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Thiel
The Realm of
Peter
Words by Gary Rivlin
Design by Martin Flores
PayPal, Facebook, SpaceX, the Trump Presidency. Why does it seem like tech billionaire and Hobbit obsessive Peter Thiel has his hands in everything, from HQ to the lawsuit that killed Gawker? Because he does. Here’s a map of his holdings.
Thiel a huge fan of Lord of the Rings, which he read “again and again” when he was a teenager and its significance to Thiel has endured. Besides Palantir, which, in Tolkien’s Middle earth, is a “seeing stone” other LOTR references include: Mithril Capital Management, which refers to a lightweight metal (not uncommon in the Shire) that’s stronger than steel; Valar Ventures, another Thiel-backed VC firm, refers to ancient spirits that shaped and ruled the world in Tolkien’s novel. Two LLCs Thiel created for his Facebook investments were made through Rivendell One (Rivendell is an Elven realm in Middle-earth) and Lembas (a food used for sustenance on long journeys in Tolkien’s novel).
THIEL’S TOLKIEN OBSESSION
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But after it was revealed that Thiel donated $1.25 million to the Trump campaign, there have been repeated calls on Facebook to dump him from its board of directors. And when occasionally boycott movements flare up, the question is whether the backlash relates to his support of Trump or his surreptitious funding of the legal campaign that led to the shutdown of Gawker, the celebrity gossip site. Or maybe it’s his ownership stake in the CIA-backed Big Data firm that has been accused of spying on U.S. citizens.
In early 2018, Bloomberg put Thiel’s net worth at $3.8 billion. At this point, he owns a stake in hundreds of startups. The breadth of his holdings is so vast – from breakthrough energy and biotech companies to popular consumer sites such as Airbnb, Lyft, and Spotify – that it might not even be possible to avoid them all, no matter how polarizing a figure some may find him.
(The House of Thiel: The Complete Holdings Continues After Map.)
n February, a tech news site revealed that Peter
Thiel, Donald Trump’s highest profile supporter in
Silicon Valley, was an investor in the popular game show app, HQ Trivia. Within 24 hours, the hashtag #deleteHQ was trending on Twitter. “Peter Thiel is a blight on this world,” one user tweeted.
Peter Thiel was once known as a co-founder of PayPal, the online payment company born in 1998, and the first outside investor in Facebook, in 2004. These days, though, Thiel, a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager, is best known for his right-wing political beliefs (he’s a libertarian and Ayn Rand devotee who thinks politics have gone downhill since women were granted the right to vote) even as he reigns as one the startup world’s more active investors. Thiel has sunk money into noble ventures such as The Ocean Cleanup, a Netherlands-based concern that develops technologies to extract, prevent, and intercept plastic pollutions, and the free press nonprofit, Committee to Protect Journalists.
WHATS UP WITH THE LORD OF THE RINGS OBSESSION?
Breezeworks
Mirror AI
________________
______________________
Personal
Investments
Immusoft
Parasail
Health
SafeGraph
Teal
Redux
Transatomic Power
ChemomAb
Facebook
LinkedIn
Palantir
Manors
Maui
Penthouse at Bloomberg Tower, NYC
The Hills,
Los Angeles
477 Acres in New Zealand
Lyft
Airbnb
Path
Mint
Climate Corp
AltSchool
__________________
_________
Founders fund
Unity
Biotechnology
Unbound
Cherry
Affirm
HQ Trivia
Stemcentrx
Osaro
uBeam
Slide
Zynga
Stripe
Spotify
Yammer
Oculus
Task Rabbit
SpaceX
Blumio
Gel4Med
RasLabs
Epibone
3scan
C2Sense
Opus12
Ubiqud
Envisagenics
Logic.Ink
_________________________
Breakout Labs
Modern Meadow
___________________________
________________________
Mithril Capital Management
MagForce
SilverRail Technologies
ShopLocket
__________
________________
Valar
ventures
Clarium Capital
Relay
CalReply
Xero
Positron Dynamics
Clinkle
___________
Busts
PandoDaily
Story Continues Below
