Peter Thiel is a German-American entrepreneur and investor.
While Thiel has not been explicitly anti-trans in public statements, many people and institutions Thiel supports are anti-trans. Thiel is closely associated with several anti-trans Republicans and has provided them significant campaign funding, most notably Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, and Ted Cruz. After Trump won election in 2016, Thiel was part of Trump’s transition team.
Thiel is associated with the anti-trans intellectual dark web and has collaborated with other members, including Eric Weinstein, Joe Rogan, Bari Weiss, Tim Ferriss, and Dave Rubin.
Background
Thiel was born on October 11, 1967 in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany. Thiel’s parents moved to America soon after, then to South Africa before moving to the San Francisco Bay area. Thiel has a younger sibling.
Thiel earned a bachelor’s degree from Stanford in 1989. While there Thiel co-founded and edited conservative publication The Stanford Review. Via Newsweek:
Some of the wealthiest men in the New Billionaires club are Peter Thiel (who financed Zuckerberg) and David Sacksātwo guys who spent their formative years at Stanford in the 1990s writing anti-feminist screeds for their school paper. According to Kantor inĀ The New York Times, “In the pages of [Stanford’s]Ā The Review, they defined feminism in negative termsāalarmist, accusatory toward men, blind to inherent biological differences.Ā
Thiel earned a law degree there in 1992, then clerked for 11th Circuit JudgeĀ James Larry Edmondson. After a couple of years working in finance on the east coast, Thiel returned to California and founded Thiel Capital Management.
One early investment got developed into PayPal, which merged with X.com founded by Elon Musk. PayPal went public in 2002 and was bought by eBay for $1.5 billion. Thiel is a co-founder of Palantir Technologies and Founders Fund. Thiel was the first outside investor in Facebook. These investments earned Thiel billions of dollars.
Thiel was outed as gay in 2007 by the Gawker gossip blog network. Thiel then funded a successful $140 million lawsuit against Gawker brought by Hulk Hogan for invasion of privacy. The 2016 verdict led to a $31 million settlement that effectively ended Gawker.
The Thiel Foundation supports young adult visionaries, speculative scientific research, AI, life extension, and seasteading.
Thiel has citizenship in Germany by birth, the US via naturalization, and New Zealand in 2011 through investments there.
Thiel married longtime partner Matt Danzeisen in 2017. Thiel was also reportedly in a relationship with model Jeff Thomas, who died in 2023 at age 35.
Anti-transgender activism
In 1995, Thiel and David O. Sacks co-authored The Diversity Myth, an attack on progressive policies in higher education. Thiel is a Republican and has become a major figure in conservative gay activism. Thiel has been a major donor to Republican and libertarian political candidates and founded Free Forever, an America-first political action committee.
Thiel was a major contributor to Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign. In 2016, Thiel spoke at the Republican National Convention, saying “I am proud to be gay” and criticizing the GOP focus on cultural issues:
“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom. This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?”
In 2016, Thiel was revealed to be the instructor behind a “Heterodox Science” course offered by the Berkeley Institute, a private academic institution that Thiel bankrolls. “Heterodox” is a term popular among right-wing academics like anti-trans activist Jonathan Haidt, founder of Heterodox Academy. The Berkeley Institute course description included buzzwords used by anti-trans academics, including “sexual differences,” a term frequently used in anti-trans fields like eugenics, evolutionary psychology, “race science,” and “sex science”:
This seminar will discuss possible instances of āheterodox science,ā fields of study that dissent from mainstream science. Areas to be examined will include neuroscience and human consciousness; biology and human nature; evolution and sexual differences; and economics and urban social policy.
The seminar was later removed from the Berkeley Institute website.
At the 2022 National Conservatism conference, Thiel discussed “wokeness” in California, likening it to Wahhabism, an orthodox Islamic reform movement in Saudi Arabia:
In his view, the main problem with California is that, like Saudi Arabia or Venezuela, it is the victim of a āresource curseā. That is, the wealth generated from Californiaās tech sector is so tremendous that it ends up distorting the stateās entire political economy. āWokenessā, he posited, plays the same role as Wahabbism in the similarly afflicted Saudi Arabia.
In 2024, Thiel reiterated these views on the Joe Rogan Experience.
In 2023, Thiel decided not to fund political candidates, “reportedly voicing frustration over the right’s attacks on abortion and transgender rights,” according to Vanity Fair.
References
Warnke, Melissa Batchelor (December 21, 2016). Peter Thiel is almost definitely behind this mysterious āHeterodox Scienceā course. The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14025760/peter-thiel-heterodox-science-class-berkeley-institute
Pershan, Caleb (July 22, 2016). Gay Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Belittles Trans Rights In Republican Convention Speech. SFist https://sfist.com/2016/07/22/peter_thiel_gay_republican_hypocrite/
Holden, Dominic (July 21, 2016). Peter Thiel Calls Transgender Bathroom Access “A Distraction” At GOP Convention. BuzzFeed News https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/dominicholden/peter-thiel-calls-transgender-bathroom-access-a-distraction
Ecarma, Caleb (April 26, 2023). Peter Thiel Reportedly Doesnāt Want to Give Republicans Any More Money, for Very Confusing Reasons. Vanity Fair https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/04/peter-thiel-reportedly-doesnt-want-to-give-republicans-any-more-money-for-very-confusing-reasons
MacDonald, Park (September 12, 2022). Peter Thiel: wokeness is like Wahhabism. UnHerd https://unherd.com/newsroom/peter-thiel-wokeness-is-like-wahhabism/
Resources
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
Ballotpedia (ballotpedia.org)
X/Twitter (x.com)
Zero to One (ZeroToOneBook.com)