Lambert here: A potted history of Peter Thiel, worth reading in full. I picked out the section with the most interesting document.
This moment may be Peak Thiel…. We are all in Thiel’s world, following ideas and which he seeded many years ago.
Peter was born in 1967 in West Germany. His father was a chemical engineer who moved the family to Ohio when he was one. Peter then spent some of his childhood in South Africa before going to elementary school in California. School-mates say he was quite solitary, aloof and intellectually arrogant. He was into Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings (he claims to know it by memory and many of his companies have Tolkien-inspired names). He was also gay and in the closet. One moment from his childhood that seems to have left a mark was when he saw an animal skin rug and asked his father what happened to the animal. ‘It died, like we all have to do’ said the father. This horrified young Peter.
He went to Stanford University to study philosophy in 1985, just as the university was adapting to multiculturalism and there was a lot of left-wing student activism. He, by contrast, found himself connected to and cultivated by right-wing networks. He was befriended by Arne Panula, a priest who ran Opus Dei’s centre in Stanford to recruit talented young men into its ranks.
One aspect of this patronage is the Thiel fellowships — an idea to pay promising undergraduates $100,000 to drop out of college and try to start a business. Over 260 people have been awarded Thiel fellowships in the last 13 years. Then there are Thiel-funded conferences like Dialog or Hereticon (below is the schedule for the 2022 event)…
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