companies that are household names today. I had heard of Peter Thiel, but only as the founder of PayPal, and as the investor in startups who is parodied in the comedy, Silicon Valley. This book remedied my ignorance with a huge blast of well-written and thoroughly researched information.

As the best journalists do, Max Chafkin delves deep into his subject and bases his conclusions on multiple interviews from a variety of sources. The result is a biography that debunks many of the myths surrounding Thiel and shines a glaring light on what this billionaire investor has actually done, both in the tech world and in Washington.

What I learned is that Peter Thiel is a disruptor, in the most negative sense of that word. He is not interested in creative destruction as a way to improve the world, but in creative destruction as a way to improve his own standing in the world. He flouted convention, regulations, and probably broke the law to make PayPal a success, and then did the same to get Donald Trump elected.

Thiel doesn't care about making the world a better place. Did it bother him that identify thieves used PayPal to stash their pillaged plunder? No. Did it bother him that he was fomenting hate and helping destroy the environment when he backed Trump? No. Because he profited handsomely and gained power in both instances.

I knew little about Thiel before I read this book, but I am certainly well-informed now, and I will be following this very important, very dark kingmaker very closely from now on, because he's still out there, and he now has $4.1 billion to play with.

Fascinating, biased, although worth reading

As a Republican who is interested in Peter Thiel, I found the book fascinating. It presents interesting details about his life and career to understand the man behind the startup success. Make no mistake, the author hates him. However, his writing appears to be factual. Contains profiles of Palantir, PayPal, Elon Musk, and Zuckerberg. Also includes subjects such as his political activity with Trump, creating a hedge fund, avoiding taxes, succeeding in law school. If you like aspects of Thiel, the book will make you respect him more while question some areas you didn’t know about. The narrator is easy to listen to, very clear. Worth reading.

Peter Thiel is a boss

This was a very interesting book. The author is clearly biased and interprets everything from a liberal bent but even that can’t diminish the amazing story of Thiel. I believe the author’s intent was to smear and scorn Thiel but this book honestly made me like Thiel much more than before I read it.

Scary

it is truly frightening to see how deeply flawed an individual can amass such wealth and power. it is ironic that those that rail against deep states and New world orders are themselves the ones the most entrenched in it.....

WHAT ELSE CAN I SAY?

YIKES! This is a character study of someone I would not want/hope to be.