At the end of 2020, Peter Thiel saw the time to expand his portfolio.
The investor no longer just gambled with innovative technologies, but put his money on something else: a new generation of Trumpists.
Thiel follows the rules that he has set himself.
He identifies growth markets and disruptive business models.
Only the magnitude has changed.
It's no longer just about dominating the market, but about power in the Republican Party.
Thiel wants what Donald Trump has been denied: He wants to change America's political course in the long term.
Majid Sattar
Political correspondent for North America based in Washington.
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“In a way, companies are like states,” writes Thiel in his start-up bible “Zero to one”, which will be discussed later.
Wrong decisions are difficult to correct, possibly only after a crisis or bankruptcy.
The most important thing for every founder is which partners they choose.
Thiel has a knack for it.
In 1999, during the dot-com boom, he founded the online payment service Paypal - with people who are now known in Silicon Valley as the "Paypal Mafia": among them Elon Musk, who later founded Space X and Tesla;
the head behind Linked-In was also one of them, as were the three YouTube founders.
In 2002, they sold the company to eBay for $1.5 billion.
Thiel himself, whose fortune is said to be worth more than nine billion dollars, then founded Palantir, a data analysis company.
His customers mainly include American security agencies.
In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, made an early investment.
Again Thiel had the right nose.
It was the time after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when the intelligence services relied on big data.
Thiel was also the first external investor in Facebook.
Everything he touches turns to gold.
The 54-year-old German-American appears with this self-confidence.
He belongs to the tech billionaire caste who would not have gotten where he wanted to without a certain delusion of grandeur.
They still have big plans: Musk wants to go to Mars, Jeff Bezos wants to make space habitable, Google co-founder Larry Page is investing in projects that involve immortality.
Thiel is also interested in many things.
Political disruption suddenly seemed possible
But he doesn't make headlines with extravagances like Musk and Bezos.
He doesn't play god.
His ambitions are earthly.
He's the nerd among the Silicon Valley boys.
And the biggest critic of the left-liberal, woken world in Palo Alto, in which a culture of failure is celebrated, as Thiel laments.
In 2018 he moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles where he lives with his husband and two children.
His political commitment was initially conventional.
Thiel, who describes himself as libertarian or conservative-libertarian, supported traditional Republicans: in 2008, for example, John McCain as the presidential candidate after he had spoken out in favor of the libertarian Ron Paul in the primaries.
In 2016, he initially relied on the former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, but ultimately on another entrepreneur: Donald Trump.
He donated $1.25 million to him in October 2016 - at a time when his campaign seemed to have collapsed after the media released the Access Hollywood tape ("Grab 'em by the pussy").
Thiel said Trump must be taken seriously, but not literally.
It was one of Trump's biggest donations.
Others from Silicon Valley had opposed Trump.