Peter Thiel

Is there anything more influential than the invisible hand of Peter Thiel? Like the Valar in the J.R.R. Tolkien books he loves so much—he’s named six companies with terms drawn from the fantasy novels—Thiel is mysterious, powerful, and a little incomprehensible. The highly secretive Palantir, of which Thiel is chairman and a cofounder, has become a go-to source of AI for government work, valued at almost $100 billion. His Founders Fund has its tentacles in startups as varied as Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries, Tom Mueller’s Impulse Space, and Sam Altman’s OpenAI. His anti-university Thiel Fellowship remains an unorthodox engine for young entrepreneurs. And then there’s politics. Thiel’s unabashed libertarian conservatism—combined with his billions of wealth from cofounding PayPal and becoming Facebook’s first outside investor—has fueled right-wing political candidates across the United States, including Trump running mate JD Vance.