Whatever you think of him, Peter Thiel is easily one of the most interesting people to have emerged from Silicon Valley over the past two decades.
Libertarian kook, Bond supervillain, rightwing provocateur: these are all caricatures that critics have sought to attach to the tech investor who became Silicon Valley’s most prominent backer of Donald Trump. They are also labels that is easy to imagine Thiel himself relishing. As a rightwing student at Stanford University in the 1980s, he trolled the liberal elite of his day in a way that anticipated the “own the libs” rhetoric of the Trump era.
Yet alongside the courting of controversy has been a readiness to challenge received wisdom in the tech industry and public policy norms alike.