Peter Thiel, the lone jockey in Silicon Valley

Peter Thiel often says: Competition is for losers. It is clear that Thiel does not fall into the category of losers. Long live monopolies and domination. The co-founder of PayPal, the investor in Facebook at the beginning of the social network, the 54-year-old Black Prince of Silicon Valley, in twenty years has raised about $ 4 billion (3.5 billion euros). A fortune is enough to put him in the Lords complex of Silicon Valley, even though the divorce from his peers today is more or less complete.

after denunciation ‘unique idea’ de la Vallée and after siding with Donald Trump in 2016, the brawler preferred to go into exile in Los Angeles in 2018. Two years later, he settled in Miami (Florida), technology hub, In contrast to Democratic California, after a stop at his New Zealand sanctuary, an anti-apocalypse sanctuary, which also became an anti-epidemic for the occasion.

Far from the mass herds

His biographer, Max Shafkin, author of the book, explains that Peter Thiel is a contradiction Paradoxical: Peter Thiel and the Silicon Valley Quest for PowerAnd Published September 21 in the United States by Penguin Press. Or a man whose identity is built in opposition, on the opposite foot, around the desire for exclusivity, away from the collective flocks of society.

Peter Tell doesn’t follow anyone, Not even on Twitter. Contemptuous of his contemporaries (well, most of them), it does not appear in Ayn Rand’s novel (1905-1982), the inspiration for libertarian individualism in anti-state America. On November 4, he was also the guest of honor at the ceremony of the Atlas Society, the circle founded in honor of the author, in 1957,Atlas shrugs (strike, Les Belles Lettres, 2011), The Reference Guide for Liberals. Dinner was in California (in Malibu), even the ambivalent sometimes condescending.

Unlike his peers, Thiel is a thinker. On January 19, 2016, at the Memorial Chapel, the Byzantine-style Stanford University church was honored with its mosaic decoration imported from Italy, for René Girard, a French academic who died on November 4, 2015 there. He taught for more than thirty years. The speaker after the organ is Peter Thiel. At Stanford University, he was a pupil of the anthropologist, who admired his theory of the mimetic character of desire.

For years it was financed Imitatio, Research Institute on Girardian Thought. His baritone voice, one swears embellished with a slight remembrance of Germany, extends beyond the candles. “Rene Girard taught me that real education begins when you begin to criticize him”, declares.

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