Co-Founder & Chairman, Palantir Technologies
Peter Thiel 2015 – INTJ Example on Business Ventures & Paypal Success
Peter Andreas Thiel (born October 11, 1967) is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, hedge fund manager, and social ...
About Peter Thiel
In a March 2026 discussion with French historian Emmanuel Todd, Peter Thiel offered his views on U.S. global standing, scientific progress, and geopolitical risks. Thiel disagreed with Todd's characterization of U.S. decline, stating that while the U.S. faces challenges, he is "not convinced that the US is in decline relative to the rest of the world" and argued that "China will disappear before the US disappears at the rate things are going." He also reiterated a long-held view that the world is in an "era of scientific and technological slowdown or even stagnation," attributing this partly to the "dual use potential" of technology, where "as you built more powerful machines, you also built more powerful weapons." Thiel also raised concerns about what he described as "the risk of a totalitarian one-world state, a tyrannical single government that controls the entire world." During the conversation, Todd characterized the U.S. attack on Iran as "an attack on a country" and "shooting heads of states," and described Trump as "the president of the defeat" following U.S. setbacks in Ukraine and against China. Thiel did not directly address those specific characterizations in the provided transcript excerpts.
Transcript (11 segments)
✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Reporter0:00
Look at a day like this, you'd think anything's possible, future is limitless. And you'd probably think so too if you were Peter Thiel. He's the Silicon Valley version of the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. He didn't give you a brain, a heart, or courage, but he had a lot to do with giving you PayPal, Facebook, YouTube, and Yelp. His latest investment: paying students who drop out of college. That's surprising for a guy who went to Stanford for undergrad and law school, but maybe it's his own story that's helped lead him to this conclusion. Thiel was a derivatives trader before co-founding PayPal at 31 years old. So how did you come up with the idea for PayPal?
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Peter Thiel0:37
We were trying to come up with something. We were looking at all the new payments companies where people were trying to start on the internet in the '90s, and we realized that you had to do something with real money, and you had to do something where you could get people involved who weren't signed up yet. So the brainstorm, the main insight, was to link money and email together.
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Reporter1:00
Saying that combination turned out to be a winning one is an understatement. eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, personally earning Thiel $55 million, some of which he used to invest in promising startups, most famously Facebook. His $500,000 investment is now worth $1.5 billion. Has it exceeded your expectations? The success absolutely. His status as the company's first Silicon Valley investor earned him the full Hollywood treatment when he was portrayed in the Oscar-winning movie The Social Network. When did the light bulb go off for you that this could really be something?
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Peter Thiel1:46
I had spent a lot of time looking at all the social networking businesses for a few years before then, so I was pretty primed and ready to go. I basically told them I'd invest after meeting them for an hour, so I was ready to go.
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Reporter2:00
More than gut instinct, Thiel is also a genius literally. As a child he was a math phenom and chess champion, so don't try this at home. The only thematic mistake, parenthetically, that you made in just as a general principle, is when you moved your knight to the side. You never want to do that in general. A knight in the middle can move to lots of squares; on the side it can move to fewer squares.
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Peter Thiel2:28
Thank you. Now I'll never knight on the rim again.
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Reporter2:30
Thiel's known for making eccentric moves. And if you are doing something genuinely new, it will always look a little bit weird, a little bit strange. He funds the Seasteading Institute, devoted to creating self-governing communities in the middle of the ocean, and he's also donated millions to promote research into extending human life expectancy by reversing the aging process. Would you personally want to live for 200 years?
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Peter Thiel2:59
I enjoy my life. I think I would certainly like to live longer.
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Reporter3:10
People who know Thiel really weren't all that surprised that his latest project is a little out there. College is sort of, on the one hand, giving people learning, on the other hand, taking away some future opportunities by loading the next generation down with debt. He started a $2 million fund to pay promising teens, all under the age of 20, $1,000 each to drop out of college and start up a business. Students like Jim Danielson, one of Thiel's fellows, who's pulling the plug on Purdue because he's worried about missing the boat on electric cars. No engine at all, doesn't use gas at all, it's all electricity. He started tinkering with his old Porsche in high school and managed to turn it into a fully electric car, something he learned how to do on the internet for free. And if I passed up this opportunity and waited till I finished my college degree, a lot could be changed. Critics will say that Peter Thiel went to Stanford, he has his law degree from Stanford, easy for him now to say not everybody has to go to college. Facebook was started in 2004, that was the right time to start that company. If all the people involved had finished their college education and waited till 2006, 2007, it would have been too late for that business. His theory is right on time. New York Magazine recently rated the worthlessness of a college degree as one of the year's most fashionable ideas. The price of education on a college level has gone up by a factor of more than 10 since 1980, adjusted for inflation. It's gone up by about 300% more than housing or tech stocks. It's been an incredible run-up. But isn't the payout later? Isn't it a long-term investment? For example, the typical person who's graduated from college is likely to make two times more over their lifetime than the person who just has a high school diploma. Does that say something that's gone wrong with our society? It's become so critical to get these credentials. And what does it say when anyone with just a high school degree has no prospects in our society?
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Peter Thiel5:00
That kind of thinking has made him the poster boy for the growing movement in Silicon Valley that believes government hinders innovation. But he doesn't hew to the conservative stereotype. People have often said that you're a walking contradiction in that you're gay, Republican, very religious. I probably am a bit of an outsider in many ways, and that has good things and bad things about it. It does have the tremendous benefit of forcing you to really think about what's going on with institutions in our society and then look for ways to make them better.
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Reporter5:45
Back in our chess game, that intense focus was on full display. Despite a packed schedule, the meticulous billionaire only got excited when it seemed we might not have time to finish our game. Give me one more minute, I just need one more minute. He wants to ensure that competitive mania here, because once Peter Thiel starts something, he's determined not only to finish but to win. All right, well I'm going to go checkmate in San Francisco for Nightline. Lindsy Davis, ABC News.