Thiel was Facebook's first outside investor and a founding partner of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm. He is also a co-founder of PayPal and seeded the analytical software firm Palantir Technologies. The former derivatives trader was also part of the transition team of President Donald Trump.
Thiel's fortune was seeded by investments in technology companies including Facebook and PayPal which he's leveraged into investments in hedge funds and other tech companies.
Thiel owns about 7% of Palantir Technologies, according to an analysis of its 2023 proxy filing. He's credited with shares held directly as well as those held by Thiel Capital, PLTR Holdings, STS Holdings II, Rivendell 7 and Rivendell 25 because he's the beneficial owner of these entities.
The billionaire indirectly owns stakes in various companies through his interest in venture capital firm, Founders Fund. His stake in the firm is calculated to be 42.5% based on information in the company's 2023 Form ADV filing. Its valuation assumes insiders own 22% of the $22.1 billion in assets managed across its funds. The analysis was updated on Aug. 31, 2023 to reflect the latest financial information. This led to a decrease of about $900 million in the net worth calculation.
Thiel also holds stakes in publicly traded companies outside of Founders Fund, such as Compass Pathways and AbCellera Biologics.
Thiel sold half his stake in Facebook to Digital Sky Technology in May 2009, according to 'The Facebook Effect,' a history of the early years of the company. This transaction is valued at $200 million based on private market valuations of Facebook at the time.
Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal and is estimated to have collected about $100 million in proceeds from the company's 2002 initial public offering and subsequent stock sales, according to company filings and data compiled by Bloomberg.
The value of his cash investments is valued based on proceeds from share sales, carried interest and reported data from Thiel's federal tax returns. It includes the value of his hedge funds.
Thiel didn't respond to phone and email requests for comment.
A self-described contrarian, Peter Thiel made his fortune by appealing to the masses. He co-founded PayPal in 1999 on expectations that people would want a more integrated way to spend money online. He ended up making as much as $90 million after the company's public offering and subsequent all-stock sale to EBay in 2002.
His success with PayPal led the one-time derivatives trader and trained attorney to start the Clarium Capital hedge fund. Bets on increasing consumer demand for commodities such as oil helped the fund grow to over $8 billion in assets within six years. While the financial crisis reduced Clarium's size to a few hundred million dollars in assets -- almost all of which belonged to Thiel -- his personal fortune continued to grow thanks to his early recognition of the power of social networking. Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook, initially loaning $500,000 to Mark Zuckerberg in June 2004.
Growth in the digital sphere also boosted his stake in Palantir Technologies, a company he co-founded in 2004 with Alexander Karp. Palantir sifts through the growing reams of digital data to find meaningful patterns for customers, including the federal government.
Thiel also has a history of making numerous small and profitable venture-stage investments in companies, including LinkedIn, Zynga and SpaceX, among others. He inaugurated the Thiel Fellowship program with 24 awardees in 2011. Thiel fellows are college-age people granted $100,000 to skip college and focus on their entrepreneurial efforts and "self-education."
Thiel's philanthropic efforts are directed toward projects intended to influence the masses in constructive ways, such as promoting planned alternative government experiments on sea colonies and supporting research into prolonging lifespans. He also gives heavily to philosophical efforts that promote religious non-violence based on the theories of French-born Stanford University professor Rene Girard. He was revealed to be financing lawsuits against gossip site Gawker Media in May 2016.
He was one of the few tech industry executives who supported Republican candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 election and served on the President's transition team.