The Contrarian on Trial

Peter Thiel's ideas, set against what he did, from a Stanford student paper to PayPal, Facebook, Palantir, the Gawker lawsuit and Donald Trump. Where the record bears the ideas out, the course says so; where it parts from them, and from his teacher Girard, it shows where.

A course on the thought of Peter Thiel.

Philosophy · Technology

What you will learn

  • Describe how the Stanford Review tied small campus disputes to national politics and raised money from alumni.
  • Explain how The Diversity Myth applies Girard's ideas of interdividual identity, ressentiment and ritual expulsion to campus denunciations.
  • Compare the book's account of the Rabois affair with what the record shows happened to Rabois afterwards.
  • Explain how Confinity and X.com came to mirror each other during the eBay payments war, using the bonus race and the office slogans as evidence
  • Describe how the fifty-fifty merger was reached and why both sides argued that a payments network tends toward monopoly
  • Identify the moves after the merger, from the hedge fund proposal to the boardroom coup, that show Thiel acting as a trader and tactician
  • State the conditions attached to Thiel's 2004 loan to Facebook and the stake and board seat he ended with
  • Explain how network effects, a small starting market and the power law each appear in Thiel's account of the Facebook investment

Course outline

  1. The Paper and the Mob — Follows Thiel from the 1987 fight over Stanford's Western Culture course, through the student paper he founded, to the 1995 book in which he and David Sacks read campus protests through René Girard's…
  2. The Rivals Who Merged — PayPal began as a scheme to beam money between handheld computers, fell into a ruinous copying war with Elon Musk's X.com, and escaped it by merging into a single network. This lesson follows that…
  3. The Dorm Room Bet — This lesson follows Thiel's 2004 loan to a Harvard dorm website, which became the clearest proof of his claim that one venture bet can outweigh all the others. It then sets that proof beside what he…
  4. The Seeing Stones — After PayPal, Thiel built three institutions out of his ideas: a data company for the national security state, a venture fund sold on its daring, and a fellowship that paid teenagers to leave…
  5. The Patient Plot — This lesson follows Peter Thiel's secret campaign against Gawker Media, from a blog comment in 2007 to a $140 million Florida verdict in 2016. It shows how he won by choosing a plaintiff a jury would…
  6. The Least Contrarian Bet — This lesson follows Peter Thiel's backing of Donald Trump from the 2016 convention stage to his break with Trump years later. It shows that the bet followed from Thiel's diagnosis of stagnation and…
  7. The Cure Left Unused — Girard's last book warned that the modern world is heading toward catastrophe, and his own words counsel giving up rivalry, distrusting anyone who claims to stand outside imitation, and refusing to…

Works read in this course

  • The Tempest — Shakespeare's play, in which the servant Caliban sings of freedom while trading his old master for a drunken butler he worships as a god; Thiel and Sacks take from it the warning that a crowd can mistake a new obedience for liberation.
  • Atlas Shrugged — A novel by Ayn Rand (1957) that PayPal's early staff read as close to required, alongside Cryptonomicon; Thiel takes from it, on Chafkin's account, part of the libertarian ethos he imposed on the office.
  • The Lord of the Rings — Tolkien's novel, whose seeing stones let their holders watch far-off events and are used chiefly by the villain to spy; Thiel took from it the name Palantir, and his company took from it its picture of itself as 'saving the Shire'.
  • Zero to One — Thiel's 2014 book on startups, written with Blake Masters, in which he set down the rule that computers are 'complements for humans, not substitutes'.
  • The Contrarian — Max Chafkin's 2021 unauthorized biography of Thiel.
  • The Philosopher in the Valley — Michael Steinberger's 2025 book about Alex Karp and Palantir.
  • Discourses on Livy — Machiavelli's commentary on the Roman historian Livy, whose chapter on conspiracies Holiday reads as teaching that some situations leave only one option, secret coordinated action against a powerful enemy, a lesson he says Thiel absorbed.
  • Achever Clausewitz — Girard's last book, a conversation with Chantre published in English as Battling to the End, which reads Clausewitz's escalation to extremes as the shape of a modern world that has lost its sacrificial brakes; Thiel takes its apocalyptic frame but not its claim that no one can halt the escalation alone.
  • Deceit, Desire, and the Novel — Girard's first book, which argues through the great novels that our desires are copied from models and attacks the Romantic lie of personal autonomy; Thiel takes the theory of copied desire while still urging readers to think for themselves.

Built from

This course was built from 8 books.

  • Max Chafkin, The Contrarian (2021)
  • Jimmy Soni, The Founders (2022)
  • Ryan Holiday, Conspiracy (2018)
  • Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley (2025)
  • David Sacks and Peter Thiel, The Diversity Myth (1995)
  • Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One (2014)
  • René Girard, Evolution and Conversion; Battling to the End
  • Cynthia Haven, Evolution of Desire, A Life of René Girard (2018)

Terms introduced

the PayPal mafia, power law, champerty, the Thiel Fellowship

Part of the Simposeum course library.