Peter Thiel
Partner and Co-Founder, Founders Fund. On 4 shows, 3 appearances, plus 2 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorfounderexecutiveauthor@peterthiel ↗foundersfund.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal and Palantir Technologies, and was the first outside investor in Facebook. Through his venture firm Founders Fund, he backed companies including SpaceX and Airbnb, and co-authored Zero to One.
4shows
3appearances
80statements
14resolved
3supported
5contradicted
21%fully supported
549said about them ↓ Everything Peter Thiel said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Thiel: Lawsuit discovery proved the Army covered up reports favoring Palantir
“And then when you and then what you can do when you sue somebody is you get discovery and you discover, and you sort of discover what's going on in the sausage making factory that no one's investigated for 22 years. And there's a lot of stuff and we're sort of…”
Thiel claims Kamala Harris will win a close election by cheating
“If it's like going to be a razor thin close election, then I'm pretty sure Kamala will win because they will cheat. They will fortify it. They will steal the ballots.”
Thiel: Defending Taiwan is not worth risking World War III
“It's not worth it's not worth World War III. And I still think it's quite catastrophic if it if it gets taken over by the communists.”
Thiel: Left-Wing Philanthropy Is Often Cover for Criminal Activities
“So much of this left wing philanthropy nonprofit world, I think was, you know, it was just a cover for, you know, borderline criminal activities.”
Thiel: Supports broad student debt forgiveness because students were ripped off
“I do think a lot of the students got ripped off. And so I think there should be some kind of broad student debt forgiveness at this point.”
Thiel: There Are Only Two Types of Businesses: Competitors and Monopolies
“The extreme binary View of the world I always articulate is that there are exactly two kinds of businesses in this world. There are businesses that are perfectly competitive, and there are businesses that are monopolies.”
Thiel: Tech has been society's only vector of progress for decades
“For the last 25, 30 years Tech meaning broadly, you know, computer science, software, internet, mobile internet now, now crypto and AI in the last few years, this has been, this, there's been, this has been sort of this one vector of progress in our society. T…”
Thiel: U.S. military's DCGS software was a failed billion-dollar boondoggle
“There was this software program. This was once we moved from intelligence community into the broader military called DSIGs, which was just sort of this in theory was a system we were supposed to figure out ways to integrate the data across all these units in t…”
Thiel: University system is as broken as military procurement
“You know, the university system seems as broken or more than the military procurement process.”
Thiel: Trump's Second Term Will Accomplish More Than His First
“Normally the second term does less than the first term, This is going to be the, I think will be the real first term.”
Thiel: Thousands of Officials Could Be Criminally Prosecuted for Mislabeling Funds
“And I think you could prosecute thousands of these people for criminally, For the thing that they wanted to prosecute Oliver North for in the eighties.”
Thiel: Austin, Texas Is a Government Town and Bad University College Town
“This is where I would be deeply skeptical even of a place like Austin, Texas. You know, it's, it is, I mean, it's a government town. It's a bad university college town.”
Thiel: Top tech CEOs express radically different views in private versus public
“There was a incredible felt sense among all the top CEOs I know in Silicon Valley that there's all the stuff you can't talk about. There are things they tell me behind closed doors that are very different from what they feel they can say in public. And the gap…”
Thiel: Fake AI would outperform the current federal workforce
“Maybe you can replace them with AI, or maybe you can replace them without AI, and just use the AI can be completely fake, and we can improve things tremendously.”
Thiel predicts the 2024 presidential election will not be close
“My one contrarian view on the election is that it's not going to be close. You know, most presidential elections aren't, and you know, one side just breaks. You know, 20, twenty-sixteen, twenty-twenty, we're super close, but two-thirds of the elections aren't,…”
Thiel: Ukraine and Gaza conflicts are warmups to a China-Taiwan war
“You know, I think we're sort of sleepwalking into Armageddon with you know, the Ukraine and the conflict in Gaza are just sort of the warmups to the China-Taiwan war.”
Thiel: Declaring US won't defend Taiwan would prompt immediate Chinese invasion
“If you if you if you say we want some guardrails and we won't defend Taiwan, then they'd get invaded right away.”
Thiel calls Founders Fund's European venture investments vacation junkets
“We've probably tried to do too much investing in Europe. Over the years, it's always sort of a junket, sort of, it's a nice place to go on vacation as an investor.”
Thiel: 'Low-hanging fruit' stagnation theory is a Baby Boomer excuse
“I always think that was just a sort of baby boomer excuse for covering up for the failures of that generation.”
Thiel: Founders Fund hasn't invested heavily in AI due to dot-com bubble parallels
“My model is AI feels like it does feel uncomfortably close to the bubble of 1999. So I'm, we haven't invested that much in it.”
Thiel: No talented founders started semiconductor companies after 1993
“No, no talented people started semiconductor companies after 1993 because they all went into, you know, into software.”
Thiel: The financial bubble is in government bonds, not tech
“My candidate for where the bubble is today is it's the government printing money, it's the government bonds it's minus two percent real interest rates, and so the things that are bubble-like are the things that are most like government bonds. So that's corpora…”
Thiel keeps three quarters of his net worth in illiquid tech stocks
“I probably, three quarters of my net worth is in illiquid tech stocks in Silicon Valley, and it's because I believe there's a giant bubble centered on government bonds, and this is the furthest I can get from it.”
Thiel: Legacy tech giants like Microsoft and Oracle bet against innovation
“There's a whole set of companies in the Nasdaq 100 that are actually bets against technological innovation. So Microsoft is a bet that there will never be anything like Linux. It's a bet that there will be that the operating system won't shift to mobile platfo…”
The other half of the tape: Peter Thiel's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 512 times in 204 episodes across the shows. 37 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Jason Calacanis 125Joe Lonsdale 68Chamath Palihapitiya 50David Sacks 47Marc Andreessen 25David Friedberg 21Erik Torenberg 16Dan Primack 15
Statements about Peter Thiel, by other people (37)
Sacks: Reid Hoffman told Peter Thiel he wished Trump was a martyr
“Just days before the shooting, Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman had an exchange at Allen and company that was publicly reported. In which Peter said that Reed had turned Trump into a martyr by funding lawfare, and Reed responded, I wish I had turned him into an ac…”
Andreessen: Monopolies stop innovating and destroy innovation
“Monopolies stop innovating. Monopolies are just death to innovation because as you like to say, the motto of any monopoly is we don't I don't care because we don't have to.”
Sacks: Facebook board wanted to oust Peter Thiel for supporting Trump
“I do remember the time when Peter supported Trump during the election, and the rest of the board wanted to run him off the board”
Ullyot: Peter Thiel's role in the Trump transition was invaluable for tech
“The role that Peter Thiel has played for tech has been invaluable for tech in that room. It's a voice. It's a very respected voice within that team.”
Sanchez: Peter Thiel rejected Replit, saying it would never be big
“I remember when I told Peter Thiel that he should invest in the company and Peter said, it's never going to be a big company. This vibe coding thing is sort of ridiculous. And he put it in an email”
Lonsdale: Facebook asked Peter Thiel to be openly gay for diversity
“I remember they had to ask Peter Thiel if you, if he could be openly gay for the Facebook board because it was important to count for the number of people.”
Masad: Peter Thiel left Meta board over disagreements on VR and AI
“And at the time, he actually had just left the Meta's board, and the reason he left is he disagreed with how Meta's trying to invest in all these immersion technologies, like VR and AI, and Zuck is trying to find his next act.”
Masad: Peter Thiel dismissed 2022 AI pitch as meaningless hype
“So I actually pitched Peter Thiel on AI back in 22, and he told me that I was engaging in buzzwords and hype, and he says saying AI is like saying software or saying a computer, it's meaningless.”
Mark Pincus: Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman had a deep falling out
“Between Peter and Reed they've been friends for life, and they had a falling, deep falling out over all this”
Lonsdale: Startup CEOs earning under $75k massively outperformed higher-paid peers
“You know, actually when I was working with Peter Thiel, must have been 21 or so, we conducted a study he had me look into of CEO salaries. And so it turned out there were three different cohorts. At the time salaries were lower. This was turning 42 this week. …”
Friedberg: Tech acquisitions either mean buyers overpay or sellers sell early
“Either the buyer pays way too much or the seller sells way too early.”
Sachs: Capitol Hill staffers call tax legislation the 'Peter Thiel provision'
“And I've actually heard that staffers on Capitol Hill are calling this the Peter Thiel provision.”
Sachs: Roth IRA tax reforms are political revenge against Peter Thiel
“I think there is a sensible way to provide some restrictions on these retirement accounts, but the way they're doing it is so punitive, I think it is motivated by political revenge against Peter.”
Arthur: Industries naturally trend toward domination by one or two players
“I think that in the long, long run, things do tend to get dominated by only one or two players, even in the standard businesses. And the reason that's not completely and utterly true all the time is that there are new products getting launched all the time in …”
Andreessen: Technological progress in atoms lags behind progress in bits
“It's a fair critique that there are many fields that are not moving as fast as they could. And in particular fields, you know, applications of computer science or other fields of engineering that intersect more in the world of atoms as opposed to the world of …”
Levchin: Seeing peers' human vulnerabilities inspired PayPal alumni to pursue massive ideas
“So if you know kind of the true base version of who we all are, as you watch one of these people go for something really big, like Elon Taking humanity to Mars, which is extraordinary. And yet, you know, he's a human being. Like, I've seen him sweaty and tired…”
Weinstein: Working for Peter Thiel closed 30% of academic doors to me
“When I took a job with Peter Thiel, let's imagine that there are only about a 125 people I can speak to about my work. I would say 30% of the doors closed to me, just by virtue of the fact that I worked with Peter Thiel, and I don't think he's the devil, and h…”
Tan: Turning down early Palantir offer was a $2B to $4B mistake
“Peter said, I'm so sure this is the right thing for you. Like, here's a check for 70 grand. That was how much I made at Microsoft at the time. And I said, thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year. Which I did, but I think …”
Woo: Peter Thiel's anti-college stance is hypocritical given his Stanford degrees
“Yeah, I think Peter Thiel in some sense is like, kind of hypocritical when he's like, don't go to college where he had Stanford undergrad, Stanford law school, he got all the badges, right?”
Calacanis: Peter Thiel is one of the greatest investors across business and politics
“Best investor for me was Peter Thiel, but on two tracks. Obviously Peter's been in some of the great companies through Founders Fund, including SpaceX, but he also picked Trump, he also picked Vance, and he also picked Sachs, so I think it's undeniable that Pe…”
Lonsdale: Musk, Thiel, and Koch are philosopher builders
“A lot of the builders who I admire most, whether it's Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Charles Koch, they're deeply enmeshed in philosophy. They're philosopher builders, and they've taken the time to go and kind of work on society to make sure our society stays somethi…”
Calacanis: Thiel made record $15M Senate campaign donation for Vance
“Teal backed him with, I think, the largest Senate race donation in history, fifteen million.”
Lonsdale: X.com and Confinity would have failed without their PayPal merger
“Elon Musk, you know, had X.com and Peter Thiel had Confinity and they merged to become PayPal and both of them were probably going to die otherwise. That was the only way they could survive was to merge.”
Andreessen: First-time founders should raise seed money before Series A
“If you're a first-time founder, first-time founder, it's almost always better to start with angels or with the early seed investors. It's, again, contrary to myth and archetype, it's very hard for the first-time founder to raise, raise a straight A round. It's…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
All-In 288
the a16z Podcast 108
American Optimist 88
BigDeal 28
2026 48 mentions in 23 episodes 2 per episode
- AI Investing Strategy for 2026 · Joe Lonsdale
- Garry Tan: New Rules for Founders
- How Elon Musk Solves Problems | Eric Jorgenson
- SpaceX’s Secret, Nuclear's Rebirth, and the AI Power Crisis · Joe Lonsdale
- Why AI Agents Could Finally Reinvent the Credit Card
- Eric Weinstein: The State of American Science, Breakthrough Coverups, and the Danger of Physics
- Billionaire Founder: No One Tells You This About Starting A Company | Ankur Jain
- Epstein Files, Is SaaS Dead?, Moltbook Panic, SpaceX xAI Merger, Trump's Fed Pick
- 15 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 112 mentions in 44 episodes 3 per episode
- All-In Inauguration Day Livestream with the Besties from Washington, DC!
- AI CEO: How To Make A $10M Business With AI Employees (Amjad Masad, CEO of @replit)
- The Unicorn Founder Who Delegated Everything.
- Two Billionaires Debate: Should We Fear AI? · Joe Lonsdale
- Tech vs. Media: Balaji Srinivasan on the Battle Shaping Our Future
- Does OpenAI Need a Bailout? Mamdani Wins, Socialism Rising, Filibuster Nuclear Option
- Big Beautiful Bill, Elon/Trump, Dollar Down Big, Harvard's Money Problems, Figma IPO
- Trump's First Week: Inauguration Recap, Executive Actions, TikTok, Stargate + Sacks is Back!
- 36 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 91 mentions in 34 episodes 3 per episode
- Ep 77: Mike Solana on Exposing Corruption, Saving San Francisco, and Building a New Media Empire · Joe Lonsdale
- Michael Ovitz | All-In Summit 2024
- In conversation with Reid Hoffman & Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
- Billionaire Entrepreneur: “America Will Collapse Without A Recession” | Joe Lonsdale
- "Founder Mode," DOJ alleges Russian podcast op, Kamala flips proposals, Tech loses Section 230?
- The All-In Holiday Spectacular
- Flying Cars Have Arrived! eVTOL Panel: Archer, Joby, Wisk | All-In Summit 2024
- Megyn Kelly | All-In Summit 2024
- 26 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 56 mentions in 24 episodes 2 per episode
- E140: LK-99, Sclerotic establishments, Fitch downgrades US debt, Trump indicted... again
- Ep 70: Andrew McAfee on the Science Behind the World's Most Valuable Companies · Joe Lonsdale
- E129: Sam Altman plays chess with regulators, AI's "nuclear" potential, big pharma bundling & more
- Ep 66: Bob McGrew — the Superstar Palantir Alum Leading OpenAI's Transformative Research Projects · Joe Lonsdale
- E128: Google enters AI wars, Druck’s warning, Trump crushes CNN & more
- E111: Microsoft to invest $10B in OpenAI, generative AI hype, America's over-classification problem
- Alex Karp On The Future Of AI And Building A Multi Billion-Dollar Company · Joe Lonsdale
- E120: Banking crisis and the great VC reset
- 16 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 70 mentions in 29 episodes 2 per episode
- E66: $FB's big drop, Rogan/Spotify mess, Xi/Putin meetup & supply chain issues with Ryan Petersen
- E88: First principle politics, China chaos & outlook, state of private/public markets & more
- E76.5: Food shortage, China's grand plan, inflation, French election plus an All-In Summit preview
- E68: Trudeau invokes emergency powers, Bitcoin vs. government, Tiger Global's new strategy and more
- E103: Tech layoffs surge, big tech freezes hiring, optimizing for profits, election preview & more
- E102: Elon closes Twitter deal, $META uncertainty, Zuck's historic bet, big tech decline & more
- E75: Fast shuts down, board culpability, Elon buys 9% of Twitter, deplatforming's evolution & more
- The Network State with Balaji Srinivasan
- 21 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 55 mentions in 22 episodes 3 per episode
- E49: Coinbase CEO reflects on controversial blog, state of the markets, 1000 unicorns & more
- E52: Trump's SPAC, peak venture liquidity, tech as an economic ladder, Dems overplaying their hand
- E38: Bestie brawl, Robinhood's $70M fine & S-1, Delta variant, next gen candidates & more
- E36: New FTC Chair, breaking up big tech, government silent spying, Jon Stewart, wildfires & more
- E18: Inauguration talk, breaking down the $1.9T stimulus, the case for recalling Gavin Newsom & more
- E17: Big Tech bans Trump, ramifications for the First Amendment & the open Internet
- E51: Supply Chain Shortages, Inflation, DeSantis, Ted Sarandos Netflix Memo, Cancel Culture, Fan Q&A
- E50: Crypto investing deep dive, Facebook's whistleblower fallout, Chappelle's new special & more
- 14 more episodes that year, every mention in 2021 →
2020 25 mentions in 9 episodes 3 per episode
- E8: TikTok + Oracle, how privacy loss will impact society, economy & COVID outlooks for 2021
- E5: WHO's incompetence, kicking off Cold War II, China's grand plan, 100X'ing American efficiency
- E4: Politicizing the pandemic, Police reform, Twitter vs Facebook with David Sacks & David Friedberg
- E15: “The Besties” All-In’s inaugural award show covering the best, worst & most memorable of 2020
- E14: Salesforce acquires Slack, DeepMind’s AlphaFold breakthrough, Trust Fund Socialists & more
- E13: SPACsgiving Special! Vaccine news, innovation vs regulation, fixing higher ed, challenge trials
- E6: Big Tech antitrust aftermath, potential effects of an M&A clampdown on Silicon Valley & more
- E2: Rebooting economy, understanding corporate debt, avoiding a depression & more with David Sacks
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2020 →
2019 50 mentions in 18 episodes 3 per episode
- a16z Podcast | From Jobs to Flying Cars
- a16z Podcast | Startups and Pendulum Swings Through Ideas, Time, Fame, and Money
- a16z Podcast | Network Effects, Origin Stories, and the Evolution of Tech
- a16z Podcast | Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
- a16z Podcast | Incenting Innovation Inside, Loonshots to Moonshots
- a16z Podcast | The Case Against Education, From Signaling to Rainbow's End
- a16z Podcast | High Growth in Companies (and Tech)
- a16z Podcast | On Productivity, Immigration, Trump, and Media
- 10 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2017 5 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Peter's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AMERICAN OPTIMISTLEDGER | Partner and Co-Founder, Founders Fund | 1 | 28 | 25% 1/4 | full record on American Optimist → |
| ALL-INLEDGER | Partner and Co-Founder, Founders Fund | 1 +1 | 26 | 0% 0/5 | full record on All-In → |
| a16zLEDGER | Partner and Co-Founder, Founders Fund | 1 | 25 | 40% 2/5 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| BIGDEALLEDGER | Partner and Co-Founder, Founders Fund | 0 +1 | 1 | — | full record on BigDeal → |