Peter Thiel the Whovian

Peter Thiel, September 2014, in the Media Cafe at New Broadcasting House

Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Palantir co-founder, early backer of Facebook and one of the rare tech titans to come out publicly for Donald Trump, is in the news. What sounds like a fascinating new biography by Max Chafkin is full of revelations about Thiel’s apparently malign influence on Silicon Valley, his extreme libertarian yet anti-market philosophy - he wants any company he is involved in to end up as a monopoly - and his eagerness both to suck up to those like Trump who may be of use to him and to crush those who he perceives to have slighted him.

This long piece by Chafkin in New York magazine is a great if chilling read, full of arresting anecdotes about Thiel’s borderline sociopathic behaviour, though perhaps exaggerating his influence on the ‘move fast and break things’ ethos of recent Silicon Valley successes like Facebook and Uber.

Peter Thiel makes a couple of appearances in Always On, first as the billionaire backer of DeepMind wooed by Demis Hassabis with an anecdote about chess - Hassabis refuses to identify him but it is obvious who it is. Then it is his great line about the limitations of the smartphone revolution, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters”, which sets up the chapter about the visionary Elon Musk, though Chafkin quotes a source as saying “Musk thinks Peter is a sociopath, and Peter thinks Musk is a fraud and a braggart.”

Given the biography’s lurid portrait of the ruthless, emotionally stunted Ayn Rand fan, I’m almost embarrassed to recall my one encounter with him. In September 2014 he came to New Broadcasting House where I interviewed him in the cafe overlooking the newsroom about his book Zero to One for my Tech Tent radio programme.

There, in the kind of public service institution you might have thought he despised, we had a perfectly amiable conversation about his investment strategy and his views on where technology was heading. You can listen to it here, around 16’30” in.

He stressed again that the route to riches was to build a monopoly - “you do not want to build the fourth online pet food company, the tenth thin film solar panel company, you want to do something that's new and very different like Apple building the iPhone” - and he repeated his line about flying cars and 140 characters.

Then, when the interview was over, his eyes lit up. He’d spotted in the corner of the cafe a visitor attraction, Dr Who’s Tardis. He revealed that he was a Whovian, a fan of the venerable BBC series and asked, rather shyly, if he could have his picture taken in front of the police box.

Which all goes to prove….nothing much, I suppose, except that like the interior of the Tardis, most people may be more multidimensional than they first appear.