A venture capitalist with a fortune estimated at $26bn. He was one of the early backers of Meta (then Facebook) and SpaceX. His biggest venture-capital firm is Founders Fund.
Thiel has long argued that an excessive focus on "bits" (software) at the expense of "atoms" (hardware) has helped produce economic stagnation in America. In 2015 he wrote that the country needed "a new atomic age" to produce clean, abundant energy. He has said that the Manhattan Project epitomised how America's government used to "get things done".
In 2016 Thiel was the first prominent figure in Silicon Valley to support Donald Trump. He helped bankroll the early political career of J.D. Vance, a former colleague who became America's vice-president.
Thiel and Founders Fund have a history of incubating firms that do highly sensitive work in support of America's national security using hitherto unproven technology. These include Palantir, a big-data firm set up in 2003, and Anduril, a maker of autonomous weapons. In April 2025 Founders Fund was the main investor in a $50m funding round for General Matter, a startup aiming to become the first privately funded company to enrich uranium in America; Thiel joined its board.
Thiel is also placing bets on America's high-tech manufacturing renaissance. In October 2025 one of his former acolytes, James Proud, a London-born entrepreneur, unveiled Substrate, a firm aiming to create a chipmaking machine in America using advanced X-ray lithography to take on ASML, the Dutch firm that is the sole supplier of extreme-ultraviolet lithography used in advanced semiconductor manufacturing. Substrate has raised $100m at a valuation of $1bn, backed by Thiel's Founders Fund.
Thiel is among the backers of Rainmaker, a startup that aims to make cloud-seeding cheaper by using drones rather than aeroplanes.
Thiel has also invested in fertility technology, including 28, a period-tracking app, and Gaia, a platform that provides financing plans for those pursuing fertility care.
Margaret O'Mara, a historian of Silicon Valley at the University of Washington, has noted the incongruity of libertarians like Thiel harking back to a golden era of government intervention at the height of the cold war. She calls it the "Space Age, brought to you by Ayn Rand".
In October 2025 Thiel gave a series of lectures and interviews arguing that the world has submitted to a doctrine of "peace and safetyism" for 50 years, producing stagnation in many areas. Citing the Bible's warning that "the slogan of the Antichrist is 'peace and safety'", he argued that organisations such as the European Union and figures who urge caution on artificial intelligence risk the rule of the Antichrist. He called Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who writes about the dangers of AI, a "legionnaire of the Antichrist". Thiel has invested in AI and sees anti-AI regulation as stymying the technology's potential. He acknowledged that giving the lectures in secret was "a pretty good marketing shtick".
What soon grows old? Gratitude.