How Peter Thiel Wins

Hi, it's Max. What does one of tech's top investors know about politics? That's a question that has hung over the career of venture capitalist and conservative provocateur Peter Thiel, who broke with the Silicon Valley consensus to endorse Donald Trump ahead of the 2016 election. The prospect of Thiel, a gay immigrant futurist from California with two Stanford degrees, backing a reactionary New York real estate developer who ran on a platform that included mass deportations of immigrants seemed profoundly strange at the time. And for years, pundits in D.C. and Silicon Valley have bent over backward to try to understand why Thiel supported Trump and what exactly he got for his trouble (and the $1.25 million he donated to Trump's candidacy).

The question was also a bit of an obsession for me as I researched and wrote my book, The Contrarian, a biography of Thiel that comes out on Tuesday. Bloomberg Businessweek's latest cover story, excerpted from the book, offers an answer: Thiel leveraged his connections to the Trump administration to expand his wealth dramatically—with more than $5 billion squirreled away, conveniently, in a tax-free retirement account—and to consolidate his political power. Under Trump, Thiel's defense contractor Palantir won hundreds of millions of dollars in government deals, and Thiel's net worth swelled. My sources figure he's worth at least $10 billion. Maybe a lot more.

Thiel's success over the past four years is particularly interesting because it cuts against the conventional wisdom about Trump's closest supporters. Many of them saw their political prospects diminish, especially during the final year of his presidency, which ended with a deadly, out-of-control pandemic and a failed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Thiel, though, somehow managed to keep the perfect distance from the White House to position himself as a key patron to Trump's movement without being tarnished by the actual presidency. Now he's backing two senate candidates, J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona, who are ideologically—and financially—aligned with his interests. If they win (and maybe even if they don't) Thiel could go into the next presidential election cycle with even more influence than he had in 2016. He's not known as a brilliant investor for nothing. Click here to read my excerpt and here to order a copy of the book. —Max Chafkin