Billionaire PayPal Founder Unheard Secrets of Peter Thiels Success
Billionaire PayPal Founder Unheard Secrets of Peter Thiels Success
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00:00 Silicon Valley is not recognized for its glitz and gloss. Nonetheless, Peter Thiel
00:06 has created a mystique. Thiel, a billionaire who was co-founder of PayPal,
00:11 the digital payment business and the first outside investor in Facebook. And
00:16 there's no doubt that the PayPal success story is one that everyone should know.
00:22 The PayPal mafia has had a massive impact on everything from social media
00:27 to the auto and aerospace industries. So, today let's have a look at the
00:33 documentary about Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal. Thiel is one of the
00:39 most influential figures in Silicon Valley and he has parlayed his personal
00:44 network, financial investments and zeal for debate into a business philosophy
00:49 that is emulated by startup founders who revere Thiel as the cult leader of the
00:55 cult of disruption. According to Max Schaffkin, author of the Thiel biography
01:01 "The Contrarian" which was published in 2021, Thiel's family relocated to the
01:07 United States from Germany when he was a child, settling in the Californian state
01:12 of San Francisco. He was a chess champion as a boy and he went on to Stanford
01:18 University for his undergraduate studies and subsequently to the university's law
01:23 school. During his time at Stanford, Thiel founded the conservative newspaper, the
01:29 Stanford Review, which fought against what Thiel and his fellow writers saw as
01:34 the creeping force of political correctness on university campuses. Later,
01:39 Thiel and tech investor David Sachs collaborated on the book "The Diversity
01:45 Myth" which addressed many of the same issues. In his first year out of college,
01:50 he raised 1 million dollars from friends and family to start Thiel Capital
01:56 Management, which invested in the dot-com boom. He then joined up with Max
02:01 Levchin to co-found PayPal, which was eventually bought by eBay. Thiel utilized
02:06 the proceeds from the sale to make investments in other technology
02:10 businesses and he is most known for being one of the early investors in
02:15 Facebook. Other early PayPal employees and investors go on to become significant
02:21 figures in Silicon Valley and they collectively referred to themselves as
02:25 the PayPal Mafia, even going so far as to pose as mafia bosses in a Fortune
02:32 magazine spread as recently as 2007. The more deals Thiel participated in as a
02:39 member of the organization, the greater his power in the technology industry
02:44 became. Since its founding in the mid-2000s, Thiel's venture capital firm
02:49 Founders Fund has invested in a diverse range of firms including SpaceX, which
02:55 was created by PayPal veteran Elon Musk, LinkedIn and Lyft. Thiel's day job
03:01 continues to be that of a successful venture capital investor. According to
03:06 research firm PitchBook, he was instrumental in the formation of many
03:10 organizations including Founders Fund, Mithril Capital Management and Vala
03:16 Ventures, which together oversee about 20 billion dollars in assets. He also
03:22 served on the boards of several other companies. Additionally, he has made
03:27 direct investments in dozens of companies over the years with his own
03:31 money, including the art buying platform Artsy, the mobile game developer Zynga
03:37 and the health insurance firm Oscar, which was founded by Josh Kushner, the
03:42 brother of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, among others. Some of his most
03:47 well-known investments stand to gain directly from government contracting
03:52 opportunities. Palantir, which Thiel helped create in 2003, has a large number
03:58 of government clients, including the Department of Defense among its most
04:02 important. According to Palantir's most recent earnings report, the company
04:07 receives more than half of its income from government clients. In 2020, the
04:13 Trump government awarded a five-year contract to Underreal, a company that
04:17 specializes in the construction of automated surveillance towers and drones
04:22 for border enforcement. Thiel is also a serious player in the debate over tax
04:27 reform. This past year, the investigative journalism organization ProPublica
04:33 revealed that Peter Thiel has protected billions of dollars of his own money
04:38 from taxation by operating his investments out of a ROTH individual
04:44 retirement account. Democratic members of Congress introduced a plan last year
04:49 that would force Thiel and other affluent individuals who use ROTH accounts to
04:55 incur massive tax bills if they ever decided to withdraw their funds. Thiel
05:00 has also made direct contributions to anti-tax lobbying organizations such as
05:06 the Club for Growth through his foundation. So what about Facebook? Peter
05:11 Thiel revealed in February 2022 that he would be leaving Meta, Facebook's parent
05:17 corporation, after 17 years on the board. According to a 2019 Wall Street Journal
05:24 story, Thiel has exerted a significant influence on Facebook CEO Mark
05:30 Zuckerberg, encouraging him to take a more "laissez-faire" approach to censoring
05:35 material and advertisements on the company's apps. Liberal employees had
05:40 expressed displeasure with this appointment to the business's board of
05:44 directors, which Facebook critics also cited in their arguments about how the
05:49 corporation facilitated the development of right-wing populist leaders in the
05:54 United States and other countries. With his departure, it's possible that
05:59 criticism will grow less fierce, particularly from within the corporation.
06:03 Nonetheless, it's unlikely that it will totally disappear. Thiel's role was
06:08 already primarily consultative in terms of steering Facebook's course when the
06:13 company was founded. In contrast, to most corporate boards of directors,
06:18 Zuckerberg holds complete control over Facebook since he has kept a majority of
06:23 voting shares over the course of the company's history. Thiel's investments in
06:28 other companies were also beginning to conflict with his responsibilities as a
06:33 member of the Facebook board of directors. He has invested in Rumble, a
06:37 video platform that claims to take a more hands-off approach to content
06:42 control than social media behemoths such as Facebook and YouTube, among other
06:47 things. Recently, the New York Times reported that BoldEnd, another of the
06:53 businesses sponsored by Thiel's founders fund, claimed to have developed the
06:58 capacity to hack WhatsApp, one of Facebook's products, according to the
07:02 publication. The billionaire investor has defined himself as a libertarian and has
07:07 donated mostly to Republican candidates and political action committees that are
07:12 either conservative or anti-tax in their positions. Thiel wrote in a 2009 essay
07:19 about his personal political journey that he had become disillusioned with
07:23 politics and its capacity to achieve libertarian aims, saying, and I quote, "I no
07:30 longer believe that freedom and democracy can coexist." In his
07:35 subsequent remarks, he said that the expansion of voting rights of women and
07:40 the increase in the number of welfare recipients have made it more difficult
07:44 to elect libertarian leaders, though he later emphasized that he did not
07:49 advocate stripping women of their voting rights. More recently, Thiel has expressed
07:55 nationalist sentiments, stating that large US technology businesses such as
08:00 Google should avoid doing business with China because it is one of the country's
08:05 geopolitical rivals. Contrarianism, according to Thiel's biographer Chafkin,
08:10 has been described as Thiel's most consistent philosophy, in which he
08:15 positions himself in contrast to conventional or mainstream thinking.
08:20 According to the New York Times, Thiel first linked himself with Trump in the
08:25 run-up to his election in 2016, donating at least 1.25 million dollars in his
08:31 election campaign. After a video of Trump making vulgar remarks about women
08:36 surfaced, the gift came just a few weeks after the incident. In the following
08:41 years, Thiel delivered a speech at the Republican National Convention and
08:45 joined Trump's transition team, where he served as a liaison between the
08:51 president and Silicon Valley, assisting in the nomination and appointment of
08:55 some of Trump's acolytes to positions of authority within the administration.
09:00 Net worth. So, is Peter Thiel a multi-billionaire? Does he have a net
09:07 worth of more than 10 billion dollars? No way, not yet. Currently, Peter Thiel has
09:14 an estimated net worth of 5.2 billion US dollars. So there you have it. If you
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09:30 [Music]