Peter Thiel's support for Donald Trump is a surprise because Thiel is an outspoken Libertarian. Logic would dictate that Gary Johnson would be more to his taste.
Thiel is expected to drop a bombshell in his speech on Thursday: to proudly state that he's gay. No one has ever done that in an RNC speech before.
That part of his speech is even more surprising given Thiel's admission in March that he had been secretly funding Hulk Hogan's high-profile lawsuit against online news organization Gawker.
Gawker's gossip blog Valleywag came into his crosshairs after it highlighted that he was gay. Thiel once compared the site to Al Qaeda.
Thiel hasn't really given a strong rationale for why he supports Trump yet. The closest he came was a statement that the country was on the "wrong track" and needs to discuss problems "frankly," implying he likes Trump's style.
His close friend and PayPal cofounder Max Levchin told Bloomberg that he's not entirely sure if Thiel's support for Trump isn't some kind of April Fool's joke. “It wouldn't’t surprise me if the underlying reality of his choice were the sheer contrariness of what he is doing," he said.
Other theories suggest that Thiel's support of Trump is really some kind of "diabolical" plan to hasten the demise of the Republican party or America's whole democratic structure.
At 48, Thiel is worth almost $3 billion and he has not yet donated any money to support Trump's campaign, Bloomberg reports. He previously made donations to former HP CEO Carly Fiorina's PAC and to Utah senator Mike Lee, a member of the #NeverTrump gang.
Thiel is a US immigrant. He was born in Germany and moved to the US when he was one year old. His family settled in the San Francisco Bay Area when he was in fifth grade. He attended Stanford where he studied philosophy and got his law degree. At Stanford he met many of the people that would become key players at PayPal (later known as the PayPal mafia) including include Keith Rabois, David Sacks, and Reid Hoffman.
He's never been afraid to share controversial opinions. In 1999, Thiel and his buddy David Sacks wrote a book called "The Diversity Myth" in which they argued that colleges were bowing to political correctness, dumbing down their admissions policies and silencing intellectual dissent in the "name of diversity."
Thiel is also child chess prodigy. He's a world-ranked chess player who was reportedly once one of the highest ranked under-21 players in the US. Many people believe that Thiel looks at life like a chess game and that his political opinions are all part of his bigger, master plan for winning at business and defeating perceived enemies.
Before his career in tech, he was a clerk for an appeals judge, which landed him an interviews to clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy and Justice Antonin Scalia. He didn't get the job. "At the time, I was devastated," he wrote in his book "Zero to One."
So he took a job as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse Group and made enough money to launch a fintech startup called PayPal with Max Levchin. PayPal merged with Elon Musk's payment company, X.com, went public and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Those early employees (the PayPal Mafia) became wealthy angel investors. Thiel's stake was worth about $55 million, and from there he launched a hedge fund, Clarium Capital. By the time he was 37, Clarium was managing $270 million.
Source: Big Bucks From Bubble Fears
In 2004, Thiel led a $500,000 angel investment in Facebook for about 10% of the company, taking 3% himself. (Others like Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus were also angels). This was the first outside investment in Facebook and between the shares that Thiel sold at the IPO and those he sold shortly after, he made about $1 billion.
"[My] biggest mistake ever was not to do the Series B round at Facebook," he says.
Source: Reddit AMA
In the movie about Facebook, "The Social Network" Thiel was played by Wallace Langham. Thiel wasn't a fan of the movie, saying,"The zero-sum world it portrayed has nothing in common with the Silicon Valley I know, but I suspect it's a pretty accurate portrayal of the dysfunctional relationships that dominate Hollywood."
Source: Reddit AMA
In 2004, Thiel cofounded another tech company, Palantir, with Alexander Karp. They landed the CIA as an early customer and investor. Thiel's idea was to use financial industry fraud-detection software to detect terrorist activity. Palantir can sift through photos, videos and other data to watch for criminal activity. Palantir is known today as one of the most secretive successful companies in the Valley. It raised $2.42 billion and is valued at $20 billion.
Thiel's parents didn't let him watch TV when he was a kid. He did like to read, and J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" was his favorite series as a teen. He tends to choose "Lord of the Rings" inspired names for his ventures. For instance, Palantir refers to the "seeing stones" in Tolkien's books.
Thiel is best known today as a venture capitalist. His VC firm, Founders Fund, had a manifesto that once famously said, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters," a ding at Twitter that expressed his disappointment with what he considered a lack of big ideas from startups. Still, he's also an active angel investor, who's backed about 80 companies like Airbnb, LinkedIn, Lyft, SpaceX, Spotify, Yammer, Yelp.
Source: Founder's Fund manifesto: What happened to the future?
Thiel also believes that death and aging is something that can be cured. "Most people deal with aging by some strange combination of acceptance and denial. I think the psychological blocks to thinking about aging run very deep, and we need to think about it in order to really fight it."
Source: Reddit AMA
