Peter Thiel
Founder, Clarium Capital
Peter Thiel is the founder and president of Clarium Capital Management LLC, a global macro hedge fund managing $2 billion in assets and which has returned 240% since its inception in October 2002. In 2005, Clarium was honored by both MarHedge and Absolute Return as the global macro fund of the year. Mr. Thiel is most widely known as the co-founder and CEO of PayPal, the dominant online payment service, which today has over 130 million users in 103 countries. In 2002, immediately prior to forming Clarium, he sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion; the PayPal unit has been among eBay's most profitable ever since.
In addition to managing Clarium, Peter Thiel is a partner in The Founders Fund, a venture capital firm he started in 2005. He has launched and provided the initial capital for several notable technology start-ups, including LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, and Facebook, which over the last two years has become the sixth most trafficked site in the U.S. A frequent financial commentator, Mr. Thiel's market insights, opinions, and articles have been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Barron's, Bloomberg Markets, NPR, PBS, the BBC, CNBC, and the hedge fund press, and he has been profiled on "The Charlie Rose Show" and as part of an NHK Special. He also is the subject of a chapter in Steve Drobny's book, Inside the House of Money.
In addition to finance, he is active in a variety of academic, philanthropic, and cultural pursuits. He serves on the boards of several think tanks, including Hoover Institution, Pacific Research Institute, and the Singularity Institute, which studies the tremendous benefits and dangers of artificial general intelligence. He also has served on Stanford Law School's Board of Visitors and taught Globalization, Sovereignty & Technological Change at Stanford Law School in 2004. In 2005, he co-produced the film Thank You for Smoking, based on the eponymous Christopher Buckley novel. He also is a U.S.-rated chess master.
An advocate of radical life extension research, he has pledged to donate a total of $500,000 over the next three years to fund pilot research projects intended to deliver early stage validation of the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence approach to combating the debilitation caused by aging. Additionally, until the end of 2009, he promises to match every Dollar donated to the Methuselah Foundation for SENS research with a 50 cent matching contribution from himself, up to a maximum of $3 Million of matching funds. He is quoted as saying, "Rapid advances in biological science foretell of a treasure trove of discoveries this century, including dramatically improved health and longevity for all. I'm backing Dr. de Grey, because I believe that his revolutionary approach to aging research will accelerate this process, allowing many people alive today to enjoy radically longer and healthier lives for themselves and their loved ones."
This year, Peter Thiel has been honored as a Young Global Leader, an award bestowed by the World Economic Forum to recognize the world's 250 most distinguished leaders age 40 and under. In September he delivered a talk at the Singularity Summit in San Francisco called "Financial Markets and the Singularity," where he observed that over the past three decades, the financial markets experienced the largest and most violent series of booms and busts in history. Nothing in the orthodox literature predicted the market gyrations of the recent past; if anything, efficient market theorists would have anticipated a period of moderation as new technologies allowed participants to access and analyze data in unprecedented ways. His thoughts on the merit of non-profit organizations like the Singularity Institute in dealing with the economic volatility associated with emerging technologies are expressed in his SIAI video interview.
video
SIAI Interview Series
video
2007 Singularity Summit,
Financial Markets and the Singularity
transcripts
2007 Singularity Summit,
Financial Markets and the Singularity
SIAI Interview Series,
Economic Questions of the 21st Century
audio
2007 Singularity Summit,
Financial Markets and the Singularity
29:58
SIAI Interview Series,
Economic Questions of the 21st Century
23:39
2004 Accelerating Change Conference,
Virtual Money
39:17