"The Contrarian" by Max Chafkin

Above: "The Contrarian - Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power" - Max Chafkin - 336 pages.

Being exposed to numerous of these brilliant, groundbreaking, idiosyncratic innovators, like Palmer Luckey, enabled my understanding of what Peter Thiel's real contribution to our world was: distinctively successful identification of talented visionaries with ideas that would change the world and taking the financial risk of underwriting their dreams. Sadly, this wasn't the focus of Chafkin's book.

I completed reading this book today.

Peter 'n Mwah (sic)

After presiding, as CEO, over the sale of Miami, Florida based American Savings of Florida to First Union Bank in 1995, more to kill time than anything, I signed up to attend a political conference in Miami..."The Dark Ages Weekend." The weekend was a conservative spoof on a well-known liberal retreat called "The Rennaissance Weekend," attended, in Hilton Head, South Carolina, by the Clintons and other left-wing glitterati.

"The Dark Ages Weekend" organizers were young conservatives who over time have become serious political players on the right: Dinesh D'Souza, Laura Ingraham, and Newt Gingrich. If the left is "Rennaissance," said these brash kids, we'll be "Dark Ages!" The Dark Ages Weekend was a onetime event. In subsequent years, the event's mailing list was picked up by David Horowitz Freedom Center and an annual Conservative conference was relaunched, renamed "The Weekend."

I had a single ticket to the "Dark Ages Weekend," and because I lived in Miami, I didn't have to book a room at the Doral Country Club where the event was held. I don't remember much about the event but for two exceptions. First, I was "cut" out of a conversation by Arriana Huffington (posing as a Conservative in those days), who, after determining that I was a political nobody, quickly sought more interesting people. Second, I met a very interesting young man, who, like most of the conference organizers, was still in his twenties.

The final night keynote speaker at Dark Ages Weekend was Newt Gingrich. I entered the conference room and looked for an open seat. Tables toward the front of the room were filling up. In the far, rear, "southeast" corner of the ball room was a table, empty but for one young man. I asked if I could join him. He said, "sure." The young man introduced himself as Peter Thiel.

I learned that night in 1995 that young Peter was a conservative, prodigy regular on William Buckley's PBS TV show, "The Firing Line," that he had written a book, "The Diversity Myth," deriding political correctness at his alma mater, Stanford (undergrad and law); that he was bored with his current employment at the tony New York law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell; and that he intended to start a hedge fund that would arbitrage Japanese yen. No one else joined the table. Peter was personable, comfortable, talkative and open that evening. I remember thoroughly enjoying our chat. After dinner, and Newt's speech on "Contract with America," Peter and I exchanged contact information. Peter had offered me a chance to be a "friends and family" investor in his new hedge fund. I sensed something idiosyncratically puissant about this "kid." I took him up on his offer. He would need my contact info to start the process.

Circa 1996 I became a charter investor in Peter's Clarium Fund. Through 1999, about the time of the founding of PayPal, I would enjoy an occasional telephone chat with Peter. We talked about the Clarium fund performance and conservative politics. During that period, Peter paid a visit to Park City and stayed a couple of nights with us in "The Yellow House." As an aside, Peter is not the only celebrity that has stayed in our Park City old town home. In the early aughts, after we moved TIMDT's new home creation in Iron Canyon and rented The Yellow House to the Imhoff's, parents of Douglas Imhoff, husband of Vice President Kamela Harris. Doug and Kamela spent a couple of nights at The Yellow House with Doug's parents. I should put a brass plaque on The Yellow House noting the two luminaries that stayed there!

The early years performance of the Clarium Fund showed positive results, though I am not sure that the fund's early success was all due to arbitraging Japanese Yen as Peter had suggested to me at our Miami colloquy. I decided to cash out of Clarium circa 2002 and apply the proceeds to the construction of our new home in Park City. My timing was impeccable, because shortly after withdrawing my stake, Clarium value declined significantly and never became a long term, viable investment vehicle. I didn't game it. It was a lucky guess. Would there be a future opportunity to invest with Peter? I didn't know.

As Peter's notoriety grew with his success at PayPal my direct contact with him atrophied. Notwithstanding, I received an invitation in 2003 from Peter's new private equity fund, Founders Fund, to become a "family and friends" investor. I took advantage of that invitation and have since invested in five of Founders Fund's funds.

Circa 2009, I made an appointment to see Peter at his Founder's Fund Presidio office in San Franciso. I had motorcycled to San Francisco to attend the Limited Partner's Meeting of the Sverica private equity fund, where I was an investor. On a BMW K1200 RS motorcycle, I rode from the Union Square Marriott to Peter's Presidio office. I was told by the receptionist that Peter was very busy, but he wanted me to talk to one of his associates. I was nonplussed when into the reception room ambled a young man, who couldn't have been more than twenty-five, dressed in faded blue jeans, tennis shoes, and a white t-shirt. The kid, a Founders Fund employee whose name I don't remember, was one of Peter's Stanford graduate acolytes, part of a group of Thiel followers who would in later years, be known as The Thielverse. I can't remember the substance of our half hour conversation. I remember leaving the meeting thinking, "wow, there are some really smart young people in Peter's organization."

I started attending annual Founders Funds Limited Partner Meetings in San Francisco around 2010. At those meetings I would always find five minutes to talk to Peter at cocktails. I was never hesitant to go up to talk to Peter and when I did, he always seemed welcoming as he greeted me by name.

Principals of Founder's Fund investments would be invited to make presentations at the San Francisco limited partners meeting. Take Palmer Luckey, for example, founder of Oculus VR and later, founder of Anduril Industries, a defense technology company focused on autonomous drones and sensors for military applications. Founders was a principal investor in Anduril. Palmer addressed the meetings wearing a Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts and flip flops. He could have very well been that friendly guy you were having a beer with at the next-door bar. Today, he is a billionaire. Being exposed to numerous of these brilliant, groundbreaking, idiosyncratic innovators, like Palmer Luckey, enabled my understanding of what Peter Thiel's real contribution to our world was: distinctively successful identification of talented visionaries with ideas that would change the world and taking the financial risk of underwriting their dreams.

At Founders Fund Limited Partners meetings, being around visionaries and risk takers and witnessing firsthand the apex of private equity investing was a real shot in the arm for me. Peter Thiel's PayPal "friend," Elon Musk, was a guest speaker at one of the Founders Fund Limited Partner dinners I attended. During Q and A I got ahold of the mike and asked Musk, whose talk to the meeting was on his company SpaceX, what he thought of the movie, "The Martian." Musk seemed to really love the question and he waxed impassionedly for several minutes on how such movies enable the viewing public to catch the vision of the possibilities and potential of space travel.

I invited Peter to speak to our Park City Coffee Group, La Societe Deux Magots (LSDM). He spoke to us via Zoom in the high panic coronavirus period on 16 June 2020. Peter's subject was a theme for which he has become well known: Stagnating Technological Progress. I've cited below, in italics, an excerpt from the LSDM meeting speaker notes:

It seems to me the current form of progress we see is full of banalities – imagine a university president standing up to tell you how “things are improving” and “getting better by the day”. Not attempting to quantify that in any measurable way. This happens all the time today. And think about the dichotomy of the “World of Bits” where things are fine and improving – a sense of progress – and the “World of Atoms” where things are clearly not accelerating if they are progressing at all.

In January of this year (2022) I attended a fundraiser at Peter's home in Miami Beach for Wyoming House of Representatives candidate, Trump endorsed, Harriet Hageman. I sat next to Peter at dinner and thought hard about questions I could ask him. What was his position on ESG? Bitterly against. What was the future for blue jurisdictions where crime was on the rise? California? Don't sell them short. New York City? It will take a long time to turn around.

Chafkin's Woefully Inadequate Book

ln the Thielverse, if I'm even there at all, I'm a small rock orbiting beyond Pluto. Still, knowing Peter, at least from a distance, I was very interested in reading Chafkin's biography. Peter was not interviewed for this book, though Chafkin had known Peter and interacted with him periodically during the preceding fifteen years. It is believed that Peter was not particularly happy with the book.

Unfortunately, in his biography of Peter Thiel, Chafkin focused, not on the remarkable accomplishments of Peter as an investor and philosopher of innovation, but on the trivial: Peter's personal "inconsistencies." To wit: Peter identifies as a libertarian, but the company he founded, Palantir, sells software to the government that advances the surveillance state. Peter identifies as a Christian. Yet, he purports to believe in science enabling eternal life. Peter is a tech investor... founder of PayPal... charter investor and former board member of Facebook, yet he rails against social media and declares that tech progress has plateaued. Chafkin notes Peter's public behavior as being diffident, yet Peter aggressively took down online publication Gawker for a sleight. Peter is a gay Silicon Valley eminence grise who pillories West Coast progressivism. Peter is a proponent of "sea steading," a form of individual sovereignty, while remaining a strong supporter of Donald Trump. Yada yada.

Considering Peter's "inconsistencies," Chafkin implies that Peter is a soulless opportunist and an intellectual fraud. The tone of the book suggests Chafkin has an ax to grind and that he'd made up his mind about Peter before writing the book. Chafkin reminds me of a conservative "never Trumper" who can only highlight DJT's perceived personal weaknesses without acknowledging Trump's myriad of big picture contributions and accomplishments...which latter, of course, is the true measure of a person's greatness. Chafkin's account of Peter Thiel reads more like a cheap shot than a balanced account.

Chafkin takes off on Peter for deriding 1990s Stanford as politically correct in his book, "The Diversity Myth," when it is common knowledge that political correctness was as entrenched at Stanford in the early '90's as it is today. Chafkin criticizes Palantir as having a fake offering. General H. R. McMaster, Trump's national security advisor, didn't think so when he authorized use of Palantir software at the Battle of Tal Afar in Iraq in 2017. Chafkin pans Peter's program to offer $100 thousand scholarships to entrepreneurial kids if they stay out of college. The initiative is a charitable effort. Why ridicule it? Chafkin ties Thiel to racism on the strength of the fact that PayPal had no black employees in its early years. Peter, Chafkin points out, supported Ron Paul's presidential campaign. Paul has been tied to racist newsletters. Chafkin raises no proof of racism other than Peter's association with conservative figures.

Chafkin sneers at Peter's early support for a "protect the vulnerable, and otherwise get on with normal life" Coronavirus public health strategy. This position, challenging the then prevailing hardline, lockdown position of blue state governors, was put forward for public debate in October 2020 by The Great Barrington Declaration, lead authorship by three eminent epidemiologists, including Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Suneptra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard. NIH Head Francis Collins, echoed by NIAID Head Anthony Fauchi, rather than engage in a healthy debate on public health strategy, dismissed the Great Barrington authors as "fringe epidemiologists." Recent CDC guidelines on Coronavirus virtually mirror the Great Barrington proposals. Peter presciently followed the science, while Chafkin, driven by false narrative, can only show stereotypical, sneering, liberal dismissiveness.

A chapter of the book talks about Peter's role as a ground floor investor and later a director at Facebook. Some said that Mark Zuckerberg retained Peter as a board member because Peter was a known conservative and that, as long as Trump was in power, Zuckerberg would benefit from Peter's access to the President. Chafkin acknowledges that, counter to widespread perception that Facebook suppresses Conservative voices, that Facebook was an enabler for Trump's 2016 victory and that Conservative platforms are given wide reign at the social media giant. To be sure, Conservative Facebook posters are harassed by so-called "fact checkers." A couple of weeks ago I was kicked off Facebook for two days after posting a Dr. Robert Malone piece citing UK studies claiming disproportionately high mRNA vaccine deaths in the UK. Fact checker haircutting notwithstanding, using Facebook, Conservatives have a broadcast platform not available to them prior to the advent of social media. Ben Shapiro's Conservative Facebook site, The Daily Wire, leads all other platforms, conservative and otherwise, in total clicks on Facebook. Facebook's qualified tolerance of Conservative platforms is a source of consternation to liberal Facebook users and Facebook employees. After Trump's defeat in 2020, and likely considering the egregiousness of "Zuckerbucks" to tilt the outcome in favor of Biden, Thiel left Facebook's board.

Of late, Thiel has become a visible supporter of Trump endorsed political candidates. It is possible that after the 2022 elections, three senators, "members" of the Thielverse, will have been elected. Josh Hawley is already a senator from Missouri. Thiel acolytes J.D. Vance and Blake Masters are Republican senate nominees from, respectively, Ohio and Arizona. Chafkin grudgingly acknowledges Theil's impact in pushing MAGA candidates forward and Thiel's success in building a large coterie of devoted acolytes which form a pool for candidates to run to political office or to lead Thiel related businesses.

I look forward to the biography of Peter Thiel that portrays him as he really is, an innovation thought leader and a leading investor seeking ways to create new things in a world where technological progress is stagnating. By concentrating his biography on tangential matters, Chafkin misses the whole point of Peter Thiel.

My meeting Peter Thiel in 1995 was not calculated, but serendipitous. As Tony Soprano said in Season One of The Sopranos, "you make your own luck."