The Humorless Hateful Homosexual Hegemony of Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel, the self proclaimed libertarian entrepreneur, who founded Paypal, is one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the Silicon Valley and the world. He also happens to be gay. His seemingly  bottomless capacity for vindictive petty enmity and shameless assertion of power has shaped the way business is conducted. “The blitzscaling strategy he and his employees pioneered at PayPal created the growth playbook for an entire generation of start-ups, from Airbnb to WeWork. His most legendary bet — loaning $500,000 to a socially inept Harvard sophomore in exchange for 10 percent of a website called TheFacebook.com — is significant less for the orders-of-magnitude economic return he realized and more for the terms he embedded in the deal. Thiel ensured that Mark Zuckerberg would be the company’s absolute dictator. No one, not even Facebook’s board of directors, could ever overrule him. Similar maneuvers were adopted at many of Thiel’s portfolio companies, including Stripe and SpaceX, and today, across the industry, it’s more the norm than the exception.”

Thiel hasn’t just acted in a certain way and left it for others to notice and follow. He taught his methods to founders-in-training at Stanford, codifying the lessons from the fleet of companies founded by his former employees — the so-called PayPal Mafia. He later collected his thinking in a book, Zero to One. It became a best seller, partly because it promised a path to Thiel-scale wealth and partly because it developed the idiosyncrasies that had been present in the college-age Thiel into a full-blown ideology. The book argues, among other things, that founders are godlike, that monarchies are more efficient than democracies, and that cults are a better organizational model than management consultancies. More than anything, it celebrates rule-breaking. Thiel bragged that of PayPal’s six founders, four had built bombs in high school.

The following is an excerpt from a New York Magazine article, itself an adaptation by writer Max Chafkin, from his biography of Thiel, called The Contrarian. 

Raised by Evangelical German immigrants [Thiel] fancied himself an aspiring William F. Buckley. It wasn’t unusual to be conservative at Stanford — it housed the Hoover Institution — but Thiel considered it a hothouse of lefty antagonists. “He viewed liberals through a lens as people who were not nice to him,” said a classmate. “The way people treated him at Stanford had a huge impact. That’s still with him.” Thiel began to embrace a new identity — that of the right-wing provocateur. He joked about starting a fake charity, Liberals for Peace, that would raise money based on a vague agenda and then do absolutely nothing except pay him. And he told classmates that concern about South African apartheid, perhaps the single buzziest issue on American campuses, was overblown. “It works,” he told Maxwell. (Thiel’s spokesman has said that Thiel doesn’t remember being asked his views on apartheid and never supported it.)

In 1987, Thiel poured his sense of grievance into the launch of a right-wing newspaper, the Stanford Review. It was his first entrepreneurial venture and the beginning of a network that would eventually expand and dominate Silicon Valley. Thiel’s primary innovation with the Review was to connect the parochial concerns of a small elite — conservative Stanford undergraduates— to mainstream national politics. Thus the optional $29 per year dues charged by the student senate became a microcosm of tax-and-spend liberalism and a plan to add non-white authors, like Zora Neale Hurston, to Stanford’s Western Culture course became a civilization-level threat. A fundraising letter later sent to older alumni warned that a professor was teaching a course on Black hairstyles. It led to a flood of donations. These sorts of antics helped draw the attention of Ronald Reagan’s secretary of Education, who came to speak at a Review event and made national news recapping it on PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour.

Thiel’s newspaper was also fixated on sex. The first issue featured a satirical column, “Confessions of a Sexual Deviant,” about a young straight man who’d chosen to be celibate. According to the Review, it was almost impossible to visit a men’s restroom without witnessing a gay sex act or to cross the quad without having fistfuls of free condoms pressed into your hand. In 1987, presenting homosexuality as an addiction, a columnist wrote that “unnatural” gay men had “yielded to temptation so many times that the fires of lust burn within them, making it indeed difficult for them to control themselves.” During Thiel’s last year on campus, his close friend and Review collaborator Keith Rabois stood outside the home of a Stanford residential fellow and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Faggot! You are going to die of AIDS! You’re going to get what’s coming to you!”; two days later, the Review published “The Rape Issue,” with an impassioned defense of a student who’d pleaded “no contest” to statutory rape.

Thiel would go on to valorize Rabois as a free-speech martyr in a book, The Diversity Myth, co-written with the architect of the special issue, David Sacks. It’s tempting to psychologize the book, with its lurid complaints about the supposed prevalence of “glory holes” across the Stanford campus. And some who know Thiel speculate, convincingly, that his mid-’90s homophobia was an expression of self-hatred. (Thiel is gay, as is Rabois.) But the book’s incendiary qualities might just have easily been a product of Thiel’s single-minded desire to provoke a reaction. He wanted to make his mark, and he surely knew that the prospect of recent graduates defending the guy who had shouted “Die, faggot!” on the quad of an elite university would get noticed.