The Real Deal with Peter Thiel
Earlier this week, before heading off to a business dinner, Peter Thiel gave me a call. It’s not the first time we’ve talked, but Thiel doesn’t typically rush to return phone messages, either; he doesn’t have the time. As most know, the 41-year-old, who made his first fortune as a PayPal cofounder, oversees a New York-based hedge fund, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, and he sits on several boards, including Facebook’s. Still, Thiel isn’t too busy to notice that in the blogosphere, he’s been getting dumped on, big time. The gossip site Valleywag, in particular, has been having a heyday with Thiel, suggesting that he isn’t “as rich as he’d like you to think” and, last month, publishing a widely read piece, calling Thiel a “loopy libertarian” bent on denying women the right to vote. Though responding to those assertions wasn’t the point of our conversation, Thiel clearly wanted to set the record straight after keeping quiet these many months. I ran part of our conversation on Monday. The rest follows here:
