peter thiel might be the most dangerous billionaire investor alive a good man is a very very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control how do you become truly dangerous you become dangerous by amassing money and power and by pairing these two elements with your personal agenda pitytill has all three money power and an agenda he famously turned 1700 to 5 billion generating a return of 2. 9 million x easily placing him as one of the mvps in the world of venture capital closely next to mark andreessen and kevin john he is starting to play the game of power by getting more active in politics in the past he famously helped donald trump rise to power now he's starting to strategically back selected political candidates that are aligned with his goals and lastly he most definitely has an agenda more on that later peter thiel was born in the second best country of the world germany in the city of frankfurt a mine also known as the birthplace of goethe and kevin john having just been born peter was still ambitious and not ready to retire yet i always thought that berlin for example was was going to be a great place for innovation and now i just sort of think it's this the city people move to in their 20s to retire i think ambition is just not considered cool in europe already at age one living in germany peter thiel did not like being second and so he moved his family to the then best country in the world the usa [Music] imagine you want to design a brilliant investor and power player what would he or she look like there's a couple of boxes they would need to take i know you're going to get into stanford in four years four years later i got into stanford then i got into stanford law school to top it off give them something uncommon that highlights their intelligence like a great interest in mathematics and being the holder of a life master title in chess although he does have a play piritial had all that and more after graduating from stanford law school in 1992 he quite correctly asserted that this is just the beginning of his career trajectory life doesn't end in college so thiel started building up his cv he clerked for a judge worked as a securities lawyer and as a derivatives trader at bulge bracket bank credit swiss here he developed one of his beliefs which serves as great lesson for all of us trying to construct our own careers and so you want to always put substance over over status what happened next is widely known this is how teal built a solid foundation for any moonshot career moves he might want to attempt in the future he returned to california and in 1998 he started a company that would later become paypal the story of paypal is a fascinating one in itself but that's not all paypal merged with elon musk's online financial services company x. com in 2000 with both alphas peter and elon clashing multiple times in the period after the merge between all of us we managed to make paypal work which is then what was what that was the important thing i think elon's super impressive because he's done something outside the i.
t space the group of people that led people in these early days are referred to as paypal mafia because of their massive business influence so you might say that peter made some solid connections back then however this was not the only thing he would take from his paypal adventure teal was about to experience the first major liquidity event of his career which is something all of us on this channel are striving for two liquidity events i talk about how to build a foundation for liquidity events in my video the boring path to 1 million net worth before 35 some weeks ago i came across a startup that supports you on your path to a seven figure net worth or ten figures and buying media conglomerates whatever fits your psychopathic tendencies of course i reached out to the founder of cronify to learn more about what he's building and it's basically the app to my youtube channel's mission for example we talk about having a 10 year master plan often chronify helps you to track just that your net worth development in the next years taking into account your participating careers side ventures one-off liquidity events and so on through the link in the description below you can sign up for a free trial without any obligations and start plotting your plan for becoming liquid how did peter become liquid party is basically a massive blur in my mind all i remember is just having a bottle of champagne and a cigar and then i woke up paypal went public in february 2002 and was acquired by ebay in october 2002 for 1. 5 billion us dollar teal's ownership of paypal was diluted to single percentage digits at this point nevertheless the acquisition provided him with a financial cushion that would just be enough for his megalomaniacal plans that would come afterwards 55 million us dollar teal was around six years into his career so after graduating university when he started paypal and he was around 10 years into his career when he had his first large exit event just for you to be able to benchmark yourself against this now imagine you just earned yourself 55 million us dollar what do you do next either you take risky bets and try to maximize your wealth or you play it safe and go into wealth preservation mode most people would say that these are the two options that's why most people aren't billionaires teal applied a three pillar strategy to both conserve his wealth and maximize the probability for moonshots here's how he did it and the results were mind-blowing pillar one was that he took 10 million us dollar and started a hedge fund the fund was called clarium capital and pursued a global macro strategy essentially betting on large-scale global events pilar one was supposed to preserve and grow teal's capital pillar too was venture capital he got active as an angel investor writing investment tickets on his personal balance sheet as well as starting multiple vc funds one of these was the famous founders fund considered to be a tier 1 vc with investments such as airbnb spotify lyft and stripe pilatu was supposed to grow his net worth more aggressively with an expected return of 15 to 25 per annum in line with typical vc returns with some slim moonshot potential of hitting a home run and 100 axing teal's capital pillar 3 the last pillar of his strategy was building his own venture that meant taking a small amount of capital and starting totally from scratch but also giving him full control over the company's road map and so arguably the highest moonshot potential this strategy materialized by teal founding palantir a company that specializes on big data analytics and works with clients such as the us military did this three pillar strategy work hell yes it did for his hedge fund clarium capital the 10 million us dollar he put in in 2002 had grown to around 350 million us dollar assets under management two thirds of which was steel's money not bad for the second pillar venture capital thiel hit a home run ever heard of an investor say he's looking for the next facebook well teal found facebook and had a major influence on its success at one point he owned around 10 percent of facebook yeah but he was massively influential on my thinking in 2012 so around 20 years into his career facebook went public and peter liquidated part of his position cashing in roughly 1 billion us dollar and putting him into the prestigious three comma club lastly and this is where the power of teal's strategy becomes apparent teal still has a single digit percentage ownership of palantir a company with a market cap of around 30 billion us dollar at this point this could turn into another billion dollar payday for teal if the company keeps growing with all that capital accumulated it's time for teal to apply his techniques not to making money but to building power estimates place peter thiel's net worth somewhere between 2 and 10 billion us dollar but in terms of wealth teal is just slightly above average when it comes to silicon valley titans let alone wall street dustin moskowitz larry ellison or sergey brin of google which he loves to criticize for the lag and innovation in recent years you know google also has 30 40 50 billion in cash it has no idea how to invest that money in technology effectively and so it prefers getting zero percent interest from mr bernanke all these people have significantly higher financial firepower however at some point the marginal factor of what you can do with money decreases exponentially and peter has certainly reached this point what do you do if you have everything man can reach in business money-wise how do you start playing the game of power correct you go into politics and this is not to say that teal wasn't powerful before let's start with the you know the facts of the case it involved a sex tape you know if you if you make a sex tape of someone with their permission you are a pornographer if you make a sex tape without their permission we were told now you are a journalist in a famous incident in 2007 the gossip block gawker made thield's homosexuality public he didn't like that at all but kept his composure years later he seized an opportunity to launch a counter-attack thiel confirmed last week that he secretly spent about 10 million dollars bankrolling lawsuits against gawker and one of them a jury awarded retired pro wrestler hulk hogan 140 million dollars this dispute began in 2007 when a gawker website out of the paypal co-founder as a gay man thiel told the new york times gawker is a terrible bully he called the lawsuits one of the quote greater philanthropic things that i've done what was the outcome we don't believe that the hulk hogan verdict will stand you know 140 million in terms of the money though gawker lost needed to pay compensations in the hundreds of millions and was forced to close in 2016. most people would consider this amount of power to be extraordinary but most people aren't like teal or the target demographic of our patreon discord community and they are not like the people who hold both hands on the sides of the world and spin it like a top so politics it is and also here thiel is following his very own strategy normally there are multiple common paths into politics studying something extremely useless and becoming a politician once you graduate or building business success and transitioning into politics later like donald trump or michael bloomberg thiel chose a third way of course for a start teal is a member of the republican party although he contributes to both libertarian and republican candidates and causes since 2007 peter thiel has been supporting political candidates financially usually with grants from the tens of thousands up to around a million us dollar he famously supported trump in 2016.
billionaire investor and paypal co-founder peter thiel is making his first donation of 1. 25 million dollars to his campaign he last spoke at the republican national convention every american has a unique identity i am proud to be gay i am proud to be a republican but most of all i am proud to be an american tonight i urge all of my fellow americans to stand up and vote for donald trump [Applause] but recently teal announced something that hints at much larger ambitions we've got some news on meta that we want to bring to you changes in the board peter thiel is not going to stand for re-election to the board it was later announced that teal will leave in order to support pro-donald trump candidates in the 2022 united states elections ever since like a puppet master teal has been picking selected political candidates and building them up strategically and financially the sum he has donated far exceeds any sums he has been giving out before and places him as one of the top political donors of the us more than 20 million us dollar for the 2022 elections if you could choose would you want to become king or kingmaker would you want to be the person at the front publicly taking and justifying decisions or the silent master at the back plotting the big picture strategy it is obvious that thiel is making a concerted push for the latter option however one question remains what topics is he putting on the agenda teal divides the world into bits and atoms we've lived in a world in which bits were unregulated and atoms were regulated this is a framework that's incredibly useful to keep in mind i have used it on various instances and it might even come in handy during case interviews he fundamentally believes that breakthroughs happen in the world of bits because we live in a world in which bits are unregulated and atoms are regulated his political philosophy which is influenced by the french stanford professor rene girard emphasizes the role of outsiders and non-conformists since his student days he has purposefully violated the rules of political correctness and gathered young minds of the libertarian right around him in his entourage this means he is anti everyone studying we need to push back on this that this this idea the only way to get saved is by getting a diploma from college anti-china but um if you're only one or two steps ahead that's not very much and so if things are copied very quickly then maybe you don't need to innovate at all you can outsource all the very hard r d work to to the west you have a lot of dead weight economic costs associated with that and then if you can just steal all the ip and thai's starting shitty businesses um and so maybe they shouldn't be starting businesses so my view is we should be starting more good businesses and fewer bad ones anti-interiority in july of 1969 men reached the moon and three weeks later woodstock began as opposed to exteriority which he equates to progress and anti being a sheep and not thinking for yourself we do not trust uh people's ability to think through things at all anymore in the 21st century gerard also made him a big believer in my medic theory which says that human beings naturally imitate the desires of other human beings it's also why this channel works we are all ambitious 0.
