THE CONTRARIAN

PETER THIEL AND SILICON VALLEY’S PURSUIT OF POWER MAX CHAFKIN

Bloomsbury, 400pp, £25

Libertarian kook, Bond supervillain, right-wing provocateur, inscrutable genius or sociopathic nihilist? The complex figure who, reviewers agreed, fits all these descriptions yet remains an enigma is the Founders Fund billionaire Peter Thiel. Villain, though, was the preferred description for most, casting Thiel as a ruthless entrepreneur, destructive disrupter and hater of all things liberal, who had helped bankrupt the Gawker site for outing him and had funded Paypal, Facebook and Donald Trump as his way of undermining capitalism’s liberaldemocrat status quo.

The Observer’s John Naughton enjoyed Chafkin’s ‘detailed, impeccably researched account’ of the rise of Thiel’s personality cult. In the Times, Hugo Rifkind wanted more detail still: ‘There is a little bit too much going on with Thiel for any sketch to quite do him justice’; his fraught relationship with his Paypal co-founder Elon Musk ‘could be a book in its own right’, he noted.

Richard Waters in the FT also felt Chafkin had reduced Thiel to an unlikeable villain, the lead character in a ‘parable of Silicon Valley’, rather than delving deeper into his complicated activity as an investor. For Waters, too much of the book relied on unattributed sources, people terrified of Thiel’s retribution. Naughton similarly wrote of the ‘reality distortion field’ surrounding him.

Anna Wiener’s judgment, in a long and thoughtful New Yorker review, was that Thiel is ‘genuinely eccentric’ and his contradictions a key part of his appeal: ‘There is something for everyone.’ Then again, she admitted that ‘what registers as mystique may simply be practised opacity’.