The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and the Rise of the Silicon Valley Oligarchs

A New York Times Notable Book

A shocking and assiduously reported biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial, and hugely influential power broker whose techno-authoritarian worldview is coming to dominate our collective reality

“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 count-less aspects of contemporary life, from the technologies that mediate our daily existence to the rise of the far-right effort among some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley and Washington to untether the U.S. government from the established constitutional order. But despite his being one of the most important forces behind the tectonic shifts in America’s sociopolitical landscape, 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 philosophy, 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 stren-uously backing outsider political candidates, notably a young Senate hopeful named JD Vance and the longshot 2016 presidential contender Donald Trump.

Essential reading for a post-2024 world, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and a deeply insightful portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with peril.

Max Chafkin is a features editor and a tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek. His work has also appeared in Fast Company, Vanity Fair, Inc., and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Queens, New York with his wife, the journalist Christine Lagorio-Chafkin, and their children.