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: Startup founders should always aim to build a monopoly
“If you're an entrepreneur or founder, you always want to build a monopoly.”
Thiel: Students at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford Are Completely Lost
“It was a big achievement in a way for them to, for students to get into, you know, elite colleges like Yale or Harvard or Stanford. But they're completely lost once they're there.”
Thiel: Elite Universities' Function of Forming Leadership Has Broken Down
“Elite universities, I think the organizing function 50 plus years ago was you were supposed to get into the elite in our society, and that is completely broken down.”
Thiel: EdTech and healthcare IT yielded Founders Fund's worst software returns
“The two worst areas are educational software related companies and healthcare IT companies.”
Thiel: Slow liquidity causes venture capitalists to over-index on popularity
“There's no fast term accountability in venture capital. You know, sometimes you have momentum and the valuations go up and that, that does give you a feel where the things are working. But in practice you off, you know, it's five, 10 years later, you get liqui…”
Thiel: China directly and indirectly accounts for half the US trade deficit
“I think the rough numbers are that about a quarter of the US trade deficit is bilaterally with China, but another quarter is indirectly with China. So China is, is sort of half the problem.”
Thiel: US should radically reset trade with China alongside allies
“The reset in trade that seems desirable to me would be that we radically changed the relationship with China and we sort of Induce a lot of other countries to radically change their relationship with China. And that's how we, you know, and maybe that's how we …”
Thiel: Moving supply chains from China to Vietnam is a big win
“Vietnam is, look, it's a communist country. It's, it has bad mercantilist policies, but it's not planning to take over the world. And so at the margins, if we can move things from China to Vietnam, that's a big win.”
Thiel: Silicon Valley experienced a rapid preference cascade away from left-wing orthodoxy
“And then you can get this, at some point, you can get this very, very fast preference cascade, and something like this happened in Silicon Valley in the last few years. It was a buildup that took a few years for people to realize that, you know, Things were ve…”
Thiel confirms he will not donate money in the 2024 election
“I am still Very strongly pro-Trump, pro pro-JD. I've decided not to donate any money politically, but I'm supporting them in every other way every other way possible.”
Thiel predicts US will ban TikTok within 24 hours of Taiwan invasion
“TikTok will be banned, 24 hours after the Taiwan invasion.”
Thiel predicts US and Chinese economies will decouple
“My intuition for, you know, what is going to happen without making any normative judgments at all is it is going to decouple.”
Thiel: AI in 2024 is like the internet in 1999
“I keep thinking that AI in 20, 23, 24 is like the internet in 1999. It's really big, it's going to be very important, it's going to transform the world, not, you know, in six months, but in 20 years,”
Thiel: Nvidia earns over 100% of AI industry profits
“Nvidia is making over 100% of the profits. Everybody else is collectively losing money.”
Peter Thiel: Tax cuts and globalization cannot drive future US economic growth
“You can't do more globalization or more tax cuts here. That's not going to be the win.”
Thiel: Higher education bubble will end once baby boomers exit
“So I think the bubble will be done once the boomers have exited stage left.”
Thiel: Extreme optimism and pessimism are both excuses for laziness
“Extreme optimism, extreme pessimism, they're both excuses for laziness.”
Thiel: Most tech M&A deals fail due to lack of synergies
“I think most tech M&A deals don't make sense because most of the time there's no, there are no synergies.”
Thiel: Easy success or early failure teaches founders the wrong lessons
“Most of the time people are either in companies that fail, and then the lesson you learn is that it's impossible to build a great company, and so the next time around you try for something that's less ambitious, and so And then you certainly will not build a g…”
Thiel: Workplace conflict arises when people compete to do the exact same job
“Conflict happens when different people want to do the same thing. And one of the challenges in, it's not when people want different things, it's when people want the same thing. And in a, and so the challenge you have as a boss is to try to have people do diff…”
Thiel: Tech market is not a bubble because public IPO participation is low
“I tend to think the bubbles always required the public to be involved in a very big way, and there were these psychosocial phenomena on some level, and this, the public is not really involved because the companies are not going public until extremely late in t…”
Thiel: Replacing founder CEOs with professional managers halts company innovation
“As long as the founders run the companies there's normally enough pressure to keep doing things. Once the founders are replaced with politicians who act like CEOs you end up with you know, much less incremental stuff happening.”
Thiel: US may see nuclear power renaissance as baby boomers lose power
“I'm hopeful it's a bit of a generational issue where the anti-nuclear people Are these boomers, these baby boomers who came of age in the seventies and once they lose grip on power in the next decade or so we may be able to have a nuclear renaissance in this c…”
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 → |