Billionaire Victims Club: Peter Thiel

I was debating who next to roast as an inaugural member of the Billionaire Victim’s Club, should I choose Elon Musk? Or, … Peter Thiel.

Alas, Thiel is up this time. For all his reticence in front of the media, he has made a major splash.

Let’s dive in to his back-story, shall we?

Where it all began

He was born in 1967 in Frankfurt, Germany, but his family Immigrated to the US when he was a year old. His father was a chemical engineer, and he relocated often to chase work, starting in Cleveland, Ohio. But his itinerant father took the family to places in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia).

If you are up on your history, Germany had many colonies in Africa, and when Thiel was living there, he went to German language schools where brutal corporal punishment was readily meted out.

To escape from this, he fell hard into TTRPG’s (aka Dungeons & Dragons - a theme that many of these man-children billionaire victims will share).

Thiel and his family in 1977 did locate semi-permanently on the Peninsula community in the SF Bay Area, Foster City.

College and formative years

Thiel was a bright student, and was accepted at Stanford University, where he graduated and decided to return for Law School. He fell in with the campus conservatives, published scathing screeds in a newsletter he and his fellow arch-conservatives published.

After law school, he clerked for a judge in the 11th circuit of appeals, before joining Solomon and Cromwell to work in their securities practice. He lasted less than a year, before decamping to chase payment processing on the internet with what would become PayPal.

In 2002, when PayPal was bought by EBay for $1.5B, his payout was enough to give him he capital to start a hedge fund.

Hedge funds, if you aren’t aware, are where the principal (like former BVC winner Bill Ackman) has their own capital at risk, but then they solicit funds from wealthy individuals to build a massive pool of money that they use to invest. As a hedge, they take risky bets, and if they return a big amount of money, they get to keep a percentage of that.

Good hedge fund managers do really well, and have lots of investors who trust them.

A well timed bet on the weakening of the dollar in 2003 paid off handsomely, making Thiel über wealthy.

Palantir

If you remember the early years of PayPal, it was the wild west. There were epic levels of fraud and money laundering. Since banks had regulations and KYC rules, these new internet payment processors were rife with abuse (like the later advent of crypto and the mountains of fraud).

To combat this fraud, Thiel and his technical team built a system to do early data mining and analytical tools to identify fraudulent transactions in their systems.

After selling PayPal to Ebay, and the restructuring of society post 9/11, Thiel had the idea to use the analytical engine to build data mining tools to help identify terrorist attacks and halt them before they started.

So began Palantir.

Palantir is the seer portal from Tolkien’s LoTR series. A theme that is recurrent in these man-children of Silicon Valley.

Today, Palantir is becoming ever more entrenched in the government.

Gawker, Hulk Hogan, and shitbird status

Had Gawker media not outed Thiel as a gay man, we might never have heard of this waste of skin.

Anyhow, this story is too good not to share. Here's a link to a retrospective by LGBTQ+ Nation.

In summary:

Bubba the Love Sponge, a shock jock, had invited the wrestling hero Hulk Hogan (neé Terry Bollea) to just bang his wife. Hulk Hogan, a man who was so roided out thought “why the fuck not, Bubba must be into a cuck-kink”. I mean, who doesn't have a fetish of watching a friend fuck your wife, amirite?

Naturally, Bubba videotaped this encounter and had a good laugh with it.

Years later, Gawker got their hands on the tape and said “fuck it” and played it live.

Thiel saw this as his opportunity to get back at Gawker, and he privately funded Hogan’s lawsuit (to the tune of $10M) that ultimately led to the dissolution of Gawker.

It worked, and Thiel flexed his wealth and influence to fuck up a part of the media environment. This will not be the last of his fuckery.

That was a long intro, but let’s recap. He had a pretty fucked up childhood, he retreated into a world of fantasy, D&D, and hiding his homosexuality. He failed to gain traction as a lawyer, started a payment system that was rife with fraud, and parlayed that into a hedge fund with enough money to be able to move mountains.

Politics

Like many of the Silicon Valley founders, and especially the refugees of the PayPal Mafia, he is an avowed libertarian. Basically with a philosophy that they should be allowed to attain as much money as possible, and to not worry about his fellow men.

It was a meritocracy, and they were on the top.

About this time, he began to associate with the troll Curtis Yarvin, aka Mencius Moldbug, a truly detestable human being who has a thing for monarchy that resonates with these titans of Silicon Valley.

In 2016, Thiel was ecstatic that Trump won and saw this as an opportunity to enhance his (and his posse’s status) in society. And his goal was to eradicate all regulations and limitations on his ability to accumulate obscene levels of wealth.

This then led to Thiel going all in and back candidates for the Senate in two states. In Ohio, the Shill-billy JD Vance, avowed couch fucker, and in Arizona the black-hole of charisn'tma Blake Masters.

In Arizona, Blake Masters was up against Mark Kelly, the Husband of beloved Gabby Giffords, and kick-ass Astronaut... He really had no chance.

But in Ohio, where J(Divan) Vance should have struggled, the train car loads of Thiel cash was enough to get him over the line. And as we now know, that catapulted Vance into the vice presidency, a mere heartbeat away from the presidency.

Vance has a fairly long history with Thiel, who has elevated him to the capital class in Silicon Valley, making him a shitty faux-founder, and one of their own (c.f. The Billionaire Victim Club) who they can control. Scary shit indeed.

Mortality

Peter Thiel wants to live forever. He is truly afraid of dying. He undergoes treatments where he injects plasma from young men into his blood stream to reduce the aging process. The man is 2 years younger than me, but he easily looks about 10 years older.

Other fuckery

Recently, he sat down to an hour-long interview with the NY Times resident spoke-bucket Ross Douthat (gifted link to a partial transcript). It is not worth listening to, except for about 30 seconds where Douthat asks Thiel if humanity should survive. It takes Thiel a full thirty seconds to sorta not answer that question, before saying he wasn’t sure. Clearly he thinks he’s better than the rest of us.

He also has an underground bunker complex in New Zealand, a place for him to repair to in case armageddon happens (or climate change turns the US into a hell-scape, something that seems more probable with the re-election of Trump.

No, Peter Thiel has won the fucking genetic lottery, been in the right places at the right time and like most of the elite of Silicon Valley believe that their success is solely because of their superiority. Musk, Zuckerberg, Andreesen, Sacks, Altman, are all products of the rise of the internet, a government invention, and a complete lack of regulations.

The older generation of titans at least had the humility to acknowledge their good fortune and the massive amounts of money the military and government showered on Silicon Valley (and the North East corridor) during the cold war.

Peter Thiel is indeed a charter member of the Billionaire Victim Club.

Coda

The outstanding Behind the Bastards podcast (Part of Coolzone Media) did a 4 parter on Thiel, starting with this one:

Highly recommended if you have about 5 hours to spare... Robert Evans is outstanding in his research, and much of what I learned came from BtB...