From career breakthroughs to professional milestones, explore how Peter Thiel made an impact.
Peter Thiel is a German-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and political activist known for co-founding PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund. He was also the first outside investor in Facebook. As of May 2025, his net worth is estimated at $20.8 billion, ranking him among the wealthiest people globally. Thiel's influence spans technology, finance, and politics, making him a notable figure in contemporary society.
In 1987, Peter Thiel co-founded The Stanford Review, a conservative and libertarian newspaper, at Stanford University.
In 1993, Peter Thiel took a job as a derivatives trader in currency options at Credit Suisse and also worked as a speechwriter for former United States Secretary of Education William Bennett.
In 1995, Peter Thiel and David O. Sacks published "The Diversity Myth", a book criticizing political correctness and multiculturalism in higher education.
In 1996, Peter Thiel founded Thiel Capital Management.
In 1998, Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal with Max Levchin and Luke Nosek.
In 1998, Peter Thiel embarked on his venture capital career, raising $1 million toward the establishment of Thiel Capital Management. He also invested in Fieldlink which became Confinity.
In 1999, Confinity launched PayPal, a type of digital wallet for consumer convenience and security by encrypting data on digital devices.
In 1999, PayPal launched at a press conference, receiving $3 million in venture funding from Nokia and Deutsche Bank using PayPal on their PalmPilots.
In 1999, Peter Thiel spoke about PayPal's mission to liberate people from the erosion of the value of their currencies due to inflation.
In 2000, PayPal continued to grow through mergers with Elon Musk's online financial services company X.com and with Pixo, a company specializing in mobile commerce.
On February 15, 2002, PayPal went public.
In 2002, PayPal was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion.
In May 2003, Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company.
In 2003, Peter Thiel launched Palantir Technologies, a big data analysis company, and has been its chairman since its inception.
In 2003, Thiel successfully bet that the United States dollar would weaken.
In August 2004, Peter Thiel became Facebook's first outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake in the company for $500,000.
In August 2004, Peter Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in Facebook for a 10.2% stake in the company and joined Facebook's board.
In 2004, Peter Thiel led Facebook's seed round with a $500,000 investment for 10.2% of the company, initially as a convertible note. Although Facebook narrowly missed its user target, Thiel converted the loan to equity, viewing it as a safe and reasonable investment.
In 2004, Peter Thiel wrote "The Straussian Moment", an essay sometimes considered to be a fundamental text in his political thinking.
In 2004, Thiel spoke of the dot-com bubble migrating into a growing bubble in the financial sector and specified General Electric and Walmart as vulnerable.
In 2005, Clarium saw a 57.1% return as Thiel predicted that the dollar would rally.
In 2005, Peter Thiel established Founders Fund, a venture capital fund based in San Francisco, with partners including Sean Parker, Ken Howery, and Luke Nosek.
In September 2006, Thiel pledged $3.5 million to foster anti-aging research through the Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation.
In 2006, Clarium faltered with a 7.8% loss.
In 2006, Thiel provided $100,000 of matching funds to back the Singularity Challenge donation drive of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
In December 2007, Thiel endorsed Ron Paul for President in the 2008 United States presidential election.
In 2007, Clarium achieved a 40.3% return.
In 2007, Thiel provided half of the $400,000 matching funds for the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (now Machine Intelligence Research Institute) donation drive.
On 15 April 2008, Thiel pledged $500,000 to the newly created non-profit Seasteading Institute, whose mission is to establish autonomous ocean communities for social, political, and legal experimentation.
Beginning in 2008, Peter Thiel has donated over $1 million to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
By the first quarter of 2008, Clarium's assets under management grew to more than $7 billion, but fell later in the year after financial markets collapsed.
In 2008, Peter Thiel helped time Facebook's 2007 Series D, which closed before the 2008 financial crisis.
In 2008, after Ron Paul failed to secure the Republican nomination, Thiel contributed to the John McCain campaign.
At the 2009 Singularity Summit, Thiel said his greatest concern is the technological singularity not arriving soon enough.
In 2009, Clarium's assets fell again after financial markets collapsed.
In 2009, Thiel helped fund college student James O'Keefe's "Taxpayers Clearing House" video, which satirized the Wall Street bailout. He denied involvement in the ACORN sting videos produced by O'Keefe.
In a 2009 essay, Peter Thiel stated that he no longer believed that freedom and democracy are compatible and stressed the need to "escape politics".
On 29 September 2010, Thiel created the Thiel Fellowship, offering $100,000 (later raised to $200,000) over two years to individuals under 23 to encourage them to drop out of college and pursue their own ventures.
In 2010, Peter Thiel co-founded Valar Ventures.
In 2010, Thiel invited conservative columnist and friend Ann Coulter to Homocon as a guest speaker.
In 2010, Thiel supported Republican Meg Whitman in her unsuccessful bid for the governorship of California, contributing the maximum allowable $25,900 to the Whitman campaign.
In November 2011, the Thiel Foundation announced the creation of Breakout Labs, a grant-making program intended to fund innovative research outside of academia, corporations, or government.
By 2011, after missing out on the economic rebound, many key investors pulled out, reducing the value of Clarium's assets to $350 million.
In 2011, Peter Thiel founded Thiel Capital, a venture capital fund and family office based in Los Angeles, providing strategic and operational support for his ventures.
In 2011, Peter Thiel was a featured speaker at the Oslo Freedom Forum, and the Thiel Foundation was one of the event's main sponsors.
In 2011, Thiel donated $1.25 million to the Seasteading Institute but resigned from its board the same year.
In 2011, Thiel made a NZ$1 million donation to an appeal fund for the casualties of the Christchurch earthquake.
In January 2012, Thiel, along with Nosek and Scott Banister, supported the Endorse Liberty Super PAC, collectively giving $3.9 million to promote Ron Paul. The PAC spent about $3.3 million promoting Paul via YouTube, Google, Facebook and StumbleUpon ads.
In April 2012, Breakout Labs announced its first set of grantees, totaling 12 startups and $4.5 million in grants. One of the first ventures to receive funding was 3Scan.
In May 2012, during Facebook's initial public offering with a market cap of nearly $100 billion ($38 a share), Peter Thiel sold 16.8 million shares for $638 million.
In June 2012, Peter Thiel launched Mithril Capital Management, named after the fictitious metal in The Lord of the Rings, with Jim O'Neill and Ajay Royan, targeting companies beyond the startup stage ready to scale up.
In July 2012, Thiel donated $1 million to the Club for Growth, a fiscally conservative organization, becoming their largest contributor.
In August 2012, immediately after the early investor lock-up period, Peter Thiel sold almost all of his remaining Facebook stake for between $19.27 and $20.69 per share, totaling $395.8 million, which brought his total earnings to over $1 billion.
In 2012, Crescendo Equity, a private equity firm focusing on mid-cap manufacturing and technology companies in Asia, was established with Peter Thiel as a sponsor.
In 2012, Thiel donated $10,000 to Minnesotans United for All Families to fight Minnesota Amendment 1, which proposed banning marriage between same-sex couples.
In 2012, Thiel sold the majority of his shares in Facebook for over $1 billion and co-founded Mithril Capital, was investment committee chair.
As of 2013, the Thiel Foundation had donated over $1 million to the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (now the Machine Intelligence Research Institute).
At the Venture Alpha West 2014 conference, Thiel expressed his desire to make progress in anti-aging research. He also stated that he is registered for cryonic preservation with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation.
In early 2014, Founders Fund backed DeepMind, a UK start-up, which was subsequently acquired by Google for £400 million. Founders Fund is also an important backer of the Berlin-based platform ResearchGate.
In March 2015, Peter Thiel joined Y Combinator as one of 10 part-time partners.
In December 2015, OpenAI, a nonprofit company aimed at the safe development of artificial general intelligence, announced that Thiel was one of its financial backers.
From 2015 to 2017, Peter Thiel was a part-time partner at Y Combinator.
In 2015, Danielle Strachman and Michael Gibson, both from the Thiel Fellowship's founding team, established the 1517 Fund, backed by Peter Thiel, to provide grants and investments to "dropouts, renegade students, and deep tech scientists."
In 2015, the Founders Fund invested in Privateer Holdings, becoming the first institutional investor in the cannabis industry.
On August 15, 2016, Peter Thiel published an opinion piece in The New York Times arguing for the defense of online privacy and supporting the Intimate Privacy Protection Act.
In October 2016, Thiel announced a $1.25 million donation in support of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, after supporting Carly Fiorina's campaign initially.
In 2016, Peter Thiel sold a little under 1 million of his Facebook shares for around $100 million.
As of February 2017, Thiel had donated over $7 million to the Methuselah Mouse Prize foundation to foster anti-aging research.
In November 2017, Peter Thiel sold another 160,805 Facebook shares for $29 million, reducing his holdings to 59,913 Class A shares.
In November 2017, it was reported that Y Combinator had severed its ties with Peter Thiel.
From 2015 to 2017, Peter Thiel was a part-time partner at Y Combinator.
In 2017, Crescendo Equity Partners invested in Korea's HPSP, transforming it into a global player in the semiconductor equipment sector.
In 2017, Founders Fund invested approximately $15–20 million in bitcoin.
In 2017, Peter Thiel was one of the first outside investors in Clearview AI, a facial recognition technology startup known for raising concerns about weaponization risks.
In 2017, Thiel was named as a limited partner at Social Capital, according to a Globe and Mail article. He also sponsored Sam Altman's first venture fund, Hydrazine Capital, as well as J.D. Vance's Narya.
In January 2018, Founders Fund informed investors that its bitcoin holdings, initially purchased for $15-20 million, were now worth hundreds of millions of dollars due to the cryptocurrency's rapid surge in value.
In July 2018, Thiel donated $250,000 to the Trump Victory Committee in support of the Republican National Committee during the 2018 midterm elections and Trump's 2020 re-election campaign.
Since 2018, the startup Kleo-Connect received investments from investors associated with China's People's Liberation Army (PLA).
As of April 2020, Peter Thiel owned less than 10,000 shares in Facebook, marking a significant reduction from his initial investment.
According to a 2020 Bloomberg article, Peter Thiel was an investor in funds managed by 8VC and in the bank Disruptive Technology Advisers.
In 2020, Peter Thiel became a strategic partner and anchor investor of Elevat3, set up by Christian Angermayer's Apeiron Investment Group, and invested in the Neunkirchen-based startup Neodigital through the fund.
In 2020, Thiel Capital invested in Alloy Therapeutics, EnClear Therapies (Jason Camm became a board member), ATAI Life Sciences (Jason Camm became a director), Compass Pathways, Pilgrim, Hugoboom, Rhea, Bullish Global, FTX, QA Wolf,, Rollup, and Neros. Thiel Capital also invested in Mynaric.
In 2020, Thiel joined the board of AbCellera.
In 2020, Thiel supported Trump's re-election campaign by donating to the Trump Victory Committee in July 2018.
In 2020, Thiel's political-action committee, Free Forever, was active only during the 2020 election cycle and only in support of Kansas attorney general Kris Kobach's failed U.S. Senate bid. Almost all contributions were from Thiel.
In 2021, Peter Thiel became an investor and strategic partner of Oslo-based SNÖ Ventures, accompanied by a group of international strategic advisors.
In 2021, Soft Servo Group changed its name to Movensys after Crescendo's investment in the company.
By February 2022, Thiel was one of the largest donors to Republican candidates in the 2022 election campaign with more than $20.4 million in contributions. He supported 16 senatorial and congressional candidates, some of whom promoted false claims about voter fraud in the 2020 election.
On 7 February 2022, Peter Thiel announced his decision not to seek re-election to the board of Meta, Facebook's parent company, at the 2022 annual stockholders' meeting. He planned to leave after 17 years to support pro-Donald Trump candidates in the 2022 United States elections.
As of 2022, Peter Thiel continues to be the chairman of Palantir Technologies.
In 2022, Peter Thiel stepped down from the board of directors of Facebook.
In 2022, Rivada Space Networks was formed, drawing personnel mainly from Kleo-Connect, after the German government banned the sale of Kleo-Connect to China. Karl Rove participated as an investor and lobbyist.
In 2022, the inaugural fund of the venture debt firm Tacora, founded by Keri Findley, raised US$350 million, including US$250 million from Peter Thiel.
In 2022, through Elevat3 and in partnership with the Founders Fund, the Apeiron Group bought shares from Fosun International and others to become a shareholder in the Hamburg-based NAGA Group. Thiel also holds shares in Heidelberger Beteiligungsholding.
In 2023, Thiel Bio, a new venture capital firm, was founded by Jason Camm, Chief Medical Officer of Thiel Capital.
In November 2024, Thiel resigned from AbCellera's board for personal reasons, retaining his stake in the company.
Since November 2024, the 1517 Fund backs Venus Aerospace, a company develops hypersonic flight using rotating detonation rocket engine and Foundation Alloy.
In December 2024, the 1517 Fund received approval to get funding from the Small Business Investment Company Critical Technology Initiative (SBICCT).
In 2024, Palantir became a strategic partner of Israel in military technology, an occasion Thiel and Karp visited the country. In a 2024 interview with Bari Weiss, Thiel advocated cooperation with Israel to deter Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, referencing historical regional wars linked to nuclear proliferation.
In 2024, Peter Thiel became one of the investors in the Enhanced Games, a multi-sport event allowing athletes to use performance-enhancing substances.
In 2024, SNÖ Ventures made its first investment in the defense tech sector, providing early funding for the Swedish startup Nordic Air Defence, which develops counter-drone missile technology.
In 2024, the Founders Fund led an US$85 million seed round for SentientAGI and invested in Impulse Space (in-space transportation services), Ramp, Crusoe (AI infrastructure using clean energy).
In April 2025, General Matter emerged from stealth, focusing on the production and handling of High-Assay, Low-Enriched Uranium (HALEU). Scott Nolan, former SpaceX employee, became the CEO. Thiel is on the company's board. The plant in Paducah will be the first privately developed US uranium enrichment facility.
In May 2025, Quantum Systems, a startup which Thiel Capital has invested in, became Europe's first dual-use unicorn and third defense unicorn.
In July 2025, the 1517 Fund reportedly raised US$315 million for its first fund.
By 2025, Rivada Networks, a politically connected company with the power of Peter Thiel's name, expanded to 33 countries and collected $16 billion in investments. Deployment of satellites is set to begin in 2027, with initial tests in 2026.
In 2025, Crescendo initiated the sale of its 40.9% controlling equity stake in a semiconductor firm, drawing bids from major global PEF firms.
In 2025, Keri Findley declined to disclose whether Peter Thiel invested in Tacora's 2025 fund.
In 2025, Peter Thiel called for a drastic reset in economic relations with China, emphasizing a geopolitical perspective. He highlighted the extreme views China encourages to promote political inaction towards the communist country, in a discussion with Peter Robinson.
In 2025, the Founders Fund invested in Erebor, a new digital bank founded by Palmer Luckey which has quickly reached a US$2 billion valuation, EnduroSat, a Bulgarian startup that produces Gen3 satellites at scale, Varda, a space medicine and hypersonic testbed startup, and Hadrian, a defense manufacturing startup.
Since 2025 the Thiel Fellowship awards $200,000 to fellows.
In 2026, Rivada Networks will perform initial tests of its satellites.
In 2027, Rivada Networks Satellites are scheduled to be deployed.
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