Peter Thiel Net Worth

What is Peter Thiel's net worth?

Peter Thiel is a German-born American entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, and venture capitalist who has a net worth of $23 billion. After earning degrees in philosophy and law from Stanford University, Thiel briefly worked in law and finance before launching the hedge fund Thiel Capital and later co-founding Confinity in 1998. Confinity merged with Elon Musk's X.com to become PayPal, which was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion. Thiel walked away with $60 million and used that windfall to build what became one of Silicon Valley's most powerful investment networks.

He made another major fortune several years later when he became the first outside investor in a company that was then called TheFaceBook.com. In 2004, Thiel gave Mark Zuckerberg, who was by that point on sabbatical from his Sophomore year at Harvard, $500,000 in exchange for a 10.2% stake in the nascent social network company. Peter sold the vast majority of his shares at the company's IPO and ultimately earned $1 billion off his $500,000 investment. On the other hand, he could have earned closer to $180 billion had he continued to hold that 10% stake to the present. Even after selling most of his shares, Peter continued to sit on the company's Board of Directors through 2022.

Peter is also the founder of a venture capital firm called Founders Fund, which invested in companies like SpaceX, Airbnb, and Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company he co-founded and led for years. Palantir went public in 2020 and is a key contractor for the U.S. government and military.

Thiel is known for his contrarian views on technology, globalization, and politics. A self-described libertarian and critic of conventional thinking in Silicon Valley, he has funded research into anti-aging, artificial intelligence, and "seasteading"—building autonomous communities at sea. In 2016, Thiel made headlines for his surprise support of Donald Trump and for secretly funding Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker Media, a personal vendetta that ultimately bankrupted the company.

Early Life and Education

Peter Andreas Thiel was born in Frankfurt am Main, West Germany, on October 11, 1967. The family migrated to Cleveland when Peter was one. They moved several more times for his father's work, including to South Africa, before eventually settling in Foster City, California. He attended Bowditch Middle School in Foster City, followed by San Mateo High School, then Stanford, and then Stanford Law School.

Upon graduating from Stanford Law, Thiel clerked for a judge, then moved to New York City, where he got a job as a securities lawyer. In 1993, he began working as a derivatives trader at Credit Suisse. In 1996, as the dot-com boom was beginning to grow, he moved back to the Bay Area, where he raised $1 million from friends and family to launch a venture capital company.

PayPal

In the summer of 1998, a 23-year-old Stanford PhD student named Max Levchin attended a lecture being given by Peter. The two struck up a conversation afterward, bonding over their mutual interest in encryption and digital finance. Thiel quickly agreed to fund Levchin's idea: a payment system that allowed users to beam money between PalmPilot devices. The project became Confinity, and Thiel joined as co-founder, investor, and eventually Chairman and CEO.

The company leased an office space in downtown Palo Alto. By total coincidence, a rival digital payment company called X.com was leasing space on the same floor. X.com was founded by Elon Musk. Unlike PayPal's plan to facilitate payments between Palm devices, X.com was working on a system for sending payments over the fledgling World Wide Web.

As competition between the two companies intensified—and as venture capital spending spiraled—Confinity and X.com agreed to merge in 2000. Initially, Elon Musk became CEO of the combined entity, while Thiel stepped aside. However, after internal tensions and concerns over Musk's leadership style, the board voted to replace him later that year. Thiel returned as CEO, re-centered the company's focus on email-based payments, and rebranded the entire business as PayPal.

In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. At the time of the sale, Thiel's 3.7% stake was worth approximately $60 million. Musk's 11.7% stake netted him roughly $175 million. The deal marked one of the first major tech exits of the dot-com era—and served as the launchpad for what would later be called the "PayPal Mafia."

PayPal Mafia members and notable sales:

• Reid Hoffman

  – COO of PayPal

  – Founded: LinkedIn (sold to Microsoft for $26.2B)

  – Partner at: Greylock Partners

  – Early investor in: Facebook, Airbnb, Zynga

• David Sacks

  – COO of PayPal

  – Founded: Yammer (sold to Microsoft for $1.2B)

  – Early executive at: Zenefits

  – Co-host of: All-In Podcast

  – General Partner at: Craft Ventures

• Roelof Botha

  – CFO of PayPal

  – Partner at: Sequoia Capital

  – Investor in: YouTube, Instagram, Square, Tumblr, Eventbrite

• Steve Chen

  – Engineer at PayPal

  – Co-founded: YouTube (sold to Google for $1.65B)

• Chad Hurley

  – Designer at PayPal

  – Co-founded: YouTube

• Jawed Karim

  – Engineer at PayPal

  – Co-founded: YouTube

  – Uploaded the first-ever YouTube video: "Me at the zoo"

• Jeremy Stoppelman

  – Engineer at PayPal

  – Co-founded: Yelp

  – CEO of Yelp through its IPO and beyond

• Russel Simmons

  – Engineer at PayPal

  – Co-founded: Yelp

• Keith Rabois

  – Executive at PayPal

  – Early executive at: LinkedIn, Square, Slide

  – Partner at: Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund

  – Co-founded: OpenStore and Coast

Facebook

In August 2004, Thiel became the first outside investor in Facebook by writing a $500,000 check for a 10.2% stake. At the time, Facebook was still a scrappy startup run out of a small Palo Alto house. Thiel's investment not only gave the company its first major cash infusion but also added instant credibility, helping it attract future investors and key hires. He joined Facebook's board of directors and served as a close advisor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg during the company's early years.

When Facebook went public in May 2012, Thiel cashed out a large portion of his stake, selling $638 million worth of shares in the IPO. Just three months later, in August 2012, he sold nearly all of his remaining equity for another $395 million. All in, Thiel turned a $500,000 investment into over $1 billion in cash. For context, as of mid-2025, a 10% stake in Meta Platforms (Facebook's parent company) would be worth around $180 billion.

In addition to Facebook, Thiel has made early investments in a wide range of successful startups, including LinkedIn, Yelp, Stripe, Quora, Yammer, and SpaceX, further solidifying his reputation as one of Silicon Valley's savviest venture capitalists.

Clarium Capital Management

Following the PayPal sale, Thiel used $10 million of his windfall to launch Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund based in San Francisco. Initially, Clarium was a breakout success, reportedly managing over $7 billion at its peak in the mid-2000s. The fund made big bets on interest rates, energy, and currency trends, and benefited early from Thiel's contrarian instincts.

However, Clarium's performance faltered in the late 2000s, suffering major losses during the financial crisis and afterward. Assets under management dwindled, and the fund became far less active in the 2010s. Still, Clarium helped establish Thiel as a serious financial player beyond the tech world—and gave him the capital and freedom to pursue his next venture.

In 2003, Thiel co-founded Palantir Technologies, a data analytics company originally developed with U.S. intelligence agencies in mind. Clarium helped seed Palantir's early funding, and Thiel has remained on its board ever since.

Palantir Shares

Palantir Technologies went public in 2020, giving Thiel yet another massive paper windfall. As of the company's most recent SEC filings, Thiel directly owns approximately 71 million shares of Palantir. In late 2024, those shares were valued at $5.3 billion. By mid-2025, their value had more than doubled, soaring to roughly $11 billion amid a broader rally in AI and defense-tech stocks. That stake places Thiel among Palantir's largest individual shareholders and cements his deep financial and strategic ties to the company he helped build.

Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

Other Achievements

Thanks to his contributions to technology, entrepreneurship, and finance, Thiel has earned various recognitions and awards, including one by the World Economic Forum, which honored Peter as a Young Global Leader. In addition to the above, he has been an active participant in numerous philanthropic, academic, and cultural causes. Primarily a supporter of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Peter supports the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the medical charity SENS Foundation, as well.

Peter remains active at his alma mater and has taught at Stanford Law School. As for his Thiel Foundation, it gives young entrepreneurs $100,000 over two years to skip college and pursue their business ideas instead. While he is encouraging students to choose business over college, Peter himself received a BA in Philosophy from Stanford University and a JD from Stanford Law School.

$5 Billion Roth IRA

An investigative report by ProPublica published in June 2021 revealed that Peter Thiel's Roth IRA account is worth around $5 billion. How did he pull that off?

Peter bought his founder equity shares in PayPal with money from his Roth IRA. He paid $1,700 for 1.7 million shares at $0.001 per share. When eBay bought PayPal in 2002 for $1.5 billion, those shares were worth $28.5 million. Thanks to the intricacies of a Roth IRA, the gain was entirely tax-free. Over the next two decades, Thiel used that $28.5 million to make a number of additional investments, INCLUDING the $500,000 check he wrote to Mark Zuckerberg to buy 10% of Facebook in 2004. As we detailed previously, Thiel ultimately sold off his entire Facebook stake for around $1 billion all-in. Over the years, he has continued to invest in other startups, to the point where the value of his Roth IRA reached $5 billion by the time ProPublica published its investigation. As an aside, had Peter held on to his 10% stake in Facebook today, that investment alone in his tax-free Roth account would be worth $80-$90 billion.

Hulk Hogan Gawker Lawsuit

In one of the most dramatic chapters of Peter Thiel's public life, he secretly financed the lawsuit that ultimately bankrupted Gawker Media. The case stemmed from Gawker's 2012 publication of a sex tape featuring wrestler Hulk Hogan. Hogan sued for invasion of privacy and was awarded $140 million in damages in 2016, including $10 million personally owed by Gawker's founder, Nick Denton. It later emerged that Thiel had been quietly funding Hogan's legal team as part of a personal vendetta—Gawker had outed Thiel as gay in a 2007 article. Thiel viewed the site as emblematic of toxic, irresponsible journalism and saw the lawsuit as a way to hold it accountable. The revelation sparked a national debate about press freedom, billionaire influence, and the ethics of third-party litigation funding. While controversial, the move showcased Thiel's willingness to play the long game in his battles and his determination to shape the media landscape by unconventional means.

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