Peter Thiel
German-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal and Palantir — and became Facebook's first outside investor.
Born in Frankfurt in 1967 and raised in the US, Thiel studied philosophy and law at Stanford. In 1998 he founded the payments startup Confinity, which merged with Elon Musk's X.com to become PayPal. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002, the founding crew scattered into a wave of new companies — the so-called PayPal Mafia, including Musk, Reid Hoffman and Max Levchin.
In 2003 he co-founded the data-analysis firm Palantir with Alex Karp and others, and in 2004 became Facebook's first outside investor with half a million dollars. Through Founders Fund and the libertarian Thiel Fellowship — which pays young people to drop out of college — he has cultivated a deliberately contrarian profile, not least by secretly bankrolling the lawsuit that destroyed the gossip site Gawker in 2016.