WTF Does Peter Thiel Actually Want?

0:00 Peter Teal is, to put it mildly, a bit of an unusual guy.

0:04 Within the last year alone, he has started a new life for himself in Argentina,

0:09 bankrolled the inaugural Enhanced Games that uh kind of flopped,

0:12 started talking other billionaires into abandoning the giving pledge,

0:16 published an essay about Watchmen and One Piece, doubled his net worth,

0:19 rifted the easiest softball interview question of all time.

0:22 You would prefer the human race to endure, right?

0:25 I don't know.

0:26 I I would I would um and to top everything off,

0:30 finished a speaking tour in San Francisco in Rome

0:33 about the Antichrist and how it is going to take

0:36 the form of tech regulation or Greta Thunberg with as far

0:39 as anybody could tell not a hint of irony.

0:43 Again, this was all just within the last year.

0:46 The time management alone would almost be

0:48 impressive if it wasn't all so strange.

0:51 Now obviously thanks to a string of successful

0:54 businesses and investments into companies like eBay,

0:57 Palanteer, Stripe, DeepMind, Facebook, SpaceX, Bitcoin,

0:59 and his own venture capital firms,

1:02 he has built an enormous private fortune alongside deep public connections,

1:06 which more than almost anybody else on Earth

1:09 has allowed him to indulge these unorthodox hobbies.

1:13 There is also a good chance that none of this is really news to you anymore.

1:17 And that's not by accident.

1:18 Just over the last decade,

1:19 Teal has gone from doing everything in his power to keep a low profile out

1:23 of the public eye to today where he

1:25 is almost seemingly trying to manufacture outlandish headlines.

1:28 And all of this all raises the obvious question of why.

1:32 Outside of just putting him in not a particularly flattering public spotlight,

1:36 these strange antics may genuinely

1:38 be impacting his underlying business interest.

1:40 So, what is it exactly that Peter Teal does?

1:44 And more importantly, what is it exactly that he wants?

1:48 A leak of private information purportedly related

1:51 to an ultra secret society called Dialogue,

1:53 founded by PayPal billionaire Peter Teal.

1:56 If you want to think about the the economy of California,

1:59 in some ways it's analogous to Saudi Arabia.

2:02 I um well I I I will I I'll get I will I will sort of get get to it by and by.

2:07 But the uh the first of the new experimental culture ideas

2:10 in Valley since the first uh the program to replace Western culture it's

2:14 framed as multicultural diversity is more than just hiring you know the extras

2:18 from the space cantina scene in Star Wars or something like that.

2:22 So you can imagine the attention and concern when Tilliel

2:27 decided to hold [music] a series of lectures on the antichrist.

2:33 All right, so like always with these videos,

2:35 it would be a lot easier and a lot more fun

2:37 to just rattle off examples of bizarre things this guy has said,

2:41 funded or supported over his career because honestly

2:43 there is a lot of material to cover there.

2:45 But for now, I want to as much as possible

2:48 leave the tinfoil hats to the side and just

2:50 break down what it is his businesses actually do

2:53 to get a clearer idea of what he actually wants.

2:56 So, from the beginning, Teal had a complicated childhood moving from Germany

3:00 to Ohio to South Africa to a uh

3:03 history city in modern-day Namibia before ultimately

3:06 settling in California when he was 10.

3:08 From there, by most accounts, he was a quiet,

3:10 studious kid that had the grades to get into Stanford,

3:13 where he founded the Stanford Review,

3:14 a student publication with a conservative focus.

3:17 After graduating from the prestigious school, he got a job as a law clerk,

3:21 then a securities lawyer at Sullivan and Cromwell,

3:23 then a derivatives trader at none other than Credit Swiss

3:26 with a side hustle of writing

3:27 speeches for Reagan's former secretary of education.

3:30 Outside of just being prestigious roles in their own right,

3:33 it's worth pointing out that he juggled all

3:35 these jobs over the course of just 3 years.

3:37 the only regular jobs that he really ever had.

3:40 Now, nobody should hold anybody's childhood or early career against them.

3:43 And the only reason it's really worth discussing

3:45 at all is to point out that despite the turbulence,

3:48 after his 3 years of holding down normal jobs came to an end,

3:51 he was still ultimately surrounded by family and friends who had the means

3:55 to invest a million dollars with him at the age of 29 in 1996.

3:59 That money was the seed capital to establish Teal Capital Management,

4:04 a small venture capital firm with the idea of using

4:06 his financial skills from his short stint on Wall Street,

4:08 mixed with his Stanford connections to invest in promising

4:11 startups before the larger VC firms got to them.

4:14 By most records, this fund didn't really do anything that noteworthy.

4:18 Its largest documented investment was a web-based calendar developed

4:21 by one of Teal Stanford friends that effectively went nowhere.

4:24 But the founder of that calendar project connected him with Max Levkin who had

4:29 another idea for a company that would

4:31 use cryptography to secure fully online payments.

4:33 So yeah, this part of the story you

4:36 have probably already seen 100 YouTube video essays on.

4:38 Although it tends to get told from the perspective of one of the other founders,

4:42 Teal Levkin and Nosk started a company called Field Link with an initial

4:46 investment of $100,000 from Teal of which

4:49 $35,000 reportedly came directly from Teal's parents.

4:52 Field Link eventually rebranded to Confinity, which launched PayPal,

4:56 which attracted further investment during the do-com hype,

4:59 merged with another online payments company co-founded by Elon Musk,

5:02 survived the crash, went public in 2002,

5:04 and by 2003 got bought outright by eBay,

5:07 giving all of the original co-founders a significant payday.

5:10 Those co-founders now colloally go by the name

5:12 of the PayPal mafia because it was

5:14 a surprisingly large group of people actually involved

5:17 in starting this business thanks to the mergings

5:19 and because almost all of these guys

5:21 double down into building more companies that love

5:23 them or hate them are just as if not more relevant than PayPal itself.

5:27 Now this whole business history is interesting and probably

5:30 worthy of its own how business worked video.

5:32 But the point is from here Tiel got a nice little

5:35 payday that he almost immediately started on his next project with.

5:38 Unlike a lot of the other PayPal mafia,

5:41 Teal didn't really have hard tech skills.

5:43 And yes, I know the raw engineering

5:45 skills of someone like Musk are hotly debated,

5:47 but he did go to school for science.

5:49 And he also at the very least saw himself as a techie engineer,

5:53 so pursued techy engineering businesses with his exit liquidity.

5:56 Teal knew what he was and what he wanted to be, a finance bro.

6:00 And less than 6 months after wrapping up the eBay sale,

6:03 he had positioned himself as the moneyman in two new ventures.

6:07 The first was Clarium,

6:08 a macro hedge fund loosely based on trading around the idea of peak oil.

6:12 This actually did pretty well in the run-up to 2008

6:15 and at its peak had around $8 billion in assets under management,

6:18 making him one of the largest hedge fund managers in the world at the time.

6:21 It didn't fare so well following the global financial crisis, though,

6:24 and a combination of bad bets plus investors pulling their money out

6:28 to shore up their own businesses meant that the fund shut down in 2011.

6:31 Although a standard management and performance fee structure still probably

6:34 made Teal a decent amount of money while it existed.

6:37 Now at almost exactly the same time he was setting up his hedge fund,

6:41 he also co-founded Palunteer Technologies.

6:42 The original thesis behind this business was

6:45 that PayPal actually had really good fraud detection.

6:47 And it did that by harvesting big

6:49 data and processing it with well-gineered algorithms.

6:51 So in the early 2000s, he thought the same kind of big data

6:55 processing could be expanded to combat well basically everything.

6:59 About 15 months after starting these two businesses,

7:02 he also made a half million dollar angel

7:04 investment into an upandcoming social network called the Facebook.

7:07 In addition to buying Zuckerberg a car and providing him personal mentorship.

7:11 As if he didn't have enough on his plate, less than a year later,

7:14 he launched Founders Fund alongside two

7:17 fellow PayPal co-founders and Sean Parker,

7:19 better known as Justin Timberlake from that movie.

7:21 This was a venture capital firm that invests in earlystage companies,

7:24 waits for them to grow, and then cashes out at a higher price.

7:28 So yeah, as far as the villain origin story goes,

7:31 this was, all things considered, pretty boring.

7:33 He had a wealthy family that funded a startup that got lucky and then

7:36 reinvested those early winnings into a venture

7:38 capital firm to recompound his wealth.

7:39 Throw a rock at a San Francisco TED talk

7:42 and you will hit 20 people with effectively the same backstory.

7:45 Also, for what it's worth, hot take alert here,

7:47 but a lot of his early investments were based on some pretty decent ideas.

7:51 Founders Fund in particular was launched with a manifesto which is not

7:55 a great sign but it did make a good point which is

7:58 that tech investment had become too focused on things that could be

8:01 flipped for a quick profit rather

8:03 than building genuinely innovative new technologies.

8:05 Teal concluded the reason for this was because worldchanging new technologies

8:09 were hard while making some new app or platform was easy.

8:12 They capped it off by saying that we

8:15 were promised flying cars instead we got 140 characters.

8:17 They also went on to point out that not everything with a plug is technology.

8:22 I mean, take the logo off it and maybe don't call it a manifesto, and honestly,

8:27 it wouldn't be that different from half the stuff

8:29 we talk about on this channel every other week,

8:31 which does make me feel some kind of way.

8:33 But it's time to learn how money works to find out

8:35 how an idealistic tech investor became one of the most powerful,

8:39 dangerous, and strange men in the world.

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9:50 Okay, so one thing to know about Teal

9:52 is that he never really stopped creating new funds.

9:55 There are serial entrepreneurs that normally have

9:58 some kind of early success and then

9:59 go on to spend their entire career founding new businesses over and over again.

10:03 And there are venture capitalists that fund those new businesses.

10:06 But Teal sort of became a serial venture capitalist,

10:09 creating a long list of funds to invest

10:11 into businesses based on different ideas he had.

10:13 Now, none of these are public because they don't need to be.

10:17 But of the ones we know about,

10:19 there are at least a dozen venture capital firms and other investment vehicles

10:22 that he has co-ounded with various

10:24 people specializing in different areas of tech.

10:26 After his hedge fund closed down in 2011,

10:28 he started Mithil Capital to invest in more mature companies,

10:31 relaunched Teal Capital as a family office to manage his other

10:35 investments and co-founded the America's Frontier Fund alongside Eric Schmidt,

10:38 the former Google CEO.

10:40 He has made co-investments into everything

10:42 from a hedge fund run by Joshua Kushner, Jared's little brother,

10:46 to a crypto investment fund alongside Mark Cuban,

10:49 a uh communications company alongside Jeffrey Epstein.

10:52 and he was also one of the early investors into Reddit alongside Sam Alman,

10:57 Jared Leto, and Snoop Dogg.

10:58 He also started Valor Ventures,

11:00 a VC firm focused on companies outside of Silicon Valley,

11:03 Crescendo Equity Partners, a private equity firm focused on Asian markets

11:06 that he started alongside his husband Matt Danzen,

11:10 and then so so many Rivendell companies.

11:13 Basically, if he needs a shell company, he just calls it Rivendell something.

11:17 That includes his personal Roth IRA fund,

11:19 which he used to make early investments into Palunteer and Facebook,

11:22 and which he grew from a $1,700 contribution in early 1999 to roughly $5

11:27 billion inside of a tax sheltered vehicle

11:29 that was designed for middle class retirement savings.

11:31 So, the lesson from all of this is

11:33 that his business ever since exiting PayPal has really

11:36 just been having money and having the right

11:38 connections to scale companies along to the next buyer.

11:41 Also to play devil's advocate a bit with that many fingers

11:44 in that many pies with that many other major public figures invariably

11:47 there are going to be some skeletons even before considering his own

11:51 personal agenda which um gets a little bit harder to defend.

11:55 Now these businesses have always had

11:57 a combination of philosophy mixed with commercial interest.

12:00 Founders fund thought that technology wasn't pushing us into the future.

12:04 His hedge fund was based on the thesis of peak oil.

12:06 All of the Lord of the Rings companies are

12:09 based on investing in some interpretation of the future.

12:11 And by itself, that's not unusual.

12:13 Most investment firms have some kind of thesis

12:15 about how they look at the market differently.

12:18 And most of the time, it's just branding to tell investors how

12:21 they're going to beat the boring index fund.

12:23 But over time, Teal's investments have

12:25 slowly shifted from being primarily motivated

12:27 by finding returns to arguably more motivated

12:30 by forwarding a very specific world view.

12:32 Founders Fund is really just a venture capital

12:34 firm that thinks it can beat the market

12:36 by investing in the hard stuff that nobody

12:39 else in Silicon Valley is brave enough to pursue.

12:41 Today, the firm manages roughly 17 billion in assets.

12:44 America's Frontier Fund is slightly more ideological and wants to bring

12:48 tech manufacturing back to America to stem the power of China.

12:52 But, you know, realistically, this could also make some money.

12:55 But then there are investments like Prenomus,

12:57 a venture capital firm founded by Patri Freriedman.

12:59 Fun fact, the grandson of Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist,

13:03 that is about pushing the idea of semi-aututonomous tech forward cities.

13:07 Even if these were successful,

13:08 it is unclear how they would provide a return to their investors.

13:12 So, this is arguably much more motivated by Teal's

13:15 ideology of libertarian cities and limiting government controls.

13:18 This has also extended to practice,

13:20 a smaller organization that Teal has heavily invested

13:22 in that wants to establish an independent internet

13:25 native nation with a future Ford city outside

13:27 of the direct influence of any existing nation state.

13:30 The company has reportedly raised over $525 million from investors.

13:34 Now, this is a wild enough idea by itself,

13:37 but some of the influences shaping the objectives of practis have uh generously

13:42 been described by outlets like the New York Times as a little bit fascist.

13:46 One of the co-founders of this particular project

13:48 talked of wanting to establish a non- US city as a place for tech leads to go

13:53 to if the US political environment became less tech friendly.

13:56 Now today, our tech leaders accompany the president on diplomatic missions,

13:59 stand in front of the cabinet at inauguration,

14:01 and pretty openly float the idea of government co-investment.

14:04 So with all of that in mind, you might reasonably think that the US

14:09 political environment has arguably never been more tech-friendly.

14:12 Teal would disagree.

14:13 Largely in response to proposed wealth tax measures in California, he has,

14:17 as of about 10 months ago, taken up primary residency in Argentina.

14:21 But the move also came with some other advantages.

14:24 The country's president, Javier Malay, shares his libertarian ideologies,

14:28 and the two are reportedly working

14:30 closely on business and technological partnerships.

14:32 So, it's not unreasonable to think that he wants

14:35 to develop one of his tech cities down in Argentina.

14:38 Another noted advantage of the move is

14:40 that Argentina is a geographically isolated and resourcerich country.

14:43 So in the event of the AI apocalypse,

14:46 it would make a great doomsday bunker location.

14:48 Now you might remember that Teal already fasttracked

14:50 New Zealand citizenship where he reportedly also has

14:53 a doomsday bunker that he and Sam Alman were going to share the end times in.

14:58 So Argentina is kind of the backup to the backup.

15:01 But to be fair, this move is not without precedent.

15:04 About 80 years ago, there was another group of Argentine immigrants that also

15:08 moved to the country to avoid political uh All right, moving on.

15:13 So, yeah, Teal has made more money and developed more contacts.

15:17 His objectives pretty clearly shifted from just making even more money

15:21 to advancing his own ideologies under the guise of investing in the future.

15:25 This also included very heavy spending on politics,

15:27 including $15 million on JD Vance when he was running for senator in Ohio.

15:31 The largest single donation to a Senate

15:34 candidate in American history at the time.

15:36 Now again, to be fair,

15:37 political spending from wealthy individuals is objectively extremely common,

15:40 and we did a whole video on it.

15:43 But Teal's super PAC, Protect Ohio Values,

15:45 went slightly further than just running ads.

15:48 They reportedly uploaded voter data to an obscure blog for Vance's

15:51 team to stumble upon rather than handing it over directly,

15:54 which would have broken the arms distance rule of super PACs.

15:58 This was challenged for being a pretty blatant flatting of the rules,

16:00 but the case was ultimately dismissed.

16:02 Beyond politics, he has also always had

16:05 a very complicated relationship with the media.

16:08 Before the 2020s, he actually tried to remain very private,

16:11 doing most of his business in ideological work behind the scenes.

16:14 This was kind of derailed by an article from the publication Gawker,

16:18 which outed him as gay back in 2008.

16:20 Now, to be fair, that was kind of a dick move,

16:23 especially since at the time Teal wasn't a particularly notable public figure.

16:27 He did not like this one little bit.

16:30 In response, he personally financed the lawsuits

16:32 of several people who were suing Gawker, most notably Hulk Hogan,

16:36 with the eventual end goal of bankrupting the outlet entirely.

16:39 A jury awarded Hogan $140 million in 2016,

16:42 and Gawker filed for bankruptcy shortly after.

16:45 Of course, by this point,

16:47 thanks to the media circus and his growing wealth tied to major companies,

16:50 he was in the media whether he liked it or not.

16:53 Now, the irony in all of this is that Teal also co-founded Palanteer,

16:56 which is a company built

16:58 on compiling privacy violating information about everybody.

17:01 The US government alone paid them $687 million in the first

17:04 quarter of this year for exactly that kind of work.

17:07 And then literally as we were putting this video together,

17:10 Teal and Enhanced Games founder Aaron Duza made another

17:13 move to shake up the journalism industry by launching Objection,

17:16 a company that uses AI to evaluate journalists claims and which

17:19 offers a service where for $2,000 anybody can dispute a story,

17:23 whereby the journalist's claims get scored by a panel of AI models,

17:27 which isn't at all dystopian.

17:28 Now, all of these battles kind of had a Barbara Stryzen effect where they put

17:33 him further into the public spotlight and now he is kind of just embracing it.

17:37 Today, he speaks very openly,

17:39 is very upfront with his politics and even is more outlandish ideologies.

17:42 He came up through Silicon Valley in the early

17:45 2000s in the 2010s where these kinds of ideas would have been very against

17:49 the grain and probably cost him major partnerships,

17:51 investments, and opportunities.

17:53 And well, it arguably still does.

17:55 Venture capitalists need promising founders with ideas just

17:58 as much as founders need venture capitalists with money.

18:01 There are a lot of potentially promising

18:03 entrepreneurs that just simply would not want to work with Peter Teal or any

18:07 of his several funds because of his controversial views.

18:09 What's more is that this is potentially

18:11 even having an impact on his existing businesses.

18:14 Palanteer does most of his work with governments and well

18:17 at least some of those governments are beholden to their people.

18:20 Teal is a German citizen and he is still having trouble

18:23 with his German drone company because

18:24 the government is uneasy about his political positions.

18:27 This is costing him real money and real opportunities.

18:30 So why not just shut the[ __] up?

18:33 His life would arguably be a lot easier and his business is a lot less

18:37 scrutinized if he didn't go out of his way to look like a super villain, right?

18:41 But the boring reality is that he has more money than he will ever spend.

18:46 and he seems to genuinely think he can convince

18:48 people that his ideas have their best interest at heart.

18:51 To that end and in anticipation of some push back,

18:54 he has also engineered his entire portfolio

18:56 and life for that matter to be extremely robust.

18:59 He has multiple citizenships in Germany, the United States, and New Zealand.

19:04 And he also applied for a passport in Malta in 2022.

19:07 He has structured companies specifically

19:09 incorporated and diversified across the planet.

19:11 and he has an extensive network and friends in very high places.

19:15 He is also not tied to a single

19:18 business like almost every other billionaire at his level.

19:20 Someone like Zuck, Bezos,

19:22 Ellison or even Musk are for better or worse poster boys for their companies.

19:26 Most people would have no clue what Teal is actually invested in.

19:29 And even with all of this background, his private holdings are private.

19:33 So we probably don't know the full extent of where his money is.

19:36 Yeah, sure.

19:37 He is associated with Palanteer, which is almost certainly by far his largest

19:41 asset at a roughly $9 billion stake.

19:43 But nobody thinks that is a nice company.

19:46 Its value isn't going to drop because of bad PR.

19:49 If anything, leaning hard into the school cap baddy bond villain thing

19:52 kind of cements what the company does to a lot of investors,

19:55 and average people aren't their customers anyway.

19:57 So, he can get away with saying whatever he wants

20:00 without the same vulnerabilities that other major business leaders have.

20:03 It just so happens that what he wants to say is kind of a bit out there.

20:08 Also, for what it's worth, he probably misses out on a lot of SoCal soy

20:12 boy founders that believe in nonsense

20:13 things like humanity's continued existence.

20:15 But for a lot of founders that want

20:18 to pursue less PC initiatives like nuclear tech,

20:20 weapons or big data harvesting, he is the first person they will go to.

20:24 Which means again to play devil's advocate,

20:26 saying wild things that makes headlines

20:28 is good marketing for his core businesses,

20:30 which is investing money into companies

20:32 that put returns over traditional ethics.

20:34 Now, it is almost impossible to cover this guy without simultaneously

20:37 him and going down a conspiracy rabbit hole at the same time.

20:41 Obviously, he is not advocating for a future

20:43 where regular people come out on top.

20:45 and he isn't really even trying to hide that.

20:48 But arguably the bigger problem is that people with this much

20:50 money can have so much influence to begin with.

20:52 Now, if you want to see all of these systems actually put to work,

20:55 go and watch this video next to find out

20:57 how money and politics made this a truly unsolvable problem.

20:59 And don't forget to like and subscribe to keep on learning how money works.