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Peter Andreas Thiel
(1967 - living) Germany - U.S.A.

Peter Thiel

Businessman

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Born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany and raised in Foster City, California, Thiel studied 20th century philosophy as an undergraduate at Stanford University. An avowed libertarian, he founded The Stanford Review, now the university's main conservative/libertarian newspaper.

After earning his J.D. from Stanford in 1992, Thiel clerked for Judge J.L. Edmondson of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, practiced law and later traded derivatives. He eventually founded Thiel Capital Management, a multistrategy fund, in 1996. After co-founding PayPal, Thiel took the company public on Feb. 15, 2002, and sold it to eBay later that year.

Immediately after the sale, Thiel relaunched his fund with a new name, Clarium, pursuing a global macro strategy. In 2005, Clarium was honored as global macro fund of the year by both MarHedge and Absolute Return, two trade magazines.

In addition to Facebook, Thiel has made early-stage investments in several startups, including Slide, LinkedIn, Friendster, Palantir Technologies, Joyent and IronPort. Slide, LinkedIn, and IronPort were each founded by colleagues of Thiel's from PayPal.

Thiel's cultural pursuits have recently included executive producing "Thank You for Smoking," a feature film based on the Christopher Buckley novel of the same name. He is a chess master. He is also the co-author of the book, The Diversity Myth: 'Multiculturalism' and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, and has contributed articles to The Wall Street Journal, First Things, Forbes, and Policy Review,. In 2006, he won the Herman Lay Award for Entrepreneurship. In 2007, he was honored as a Young Global leader by the World Economic Forum as one of the 250 most distinguished leaders age 40 and under. Peter Thiel is No. 10 in Out's list of powerful gays.

In December 2007, he endorsed Ron Paul for President. On April 15, 2008, he contributed $100,000 to American Solutions for Winning the Future, Newt Gingrich's conservative 527 group.

Thiel's boyfriend is Matt Danzeisen, a vice president at BlackRock.

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Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - et alii

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