Net worth: $28.9 Billion (Forbes, 4/16/26)
Who is Peter Thiel?
- Peter Thiel built his fortune co-founding PayPal and Palantir Technologies. He followed those endeavors with an early bet on Facebook in 2004, and has since spent decades using his wealth to reshape Republican politics in his image, bankrolling candidates and causes that advance his idiosyncratic blend of libertarianism, nationalism, and authoritarian impulse.
- Thiel has been a mega-donor to Republican candidates since 2000, though he picks his spots strategically. He donated approximately $1.5 million to pro-Trump groups in 2016, vouched for Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and joined Trump’s transition team that same year, raising ethical concerns given how much Silicon Valley, and Thiel’s own portfolio companies, stood to gain from light-touch tech regulation and lucrative government contracts.
- Thiel’s most significant political investment may be JD Vance, whom he mentored, employed, introduced to Trump, and then bankrolled with a record $15 million in his 2022 Ohio Senate race, the largest single donation to a Senate candidate in history. Thiel was vital to Vance’s VP nomination: Vance had been critical of Trump in the past, and Thiel was instrumental in smoothing over the relationship.
- Thiel’s political philosophies are problematic. In 2009, he published an essay claiming that women being given the right to vote was a blow to libertarianism, and in another essay wrote “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In 2014, Thiel argued that monopolies, not competitive free markets, are the engines of innovation. He has also derided diversity initiatives and argued that “political correctness” could turn the US to a “totalitarian one-party state” like North Korea. Politico described Thiel’s ideology as “a mishmash of libertarianism and nationalism that has led to his interest in cryptocurrency, funding of immigration hardliners, support for seasteading—floating autonomous ocean communities that are not subject to government regulations or taxes.”
- Biographer Max Chafkin described Thiel’s political impulses as authoritarian, saying his views are “super-nationalistic, it’s a longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive, or, you know, a dictator, in other words.”
- Some of Thiel’s philosophical inspiration comes from Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer turned blogger who has advocated for replacing democracy with a techno-authoritarian state, where the government is “run like a corporation, with the president as its ‘CEO.’”
- Palantir’s surveillance technology exemplifies a techno-authoritarian state: a privately governed system shaping behavior while evading public oversight.
- Thiel donated $10 million to Blake Masters’ 2022 Senate campaign. Masters has been described as a conspiracy theorist and “hard-line nationalist.” In an interview, Masters named Lee Kuan Yew, the authoritarian founder of Singapore, as one of his favorite historical figures.
- Some of Thiel’s philosophical inspiration comes from Curtis Yarvin, a former programmer turned blogger who has advocated for replacing democracy with a techno-authoritarian state, where the government is “run like a corporation, with the president as its ‘CEO.’”
How is Peter Thiel benefitting from the Trump administration?
- Thiel’s influence over this administration operates less through his own presence than through a network of over a dozen allies, former employees, staffers, and beneficiaries of his investments, who have been folded into the executive branch, including the Vice President, the co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology David Sacks, and former DOGE head Elon Musk.
- Thiel’s company Palantir has benefitted immensely from the second Trump administration thanks to high-dollar contracts. The Department of Health and Human Services, where a former Palantir engineer serves as CIO, has contracts with Palantir to the tune of $405 million. In February 2026, the Department of Homeland Security agreed to a $1 billion contract with Palantir for software and services to support ICE’s immigration crackdown.
- Since Trump’s inauguration, Palantir has been awarded over $1.3 billion in federal contracts to provide services to the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Treasury, State, Health and Human Services, Veteran Affairs, Energy, Transportation, Justice, Agriculture, HUD, and Commerce. NASA, the General Services Administration and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation also awarded contracts.
- Since Trump’s inauguration, Palantir has been awarded over $1.3 billion in federal contracts to provide services to the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Treasury, State, Health and Human Services, Veteran Affairs, Energy, Transportation, Justice, Agriculture, HUD, and Commerce. NASA, the General Services Administration and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation also awarded contracts.
- Anduril, the defense tech company heavily backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund, signed a 10-year contract with the U.S. Army on March 13, 2026, potentially worth up to $20 billion.
- The Army awarded Anduril the contract to “consolidate current and future commercial solutions—including the proprietary, open-architecture, AI-enabled Lattice suite, integrated hardware, data, computer infrastructure, and technical support services—into a unified, mission-ready capability supporting the Army’s evolving operational and business needs.”
For more information, see the Revolving Door Project’s Oligarchs in Trump World tracker.