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It will happen to you.” (The boy had asked him a question about their cowhide rug.) There is the horrifying fact, according to a 1992 report Chafkin cites, that at the uranium mine, white employees handed out weekly pay to Black migrant workers from behind glass, apparently to avoid exposure to radiation. There is the scene where the strict German father, like a character out of a Michael Haneke movie, tells little Peter, “Death happens to all animals. They spent time in Johannesburg in South Africa, then Swakopmund in South West Africa (present-day Namibia), where Klaus worked on the construction of a uranium mine.Ĭhafkin sketches a peripatetic childhood. After he had earned his master’s degree, the family moved around. Klaus kept to his studies in engineering. The city was burning that summer a four-hour gun battle between the police and a group called the Black Nationalists of New Libya led to days of looting, fires, and further police crackdowns near campus. The next year, his parents, Klaus and Susanne, moved to Cleveland, so that Klaus could attend graduate school at Case Western Reserve University. Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967. What matters about Peter Thiel is whom he connects.

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Who cares what Peter Thiel thinks about Carl Schmitt or Leo Strauss or René Girard, except to the extent that an intellectual air has bolstered his reputation, as he has built payment systems used across the world and data analytics software adopted by police and health departments, the military, and ICE? Who Peter Thiel is does not really matter. But, whether by design or not, the limitations of this biography enable it to capture the key thing about Thiel: His significance does not lie in his unique genius. And other reviewers have faulted Chafkin for not pressing harder on Thiel’s political theory. Other writers have criticized Thiel for his apparent inconsistencies-for being a libertarian who is in the business of selling nation states software and consulting services, for instance.

It turns out to be a curious strength of The Contrarian that Chafkin never got to talk to Thiel on record. These books, along with studies like Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression and Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and events like the Cambridge Analytica scandal, have helped to bring about a new wariness toward tech firms.Ĭhafkin, too, takes a critical stance toward his subject, as he expertly tracks Thiel’s rise, his money, and his influence.

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All feature a close-up of the anti-hero CEO’s face, partly obscured by text or cropping or both on the cover-a sly update to the cover of Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography, Steve Jobs.

Max Chafkin’s biography of Thiel, The Contrarian, arrives well into the cultural moment that has come to be called the “tech backlash.” It follows a number of other critical books about major tech CEOs by beat reporters who have reframed their subjects as villains, rather than model leaders: Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, Reeves Wiedeman’s Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork, Brad Stone’s Amazon Unbound, and Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang’s An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination.