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  • The Contrarian

  • Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power
  • By: Max Chafkin
  • Narrated by: Will Damron
  • Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
  • 3.5 out of 5 stars (31 ratings)

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The Contrarian

By: Max Chafkin
Narrated by: Will Damron
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Publisher's Summary

Bloomsbury presents The Contrarian by Max Chafkin, read by Will Damron.

A biography of venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel, the enigmatic, controversial and hugely influential power broker who sits at the dynamic intersection of tech, business and politics.

Since the days of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s, no industry has made a greater global impact than Silicon Valley. And few individuals have done more to shape Silicon Valley than billionaire venture capitalist and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. From the technologies we use every day to the delicate power balance between Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Washington, Thiel has been a behind-the-scenes operator influencing countless aspects of contemporary life. But despite his power and the ubiquity of his projects, no public figure is quite so mysterious.

In the first major biography of Thiel, Max Chafkin traces the trajectory of the innovator's singular life and worldview, from his upbringing as the child of immigrant parents and years at Stanford as a burgeoning conservative thought leader to his founding of PayPal and Palantir, early investment in Facebook and SpaceX and relationships with fellow tech titans Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Eric Schmidt. The Contrarian illuminates the extent to which Thiel has sought to export his values to the corridors of power beyond Silicon Valley, such as funding the lawsuit that bankrupted the blog Gawker to strenuously backing far-right political candidates, including Donald Trump for president.

Eye-opening and deeply reported, The Contrarian is a revelatory biography of a one-of-a-kind leader and an incisive portrait of a tech industry whose explosive growth and power is both thrilling and fraught with controversy.

©2021 Max Chafkin (P)2021 Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Critic Reviews

"[A] deeply reported and gripping biography.... It offers essential insights for anyone who wants to understand what Silicon Valley’s global ascendance has wrought - and it’s a really great read." (Charles Duhigg, author of The Power of Habit and Smarter Faster Better)

"The Contrarian is much more than a consistently shocking biography of Peter Thiel.... It’s also a disturbing history of Silicon Valley that will make you reconsider the ideological foundations of America’s relentless engine of creative destruction." (Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound)

"A captivating, incisive, rigorously reported examination of Silicon Valley’s most mysterious and controversial powerbroker." (Joshua Green, author of Devil’s Bargain)

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politically motivated conspiracy fueled hit piece.

I am not a huge fan of Thiel tho I find his counter narratives interesting. I am sure some of the criticisms aimed at Thiel in this book are accurate and or justified but this is more than just critical, it is an attempt to construct a specific narrative about Thiel, one that conforms to a political agenda. Reality doesn't conform to our political agendas. People and facts are complicated and often contradict our world view.

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Stopped listening.

Book is well read/performed but the actual content is junk. Sounds more like a hit piece than a biography. Seems like the author really wants you to believe Thiel is super awkward and sinister.

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Hopelessly biased

The extreme negative bias of the author makes this book painful to listen to. Whatever happened to journalistic objectivity?

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A politically motivated waste of time. Keep Away!

Towards the end, the toxic political motives of the author was sickening. I was expecting insights into one of the greatest tech entrepreneurs of this era. I expected the coverage of Thiel to be motivational to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Instead what I got was a very toxic and politically motivated attempt by the author at tarnishing Thiel and the opposing side of the author's politics.

Never will I buy another book from this author or the media company he works for.

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Guilt by Association: The Book

I am open to a story of a shadowy figure with Machiavellian motivations, who deals in backrooms to achieve right wing or libertarian goals. I am open to walking away from this biography with a totally negative sentiment towards Theil. But instead I'm walking away feeling like the author believes that Theil is a strange right-wing billionaire and that's enough of a sin to reduce the man to straight up villain stature. Even as a left-wing reader with no connection to Silicon Valley or tech, I find this totally unconvincing.

The book began by asserting that Theil had tentacles in everything, and was influencing institutions and individuals in unscrupulous ways. But then, nearly every chapter begins by establishing some loose connection to a friend or associate with "wrong think" characteristics. Sometimes, the accusation is a racist article published in the person's late teens. Sometimes, it's an unsubstantiated story from an unnamed source about vaguely bad behaviour at college or in an early start up. These chapter bizarrely submits these loose associates and their bad behaviour as an example of them following Theil's lead and ends up calling them his acolytes. Focusing in on Theil's own controversial works isn't enough, instead it turns into a major case of "guilt by association", whereby we get very little of Theil and too much of his loose connections.

This pattern of associate / bad behaviour / link to Theil, is repetitious and unconvincing. The author seems to have had virtually no access to Theil and no actual new accounts of interest. Instead we get side swipes from former associates or innuendo from the author himself. A constant downplay of Theil's intelligence and a constant emphasis on his weirdness.

One example of this is Theil's Fellowship program. The author remarks that the $100,000 no strings attached money wasn't enough money for kids to live on, and that one of the participants developed a drug problem. There's a myriad of other complaints about the program in the chapter, all of it negative. At no point did we really get a sense of what the program was trying to achieve. Theil had gone against advice and took no stake in any of the companies these fellows established with the money, but the author brushes over this and tries to establish misconduct or some kind. We never get a sympathetic or empathetic approach from the author, which isn't necessary in every biography, but it would have been good to feel like the conclusion hadn't been predetermined. Though I suspect it had been.

I suggest that the author was writing for left-wing audiences who would feel that Theil's support for Trump was all you needed to know. The guy's evil, end of story. If the author had successfully stepped back and tried to work out what was motivating Theil, he would have written a much better book. But we never get it, because the author doesn't really get it.

There's many examples of the author not trying to understand the people or quotes he's dealing with. At one point, he weirdly snubs Tyler Cowen, one of the most intelligent and successful economists and polymaths on the planet. Tyler complimented Theil, and the author immediately points out that Theil was an investor in Tyler's not-for-profit. It's not like this is irrelevant, but I wish there was more depth to this relationship rather than a "gotcha" with the money stuff.

Overall, very well written and a very easy to follow book. But it's a bad biography.

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  • CPC
  • 30-11-2021

Way too biased. Waste of time

Completely left bias. Constant snide comments to try create impressions without actually saying or giving proof. I would not waste your time.

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Cheap and highly left/anti-tech biased

Listen to the recent interview of the author on This Week In Startups and you will get a more accurate view of the character of the author. Cheap and slimy. There’s a good reason why a voice actor was needed.
This reads like a cheap tabloid.
The author attempts to ridicule Thiel for taking down Gawker, but fails to mention that their actions of outing him were illegal. Worth the read. Highly biased.

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Max Chafkin writes a novel

Regrettably, blinded by his own ideology, the author has failed to comprehend the driving motivations Peter Thiel. This book reads more like a reverse treatise on Max's ideology than an account of Peter's values, motivations and determination to make the world a better place.

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