The Contrarian summary

With his brilliant grades, Thiel secured a place at Stanford University to study philosophy. Here, he picked up where he’d left off at school: he studied hard and mostly kept himself to himself.

On paper, Stanford was his dream university. It’d recently been ranked ahead of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. He’d expected studious quiet and great books.

After graduating from Stanford, Thiel drifted between various high-flying jobs. He worked as a clerk for a judge, as a lawyer for the firm Sullivan & Cromwell, and then as a derivatives trader for Credit Suisse in New York.

But when he returned to California and saw how the new tech companies were flourishing, he sensed his true calling.

In 2000, PayPal merged with X.com, a financial startup run by another entrepreneur with a major career ahead: Elon Musk. 

Musk became CEO, but there were soon disagreements between him and Thiel. While Musk was away enjoying his honeymoon, he was ousted from the role. Thiel stepped in to head the company.

On the whole, Silicon Valley in 2003 didn’t get fully behind President Bush’s War on Terror. Tech entrepreneurs were mostly occupied with dreaming up ways to deliver fresh vegan food to people’s doorsteps or connect people looking to fund good causes.

Peter Thiel, though, was different. He was consumed with the idea that Islam was a threat to the West. He believed that Bush wasn’t being tough enough on Islam, and he thought it was time to use what he called “extralegal” methods to protect the country’s interests. Rather than address issues through the United Nations, he thought the West should engage Echelon – the secret coordination of the world’s intelligence services.

In early 2008, Thiel wrote a 10,000-word letter to investors in his Clarium fund. It was called “The Optimistic Thought Experiment.” Rather than just writing about investment opportunities and risks, Thiel used the essay to paint an apocalyptic picture of the future, where those who believed in globalization would battle those who didn’t. The contest, Thiel wrote, would be close.

Thiel knew which side he was on: that against globalization. So when Donald Trump ran for the Republican nomination, Thiel saw an opportunity to further this cause.

After the 2016 election, Thiel found himself invited to join Trump’s transition team alongside Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Jr. His role was to draw up candidates for governmental positions, from Technology Officer to the head of the Food and Drug Administration.

Thiel’s suggestions were often so radical that even the iconoclastic Steve Bannon disagreed with them. For instance, Thiel’s nominee for the head of the Food and Drug Administration was the cryptocurrency entrepreneur Balaji Srinivasan – someone who believed in scrapping the FDA entirely.