Who is Peter Thiel?

An American investor who, as one of its founders, conceived PayPal. He has written that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, and has argued for using technology to create spaces for freedom outside politics. The book *Plurality* treats him as the central figure of libertarianism.

Among Silicon Valley investors, he is known for raising big arguments about politics and philosophy. Has technological progress stalled? Where can freedom be protected? He has written about such questions again and again. The book Plurality takes up his way of thinking as the leading example of a path different from its own.

In short

Peter Thiel is an American venture capitalist (someone who invests in new companies) [1]. As one of its founders, he conceived the online payment service PayPal [2].

He is known for writing, in a 2009 essay, that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible [3]. The book Plurality treats Thiel as the central intellectual leader of "libertarianism" (a position that values individual liberty above all and seeks to shrink the role of the state) [1].

Connection to Plurality

As the central figure of libertarianism. Chapter 2-0 of the book writes that libertarianism has a canon of widely read books, such as The Sovereign Individual and Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State. It then says: "Venture capitalist Peter Thiel is widely seen as the central intellectual leader, along with others (such as the authors mentioned) whom he has funded or promoted the work of." [1] → Three paths

Political ties the book points to. The same chapter writes that libertarianism "has a close, but also somewhat complicated, relationship with the nationalist and far-right in democratic countries". As examples of the close side, the book gives Thiel's emergence as a primary financial supporter of Donald Trump and his supporters, his employing former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, and his sponsorship of the political careers of Blake Masters and J. D. Vance [1].

In the story of PayPal. Looking back on the history of online payments, chapter 4-3 notes that PayPal "was originally conceived by founders Max Levchin, Luke Nosek and Peter Thiel as a new digital currency, but quickly moved to become an internet-compatible payments processor" [2]. → Commerce and trust

In a question in the conclusion. Chapter 7-1 asks: "Should we, as Libertarians like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreesen, and Balaji Srinivasan would have us do, liberate individuals to be atomistic agents, free of constraints or responsibilities?" [4] The book poses this question, together with the path of leaving the future to technologists, as a path it does not choose. → Monist atomism, Marc Andreessen

Weyl's placement. In a 2022 essay, Glen Weyl listed Thiel and Masters's Zero to One among the foundational texts of "corporate libertarianism", one of the political ideologies of the twenty-first century, and put Thiel first among its representative figures [5].

Main ideas

From here on, this section draws on Thiel's own writings and statements.

Escaping politics (2009). In "The Education of a Libertarian", a contribution to Cato Unbound, Thiel wrote that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible. The great task for libertarians today, he argued, is to find an escape from politics in all its forms [3].

The means Thiel had in mind was not to go through politics, but to create spaces for freedom with new technology. He named three. The first is cyberspace; the original vision of PayPal, he writes, was to create a world currency free from government control. The second is outer space, and the third is "seasteading", creating places to live on the sea [3].

Technological stagnation (2011). In "The End of the Future", Thiel called the stagnation of real wages and incomes since 1973 the most important economic event of recent times. His reading was that progress in computers and failures in energy had roughly cancelled each other out [6].

Without technology, zero-sum (2015). In "Against Edenism", Thiel writes that technology means doing more with less. Without technological progress, the world becomes one in which one person's gain is another's loss. Without growth, he argues, it is not clear whether capitalism could function, and representative democracy, which needs compromises that benefit both sides, is unlikely to keep functioning [7].

Fear of a world government (2025). In a conversation with Ross Douthat of The New York Times, Thiel said that if we talk about existential risks to humanity, perhaps we should also talk about the risk of a different bad outcome: one totalitarian state for the whole world. His question was whether calling for a world government that controls every computer and logs every keystroke, in order to prevent dangerous AI, would not be jumping toward something worse. Thiel links this to the Christian idea of the Antichrist [8]. → Superintelligence

What is debated

The contrast with the book Plurality. The book portrays the libertarianism of Thiel and others as the path of freeing individuals from constraints and responsibilities, and sets it apart from its own ⿻ (Plurality) as a different path [1][4].
Weyl's review "Sovereign Nonsense". In 2022, Weyl wrote a review criticizing The Sovereign Individual. He named Thiel first among the technologists who praise the book as prescient, and argued that although it takes the form of prophecy, it is really a work of advocacy. In closing, Weyl wrote that neither the technological future nor the society it shapes is predetermined, and that besides the two views Thiel describes, AI supremacy and cryptographic supremacy, there are other paths, one of which is Audrey Tang's digital democracy in Taiwan [9].
A phrase about crypto and AI. TIME magazine's 2024 feature on Tang, explaining that Plurality opposes both AI (which helps top-down control) and blockchains (which fragment society), cited Thiel's 2018 remark that crypto is libertarian and AI is communist [10]. At the Oxford Union in 2025, when the moderator asked whether she agreed with this frame, Audrey Tang partly agreed: "if you mean communism as absolute centralized state control and redistribution, then yes, I think the current development of large transformer models, which cost a lot of electricity to train, is naturally gravitating toward this over-centralization of power." She then pointed to a different path: Taiwan supports "more than 150 different smaller models", each for a particular industry or culture, rather than one huge model [11].
In the Japanese-speaking world. In a conversation with Tatsuru Uchida, Sunji Lee offered the view that technocracy like Elon Musk's and libertarians like Thiel have, as Big Tech, entered the heart of the American state [12].

Sources

Plurality, 2-0 "Information Technology and Democracy: A Widening Gulf" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/2-0/eng/ ［CC0］
Plurality, 4-3 "Commerce and Trust" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/4-3/eng/ ［CC0］
Peter Thiel, "The Education of a Libertarian" (Cato Unbound, 2009-04-13) — https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian/
Plurality, 7-1 "Conclusion" — https://www.plurality.net/v/chapters/7-1/eng/ ［CC0］
E. Glen Weyl, "Political Ideologies for the 21st Century" (2022-02-17) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/political-ideologies-for-the-21st-century/
Peter Thiel, "The End of the Future" (National Review, 2011-10-03) — https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thiel/
Peter Thiel, "Against Edenism" (First Things, 2015) — https://firstthings.com/against-edenism/
Ross Douthat, "Peter Thiel and the Antichrist" (The New York Times, "Interesting Times", 2025-06-26) — https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antichrist-ross-douthat.html
E. Glen Weyl, "Sovereign Nonsense" (2022-01-18) — https://www.radicalxchange.org/updates/blog/sovereign-nonsense/
Will Henshall, "Inside Audrey Tang's Plan to Align Technology with Democracy" (TIME, 2024-05-20) — https://time.com/6979012/audrey-tang-interview-plurality-democracy/
Audrey Tang, "Oxford Union Talk" (2025-11-03) — https://archive.tw/2025-11-03-oxford-union-talk ［CC0］
Tatsuru Uchida × Sunji Lee, "日本人が失った知的態度「ためらい」とは？" (What is "hesitation", the intellectual attitude the Japanese have lost?) (Shueisha Shinsho Plus, 2025-06-18, in Japanese) — https://shinsho-plus.shueisha.co.jp/interview/uchida_lee/30957

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