Axel Springer Award 2026: An Evening for Peter Thiel

Welcome to the Axel Springer Award 2026, an evening for Peter Thiel.

That's Berlin

Indeed, welcome to the Axel Springer Award that goes to Peter Thiel.

As expected, from the moment we announced the decision, we were facing petitions, protests, posters, criticizing that we would dare award Peter Thiel, the, I quote, "anti-democrat," the "Antichrist" and all that, hosted by Axel Springer, "the epicenter of evil," "the right-wing conspiracy," "the magnet of the sinister forces." Perhaps we should have invited anti-Semites, Islamists, clan chiefs of organized crime. Then the event would have unrolled without protest. That's Berlin, ladies and gentlemen. That's Berlin.

Dear guests, tonight we are honoring the most impactful German of our times, some people say the best venture capitalist of the 21st century, and in any case an unconventional thought leader and principled contrarian. The purpose of the Axel Springer Award is to encourage entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and new thinking. Peter, you embody all that, and we are so happy to honor you tonight.

And we are particularly happy to celebrate that together with your two co-founders and dear friends, Alex Karp and Max Levchin. And we will have a speech by the editor-in-chief of CBS and founder of The Free Press, Bari Weiss. Bari, Alex, Max, thank you so much for coming over and being with us tonight.

And we particularly welcome the Bavarian Prime Minister, Markus Söder. Bavaria seems to be one of the last resorts in Germany where capitalism and technology are not swear words. So thank you for being with us.

I have not met Peter too often, but whenever we started a conversation about deep topics (and Peter is completely unable to do small talk), I fundamentally disagreed with him, sometimes passionately, and almost always, either during or after our conversation, I had to admit that I was wrong and he was right. So nobody has surprised me so often and so frequently. Thank you for that, Peter.

When I informed you about the award, you said, and I quote, "I tried for decades to get Germany out of my mind. That worked, more or less, intellectually. But I never succeeded to get it out of my heart."

Let's try tonight to get Germany back on your mind, to get it even deeper into your heart, and let's even try to surprise some skeptics and help them to understand before they moralize, and to put curiosity above prejudice. I wish you a wonderful evening.

Five moves ahead

There are people who are ahead of their time, people with the courage to dream. Five moves on a man who may be the most influential German alive, one his own country never claimed.

Peter Thiel is someone who is thinking several moves ahead. He learned it as a child. Frankfurt am Main, 1967. At one, he leaves Germany. Cleveland. Then a mining town in the desert of South West Africa, where his father built a uranium mine. At ten, California. By high school, he has attended seven schools. Everywhere, he is the new boy.

And then there is this one game: chess. He always sought to be competitive. It asks whether you can calculate further than the other person. He never stopped. Years later, the Federation gave him a title: National Master.

Stanford, 1987. Before he starts a company, he starts a newspaper, to argue against everyone else on campus. This is the first manifestation of his mindset, as a man who is a contrarian by heart. He is 19. He studies philosophy and law. He works for Sullivan & Cromwell and Credit Suisse. He learns about the streams of money. With $1 million from family and friends, he founds Thiel Capital Management.

With Max Levchin, he builds a payment system for the internet. The company is called Confinity. Two years later, it merges with the rival run by Elon Musk, and takes the name of its own product: PayPal. In 2002, eBay buys it for $1.5 billion. Out of that team come Tesla, YouTube, LinkedIn, and SpaceX. In Silicon Valley, they call it the PayPal Mafia.

In 2004, he gives a student $500,000. He is the first outside investor to believe in Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook.

Contrarians have moved the world forward. He doesn't think about tomorrow, but about the day after tomorrow. That is why Peter Thiel is controversial. He publishes essays and books. He gets involved. He looks at the tension between the sovereign individual and society. He challenges convention and provokes. His ideas are debated around the world, often with more passion than cool-headed reason.

"It is an absolutely incredible story with crazy implications, and it shows once again why Peter Thiel is powerful, interesting, and disliked by many and respected by lots of others."

In 2003, two years after 9/11, he founds, together with Alex Karp, a company that turns data into connections, that observes power, the good and the bad. He named it after the seeing stones from Tolkien, the palantíri. Valar, Mithril, Rivendell, Lembas, Erebor: almost every company he has built carries a name from Middle-earth. Anyone who takes that for a quirk has not understood how seriously this man takes ideas. Everything known about the palantíri is in a single book.

He looks for markets where nobody else is. Facebook, Palantir, space, AI, biotech: every one of them, years before anyone else was interested.

"My thesis is that these are the really valuable companies and businesses that will take our civilization to the next level."

In 2012, he becomes the anchor investor in the first fund of a young founder named Sam Altman. Three years later, both are among the founding backers of a non-profit research lab called OpenAI.

There is a sentence in his book that is easy to miss. "In this one respect," he writes, "business is like chess." And then he quotes Capablanca: "You must study the endgame before everything else." And he asks every founder the same question: What important truths do very few people agree with you on?

The Axel Springer Award 2026 goes to Peter Thiel.

Bari Weiss: Peter Thiel is free

Please welcome on stage the CEO of The Free Press and editor-in-chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss.

I want to begin tonight by thanking you all for attending my lecture on the Antichrist. For all the media journalists who are watching this or poring over this transcript, that was a joke. I only talk about the Antichrist at my secret weekly meeting supervised by the Mossad in Tel Aviv.

What's not a joke is that I'm deeply grateful to be here in Berlin with Mathias Döpfner, a true friend and ally, and with Axel Springer, a company with morally clear values and leaders willing to stand up for them. And obviously, I'm happy to be here with all of you.

Back home, there is a quote widely attributed to Bismarck: "God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America." Now, who knows if the German chancellor actually uttered the backhanded compliment? But I love it, as do so many others, because it gets to a higher truth about my country: that America is a very lucky place. It's a lucky place to be born, and it is a lucky place to end up. It's why people from every corner of the globe still reach for our shores as a place to build, including our Frankfurt-born honoree.

Tonight, I have the pleasure to introduce a man whose life and whose character embodies what I think of as the quintessential American spirit: heretical, driven, audacious, pioneering, innovative, entrepreneurial, original, eccentric, and above all, ferociously independent. And that, of course, is Peter Thiel.

Peter Thiel is many things. He is a center of gravity in Silicon Valley, a vanguard of the counter-elite. He's a man whose name itself has become a Rorschach test the world over, including, judging from the protest down the street, here in Berlin. But above all, I would say, Peter Thiel is free.

The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once called Thiel a walking oxymoron. And in a certain light, it can certainly appear that way. Is he a traditionalist or a transhumanist? Is he the ultimate insider or the consummate outsider? An orthodox Christian or the most prominent unorthodox figure of our age? A prophet of doom who believes that we're in a period of technological stagnation, or a utopian who thinks we're on the precipice of beating death itself? But why isn't he just all of the above?

The thing is that Peter Thiel defies categorization, and that is just one of the many things that confounds his critics. But what those who love him, and those who love him just a little bit less, can't dispute is this: he sees things before the rest of us do. He knows what's coming and seems consistently to get there first. It's an extraordinary quality, and one that's given him an astonishing track record.

Like back in 1998, betting on an e-commerce platform when no one knew what an online order was. Launching the Thiel Fellowship and urging bright young people to skip college long before anyone dared say out loud that much of American higher education had gone bust. Or writing in an email to Mark Zuckerberg back in 2020 that high housing costs and student debt would drive legions of young people to reject capitalism and embrace socialism. This was long before the DSA was making daily headlines. Or predicting the rise of a global movement around AI safetyism years before people knew what AGI even stood for.

I don't think those are lucky breaks. They happen because Peter actually lives out that classic Apple slogan: think different. He's able to see around corners because he sees the world differently from other people.

Which means, of course, like everyone in this room, Peter Thiel and I have our differences. He's a gay man, I'm a gay woman, which makes us cosmic foes. He's into seasteading; I get seasick in a canoe. He believes the Messiah has come, and I'm Jewish, so I'm still waiting for him to show up.

And of course, there's the difference in our attitude, at least sometimes, toward the press and the vital role that it plays in maintaining a liberal democracy. I view it as essential; it's my life's work. I see it as an instrument of liberty and as an engine of progress that deserves to be invested in and perfected. But to the extent Peter and I disagree on this, I'm going to consider it a victory for my side of the argument that he's here tonight receiving an award from an institution that's become synonymous with freedom of the press, and just freedom, around the world.

Because in a free world, we won't always agree. That is in the nature of freedom. And I want to live in freedom. I want to live alongside people, even those that I disagree with. I would say especially those that I disagree with. Because in thinking freely, and in risking big, and in risking being wrong, free people expand the scope of what is possible for all of us.

My brilliant colleague Ross Douthat recently called Peter the most influential right-wing intellectual of the past 20 years. I think that might be true, but what that label, right-wing or conservative, misses is how strange and wild, how untamed Peter's worldview is. It's why it's so fun to sit across from him in a conversation or an interview, because you never know where he will go. He might wind up saying he's not sure if freedom and democracy are compatible, or seriously considering, as he did recently, whether or not the human race should continue. I think in the end the answer, mercifully, was yes.

His is a worldview informed by both Ayn Rand and René Girard, by Strauss and Tolkien, as you saw in that video, by Christianity, by libertarianism and techno-optimism, and perhaps above all by unorthodoxy, or, as Girard would have put it, by anti-mimesis, as a school of thought and as a practice, as a habit of mind.

That unusual blend has produced what is perhaps the defining question of Peter Thiel's career: What important truth do very few people agree with you on? He famously asks that to founders and to potential hires. But it's more than an interview stunt. I think that question is at the essence of Peter's character.

"What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" is a question that can only be asked and answered by someone with courage. Because it takes courage to interrogate your priors. It takes courage to say out loud the thing you know will set you apart. It takes courage to be lonely.

There is a reason that so many public figures of our age seem to speak in perfect unison on every important topic. And there is a reason that we can count on one hand the ones that don't. Which is why that quality, that willingness to be shouted down without going wobbly, is vanishingly rare these days.

"It's better to risk boldness than triviality," Peter writes in his book Zero to One, which is available in bookstores everywhere; he needs the royalties. And it is a principle that Peter has lived out, and then some, in his own life. No one in the world can accuse tonight's honoree of being boring.

It has also animated the most tangible way that he has changed our world: through the companies that he has founded and funded. What happened to the future, Peter asks. And not with nostalgia; he asks it in order to change it, and to challenge the rest of us to think bigger, to think in civilizational terms.

His companies have created the future. PayPal changed the nature of commerce. Palantir changed the nature of war-fighting, among many other things. And then there are the countless startups and companies that Thiel's capital has launched into orbit, not to mention the vast network of founders and builders and young people, including even a Free Press intern, that he has influenced. To name just a few: Meta, SpaceX, Neuralink, Anduril, Hadrian, Airbnb, Ramp, Stripe, and Spotify.

These are founders and companies that have transformed the way that hundreds of millions of people around the world live their lives: making commerce more efficient, making music and travel more accessible, launching satellites, manufacturing drones, promising future life on Mars, allowing the mute to speak, as in the case of Neuralink. Above all, these are companies that make the American, maybe the Western, will to build alive and real, propelling to success the startups and the people that might just guarantee that the next century remains a free one.

I know Germans like their operas long, so I am sure that we have only witnessed the first act in Peter's Ring cycle. There will surely be more provocations, more ideas to test, more worlds to build. We are in the early stages of a century that Peter has said promises to be far greater and more terrible than the great and terrible 20th century.

But greater and more terrible in what way? Will the 21st century usher in machine gods, populism or rule by algorithm, apocalypse or abundance? As Strauss put the bigger question we all face: progress or return?

What's amazing about Peter Thiel is that he can argue either side of any of those questions. What's more important, and what I know we need as we hurtle through the era of AI and the algorithm, is that he is practiced at being perpendicular. In this era of conformity, it is essential that we have sharp people unwilling to soften their edges, people who demand to be free. And, crucially, who still remain interested in the questions that so many left behind, or frankly never even entertained, by the time they graduated college.

Peter Thiel still hungers for knowledge and understanding. Put another way, he investigates what Socrates was accused of investigating, the things aloft and under the earth: the pursuit of truth, the interrogation of the things that in the end truly matter. And God knows we need people like that now more than ever.

So please join me in giving a heartfelt congratulations to the singular Peter Thiel on receiving this remarkable award.

Garry Kasparov: hailed and vilified

Hello, everyone. First, my congratulations to Peter Thiel on his well-deserved Axel Springer accolade. Peter has won many awards in his life, but speaking as someone who has more than a few trophies on my shelves, I can tell you that some are more important than others. And this one is very special, because it represents several things that are very important to Peter. One, wanting to make a difference in the world. Two, not giving a damn what other people say or think if you feel you're right.

The 19th and the 20th centuries had their titans of industry: Rockefeller and Ford, Krupp and Siemens. The 21st century has its titans. Many of them are Axel Springer Award winners, now including Peter Thiel. In every century, these titans were often hailed and vilified in equal measure. Undaunted, Peter has been at the epicenter for the entire first quarter of the digital century, and is still pushing ahead.

The list of the prize winners also includes a modern hero, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It may seem strange to find his name on a list that includes so many famous technology founders and innovators, but when you see what Ukraine is doing, leading the world in drones, he fits right in.

When I met Peter in 2009, along with another of the guests tonight, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, I was surprised that these tech gurus shared my belief that the culture of risk aversion and stagnation was taking over, even in America, even in Silicon Valley. As a result of this conversation, we decided to launch a book project together to address these issues. But while Peter and I agreed on the diagnosis, the project eventually split us on political fault lines underlying how best to solve the crisis. True to his nature, Peter's solutions included the most radical political means, which exceeded even my own appetite for risk and disruption.

Frankly speaking, I even hesitated to record this video message because of the way political differences dominate everything today. But it should not always be so. While we will always have our disagreements, even fights, we should acknowledge that the advancement of humanity depends on individuals like Peter Thiel. Peter's actions remind us that to thrive we need more challenges, more energy, not less.

But we the people, to quote the phrase, must remember that our technology must serve humankind. From nuclear power to the internet to artificial intelligence, all technology is agnostic, and we humans will always have a monopoly on good and evil. There is no digital holy grail that can provide ultimate technocratic answers to the most important human questions. What do we want? What is our purpose? What matters most? Our technology is neutral on the subject of values, but we must not be.

To conclude, I will congratulate Peter again and quote a movie with another Peter in the news these days: Peter Parker, better known as Spider-Man. As his Uncle Ben told him, remember, with great power comes great responsibility.

Sam Altman: ideas no one else has

Probably no one has invested in more of the great technology companies than Peter Thiel. And if you talk to the founders of those companies, you will find again and again how much they credit their early conversations with Peter for key insights about what they worked on, the strategy they set, or really just looking at the world in a new way.

And this gets to the thing that I think is less credited to Peter, but even more important. If you made a list of the most important ideas that have driven forward the technology industry, and maybe really a broader view of the world than that, over the last couple of decades, I don't think you'd find any one person that originated more of those ideas than Peter.

Peter's ability to think about the world through a completely fresh perspective, to come up with ideas that no one else has, that seem obvious, or even if not obvious, at least deeply correct after you hear them, but where you sort of think to yourself, "Man, I have no idea how he thought of that," or maybe even better, "I wish I had thought of that." It is hard to find anyone that beats Peter on this point, and I think the contribution he has made to society here is massive.

There are few people that I would rather sit down with and talk about something than Peter. I think his ability to find the core of an idea, or a new insight, or a completely different take on society, big or small, something obvious that we're all missing, something subtle that we're all missing, has been a huge driver of our progress, even when he points out a lack of it. And I and so many other people are very grateful for all he has done. Congratulations.

Alex Karp: der letzte Deutsche

I can think of nobody who is uniquely deserving of this award like Peter, Peter Thiel. And I thought of many ways to describe why I believe Peter is uniquely qualified, why he is in many ways deserving of this award.

And obviously you think of what it means to be German: the very important thinkers, German thinkers, but I would say the people who capture the emotionality of German, the poets. And then my first thought was remembering vividly when I met Peter for the first time, where we had a real intellectual exchange in front of the Stanford Law School. And I remember after the exchange thinking, and I still remember this as a visual memory: wow, that's the first person who understood anything I think. Maybe I should, to use the popular word nowadays, re-immigrate to Germany. And it was one of the main reasons I actually went to study in Germany.

But an award from Axel Springer Verlag is particularly important, because it is a uniquely iconic, proudly German brand. And I think what makes Peter so interesting and unique for this award is the same thing that makes him so vexing in many contexts, in Germany and in America. And I think the source of the interest, and also the complexity imposed on Peter, is quite simply: he's the last standing German. Der letzte Deutsche.

And what makes him so interesting is this very German, combined with an American upbringing, where the categories that he imposes on the world through his work (obviously as the most important venture investor in the world, as a category definer in that category, as the co-founder of Palantir and still a very active participant in what we do) are, if you think of it, competence as a moral category, as opposed to a purely moral category: the depth of feeling and commitment. The whole debate around deutsche Innerlichkeit in the philosophical arena is only possible in German, and only possible vor dem Hintergrund of very, very uniquely deep and interesting ideas, commitments, feelings.

Witness his deep friendships: not many, but important, including myself, over many decades. Witness his deep, non-public love for his husband and his family. Witness: sein Herz schlägt immer noch auf Deutsch, his heart still beats in German. Witness intellectual movements that are attuned to being pro-entrepreneurship, pro-growth, pro-capital formation, but not the cliché that capitalism will solve everything. Echt deutsch.

Of course we could look at his studies, or mine, and think of Faust. But I think many of his ideas, and what he's actually done, are interestingly captured by Heine: Ein neues Lied, ein besseres Lied, o Freunde, will ich euch dichten! Wir wollen auf Erden schon das Himmelreich errichten. A better way of doing things, a new way of doing things; it happens in this world. Verschlemmen soll nicht der faule Bauch, was fleißige Hände erwarben. We shouldn't throw away things that people have built with hard work. Simultaneously, there is the idea that hard work alone, without creativity, or that capitalism alone, will change things. These are concepts that Peter was way ahead of everyone else in warning about: a warning about the legitimate reasons for non-legitimate movements, socialism in its modern form.

I think all this has given Peter a uniquely interesting and vexing quality, especially in Germany, and makes it especially important to give him an award, because these are the qualities that Germany can learn from, to take Germany out of its somewhat difficult, you could say precarious, situation on many issues. You have to go back to echt deutsche Ideen, in a modern, non-xenophobic form. You have to go back to the last standing important German, Peter, to actually solve these problems in dialogue. And I'm very proud of him as a friend, as a Weggefährte over many, many years. And congratulations.

Did we award an anti-democrat?

Please welcome on stage this year's awardee, Peter Thiel, for the traditional award interview.

So you see, Peter, I did not exaggerate. Live performance: that's freedom.

So, herzlichen Glückwunsch, and thank you very much for the Springer prize.

Thank you so much. Such a great honor, great privilege to be here with so many of my friends, colleagues. Thank you so much.

Peter, the bad news is that this award doesn't come with money, and it doesn't come with a trophy. So it's the award as such. The only gift that we have for you today is Unfinished Tales, the first edition of Tolkien's Unfinished Tales, which was published after The Lord of the Rings and is the book where Tolkien really described the palantíri. So I hope that you have fun with this.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Pleasure. So, Peter, to straight away address the elephant in the room: did we award an anti-democrat?

No. But what am I supposed to say on that? I don't know. This famous quote from 2009, I get pinned on that for 17 years. It was this essay I quickly wrote. Writing is such a dangerous activity. It's more dangerous than having a child: if the child turns out badly, you can always disown your child; anything you write, you can never take back. But yeah, it was this hastily typed-out thing. I don't think I said anything that controversial. It was more of a critique of libertarians, classical liberals, who had too great hopes for politics. I issued a correction two weeks later that, of course, no one was arguing against democracy or voting or anything like that.

Probably the core of the argument I was making in 2009 was a worry that our society was becoming ever more politically intensified: that one of the bull markets we've had for the last 20 years is a bull market in politics, in which people, to paraphrase Trotsky, "you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you." And it's not a healthy development, but for all sorts of reasons, that's a part of the story of what's been happening on both sides of the Atlantic. And it's something I do not like.

It's an interesting discussion these days. Sometimes there is a tension between freedom and democracy, if you want to protect democracy by limiting freedom in order to do so. Where's the red line?

Of course, there are so many levels. And then, of course, direct democracy is something that only exists in a Swiss village of 100 people. So in some ways it's not even the right word. Our actual systems of governance are not democracies; they're constitutional republics. So that's another thing one could say. Or, what is the difference in the definition of democracy and populism? Is democracy what you mean when the people vote the right way, and populism what you mean when they vote the wrong way? And so do those two words not really mean the same thing? Which just tells you that you need a richer theory of what's going on, all these things.

The generational compact

Peter, we had a podcast today, and I have to say that again you surprised me, because you were basically defending, to a certain degree, the socialists in Germany, Die Linke, who have just won the election here in Berlin. Because you basically said they are taking topics seriously that we should take seriously. Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Why are you defending the socialists now?

Well, I was not defending them. But I felt if I said I understand why people vote for the AfD, then everybody would say, "Well, you're obviously an AfD supporter." But I figured if I say I can understand why people vote for Die Linke, no one will accuse me of having communist sympathies.

But yes, I think if you look at the recent election in Berlin, 25% of the people voted for Die Linke. I think something close to 50% of the youngest voters, age 16 to 24, did. And to steelman it: on some level, the generational compact in our societies has broken down. We live in these gerontocracies where the system is too heavily geared towards old people. It's too challenging for young people in all kinds of ways. And a very powerful way in which it manifests is the price of housing and rents. And that shows up in all kinds of ways.

And I don't think they have any answers. Probably their answers are worse. You can probably put rent controls in place in Berlin and turn the entire city into a slum. So I think they certainly don't have good answers for this. But there is a very real problem: housing costs too much; it's too regulated. And if nobody else is talking about it, Die Linke will keep winning.

The Antichrist is not contrarian

Peter, I have to challenge you with a question that has been mentioned this evening many times, and that you are asking frequently. Is there a truth you believe in that almost nobody agrees with?

There are so many. I always want to push back a little bit. I don't think of myself as just a contrarian. Being a contrarian means you just put a minus sign on what everybody else says, and that's in some sense not that interesting. And then, of course, it's also not always that easy to articulate what it is, to even know what everybody else thinks.

But let me give a recent version where I've changed my mind, and maybe this is a meta-level contrarian thing. Three years ago, when I started talking about the Antichrist, I thought this was a very contrarian idea. It was way outside the Overton window. I thought it was a very safe idea to talk about the Antichrist. It was like talking about the gold standard, something from the Middle Ages; nobody would complain about it in any way.

But the way I've updated is: the Antichrist, the danger of the sort of incipient totalitarian system that we have in the world, is not that crazy an idea. It's actually felt by lots of people. And so people think that it's a crazy idea that nobody agrees with; that's what they say. But if I talk to people one-on-one, actually, lots of people agree with me. So this is a very complicated version, but the contrarian belief is that the Antichrist is not contrarian at all. Almost everybody agrees with me on it.

A one-sided landscape

Peter, you started your career actually as a journalist, or as a publisher. You founded the Stanford Review, a very courageous and controversial and critical publication. Now, what we heard from Bari about the role of journalism and media: would you disagree with her?

I agree with everything that you said. And then, of course, a contrarian can also disagree with the moderator. And there is some way where it would be in very, very bad shape if it were not for people like Bari and you. And so there is sort of a question why it is so extraordinarily lopsided, why so much of it has degenerated into sort of a left-wing hate factory. And so that's a question I would put to you. So I'll compliment Bari and Mathias, you and the Axel Springer people, for the courage. But you are, of course, the contrarian voices in this very, very one-sided media landscape that is not nearly as free as we would like it to be.

Would you invest in media?

I'm very tempted to do it. I've thought about it a lot over the years. And then, yeah, it's always this: I'm always too fixated on the endgame, the business model questions. And so you'd have to give me a good answer for what's the moat, what is the monopoly in these businesses. And of course, it's probably already almost borderline illegal to ask that question, so I'm not going to ask you to answer it right now. But that is my question.

Wonderful. I'm looking forward to having a separate conversation on that topic with you.

Optimistic and desperate

Alex Karp just called you der letzte Deutsche. So what makes you German, and what is German for you?

Man, I don't know if this is too self-referential an answer, but I am so bad at self-psychoanalysis, and I don't think that would be a very German thing to do. So maybe I'm uncomfortable with that question, or something like that. But I don't know. I grew up in some ways between Germany and the U.S. Ich habe zu Hause Deutsch gesprochen, die ersten zehn, zwölf Jahre: I spoke German at home for the first ten, twelve years. My parents, the one sort of really crazy pedagogical idea they had was that they didn't think a TV set was good. Around age 12, my dad wanted to watch sports, we got a TV set, and then I gradually shifted from German to English.

But in some ways I grew up in both worlds, in some ways a little bit outside of both worlds. I have a perspective. I don't know. Most of my life has been in California. I often think of California as the opposite of Germany. It's optimistic and desperate, and Germany is pessimistic but comfortable. And probably the California attitude's better than the German one. But there's some way in which being a little bit skeptical, pessimistic, in a crazily optimistic tech world is often a healthy corrective.

As somebody who has been born in Germany and left the country when you were one year old and still feels this affiliation to Germany: for me it feels almost painful to listen to you, and to listen to Alex Karp speaking so passionately, about Germans being so successful in the entire world and not being used as a source of excellence for Germany to cope with the challenges that we have to succeed with. And my simple question is: would you help if you were asked?

It's probably easy for me to say yes, because I suspect that it'll be a while before I'm asked.

Be careful, the Prime Minister is here, so you could get some offers. You only need to ask. Okay, that's a very, very clear answer.

A couple of billion

Peter, let's talk about investments and entrepreneurship. You are one of the most successful of all times with it, with one very painful exception. I mean, usually you don't get it wrong. But when I asked you many, many years ago, I think it was in 2008, whether we should invest into Facebook, you advised me not to do it. And a few months ago you told me that you still have a bad conscience, because basically you owe me a couple of billion.

It was May of 2007, and I think I said something like that it was very fully valued. And they did the round at a $15 billion valuation with Microsoft in August of that year, and then a little less than two years later, in May of 2010, there was a down round where they were valued at $10 billion. So I was technically correct, even though you could not have listened to me.

Founders Fund

What defines a good investor? What's the most important capability or virtue a good investor should have?

I like to tell myself that it's helpful to be interested in a lot of different things. It's still somewhat of this generalist kind of a thing, where you want to try to ask questions about the details of a business, and how it fits into the bigger story of our time, into history. I don't know if that's true or just a rationalization for the ways in which I like to be an intellectual dilettante or something like that. But I think, and hope, that a part of it is this: you have to still be very much a generalist to do it well.

What distinguishes an entrepreneur from an investor? And what distinguishes American entrepreneurs from European entrepreneurs?

There's something about starting a company that's a much more singular activity. You're focused on one thing that you're doing. There's a way in which, even as an investor in these companies, you're never 100%; you don't put 100% of your capital in just one company. And so there's sort of a way that, as an investor, you can never be as completely aligned, as committed to the business, as the founders. So I think that's a difference.

My best attempt to bridge it is to just be honest about it, surface it, and think about it. So we called our venture fund Founders Fund, because, the positive version is, we think the founders are very special, very important. The humble or humble-bragging version is that we don't think we can help people very much, and we're kind of lazy, and just want to write checks and then let the other people do the work.

A more dangerous anti-Semitism

I'd love to talk with you now a little bit about entrepreneurship, and particularly Silicon Valley, but I would love to invite another guest on stage, and that is Max Levchin. Welcome, Max.

Max, before we dive into the Silicon Valley memories and future outlooks, I have one more personal question. You were born in Kyiv. You left the country when you were 16. You went with $700 to Chicago and then started an incredible career. You left Ukraine also in order to escape anti-Semitism. And now you live in a world where Ukraine has been for many years under attack in a Russian war, and anti-Semitism is rising globally, and it's becoming almost a pop-cultural phenomenon, a zeitgeist for young people all around the world, also in America. What's your take on that? What went wrong, and why?

Definitely not very good at all. I think this modern flavor of anti-Semitism feels somehow much more dangerous. Because when I was growing up, anti-Semitism divided into kind of people who were too dumb to know better. They were sort of falling back on stereotypes that were fed to them with mother's milk, people who didn't know any better, maybe had never really met a Jew and just thought, well, they have weird horns or something like that. And young people just repeated what their parents told them, and it was that.

And I think today, young people have well-formed ideological objections to Jews as a species, as a group of people. They have ideological objections to Israel's right to exist.

When we were leaving Ukraine, I was very excited to come to America, so I was definitely not too sad to leave. But I was also conscious of the fact that we were leaving the place where I was born. And I thought, one day I'll come back, and being told "dirty kike" is just going to be a thing that would be socially unacceptable. You wouldn't be called that, because obviously the people who were kind of too old to know better were dying off, and the young people were just parrots. And I don't know if I believe that anymore. I think young people are much more virulent in their anti-Semitism than some of the older ones. And that scares me, because they are conscious and active in developing their stories, many of which are fed to them by news that doesn't exist. I'm not sure I have a great answer to where it is really coming from. There's many theories, of course. But the fact that it's not abating with the passing of time, but actually strengthening, is very concerning to me.

Six people in a broom closet

I think an element of that has always been envy, and conspiracy theories that are created out of envy. And that leads us, in a way, to your incredible success that you both had, and have shaped, over decades. You first met in 1998, I think. You attended a lecture that Peter gave at Stanford University. I think you were one of six attendees.

So many.

So he must have impressed you. What did you see in Peter then? Why did it transform into a professional and very personal relationship, a friendship?

It's actually one of Peter's most endearing qualities, which has survived the test of time, unbelievably in some ways: he's as excitable today about the things that matter to him as he was when we were in our mid-twenties.

So it was literally a room the size of a broom closet. It was very small. It was not quite a broom closet, but it could have been a very large broom closet. And there were six or seven people in the room, and Peter was passionately talking about currency trading, of which I knew nothing and still know nothing about. I've learned zero in the intervening 30 years. But you couldn't help but pay attention, because he was so interested in explaining how there are all these discontinuities in the market, and these mistakes that people make. People are literally leaving money on the table. It's just there.

And so we're like, "I don't know what he's talking about, but it's so cool." And I thought that this is someone that clearly just feels deeply about intellectual pursuits. Like you would see people feeling deeply about an opera or a great story, he was feeling deeply about a topic of interest that he was willing to go very deep about. And I made a point of chatting him up afterwards, and that's where our story began.

Peter, what did you see in Max? Why did you want to work with him later?

Man, there's so many different things. But I think it's very unusual to find people who are smart and creative and extremely hard-working. Because normally, if you're any one of those three, you can slacken off on the other two. And Max is this almost unique person. I'm not sure he's the smartest person I know, or the most creative, maybe the hardest working, but on some blend of those three, he's just in a class by himself. And it was just this extraordinary partnership we built at PayPal. In all these ways, it was very complementary.

Hard things and valuable things

There are always these sort of crazy, detailed war stories and things. But one of the debates we had for years at PayPal was, Max's intuition was, "Oh, we need to work on really hard problems." And so we started with this encryption on a Palm Pilot, where it was very hard to get money financially encrypted on as small an amount of memory and software as you had on a Palm in those days. And then my counterargument was always, "We need to do things. I don't care whether it's hard. We need to do things that are valuable." And then maybe Max's counterargument was, "Well, there's nothing that's valuable that isn't hard." And then my counterargument is, "There are lots of hard things that are not valuable." And somehow we ended up doing something that was harder than my natural laziness wanted to do, and maybe pretty valuable too. So there's some way we worked together real well.

To which degree was it also this complementary fit, that Max basically knew about tech, what you didn't know, and you knew about finance and business, what he was missing?

It was financial cryptography; that was sort of the intersection. I came to Silicon Valley with a plan to start a company in cryptography, which at the time was sort of completely outlandish, because the devices that you could do serious cryptography on were mobile, and I wanted to work on mobile devices. And I also had no idea about finances; Peter knew lots about finances. So I think all of that was sort of, those were retail-level synergies.

I think one of the rarities of our partnership was that we were both into a huge number of things at the same time. So there was the overlapping set of topics and areas of interest, and things from politics. He was obviously very libertarian in college; so was I. I came at it from a socialist-country background, so I felt deeply about how socialism is not the way and we need to fight it with all we've got. And Peter came to this ultra-liberal place, Stanford, and sort of fought it from within, from its own liberalism and so on.

So we had lots of areas that had nothing to do with the work we had, that we agreed on. In our founder-dating mode, we went to a coffee shop called Printers Inc. and traded difficult math puzzles, mostly to figure out if the other person was smart enough. "Are you really the smartest person I know?" sort of thing. And we sort of ended up in a draw, I think.

And the punchline was, when we were off to do work together at PayPal, I never doubted his quality of work. When he would go off to Japan to raise money, I don't think I ever called him to say, "Well, how's it going?" I knew he would come back. PayPal almost ran out of money three times, in my count, and every time Peter would just get the suit on and go raise some money. And I don't think I ever asked how it was going. It was sort of like, well, he obviously will succeed, because he's very competent.

Naked in the Pacific

You have already complimented yourselves that you were both extremely hard-working. We get that. But could you describe a little bit the other lifestyle factors? Let's say drinking habits and stuff like that. How was Silicon Valley back then? How should we picture the early days of PayPal? Give us a little bit of color.

Well, Peter's very competitive, like, a little bit. There was one time when, I think, we had just hired our first salesperson, who was goading our engineering team to go dip in the very, very cold Pacific Ocean water. And I was willing to stand back and say, "You guys go on and take your dip and freeze your appendages off." And it became sort of a competition. Like, well, surely Peter is smart enough, he grew up here, he knows it's freaking cold. And next thing I know, Peter is stripped down naked, running for the water to make sure that he's beating everyone and staying in the longest.

And there was a time when he and I went for a run, and we decided to pace each other, because that's what we're supposed to be doing. That was one of my better moments. And then I looked away, and then I realized Peter was sprinting for the finish.

No, the way I remember it was, it was this five-mile run in San Francisco, and I was slightly ahead, and then it was about 100 meters to the finish, and I knew that Max probably would be just behind me and was going to plan to overtake me at the last minute. And then I sprinted, and I did not look back, because if I even took the time to look back, he'd be able to overtake me.

I maintain that if we had started from the same line, I would have absolutely overtaken you. So maybe it was the right call. I'm also not competitive at all.

But the synergy of our competition, in the early days of PayPal, in the last wave of Silicon Valley greatness (nothing wrong with the current wave, of course), was that you could take these competitive impulses, absolutely read the wrong tea leaves, and turn it into a success.

Ninety-ten

So Elon made an appearance in the story. Elon came to us offering to merge the companies. We were sitting facing each other in a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto, and he said, "Well, I think we should merge companies." And Peter, who was the senior partner in charge, said, "Seems like a good idea. What ratio are you thinking of?" And Elon, with a completely straight face, said, "90 for us, 10 for you." And we sort of basically stood up and left.

But the takeaway was, well, this guy's already been successful. He sold the company for $300 million. We were upstarts; we barely knew what we were doing. And the conclusion we drew was: we're too competitive to put up with this ridiculous 90-10; we're obviously going to beat him. And the conclusion should have been: this guy must have some kind of an amazing hand. He's about to beat us. He's so willing to go all in with this 90-10.

You beat up Bill Harris, the hired CEO. And was it in a laundromat where you beat him down to 50-50?

Yeah. So we had these amazing times where the rational path would have been to find a compromise and kind of be non-competitive and just sort of land the plane beautifully. And time and time again, between the two of us, somebody would be like, "Nah, we're going to fight. Let's just see what happens." And so you took the crazy risks, because there was nothing to lose, but also because you were too dumb to know that risks can be catastrophic.

Peak of insanity, peak of clarity

There was a felt sense in the late '90s that it was a crazy boom; maybe it was a crazy bubble. But there was the sense, at least I felt, and I think Max also felt very strongly, that somehow the time was short. Every day, you felt like you were going to die, or maybe you were going to take over the world. You went back and forth between those two extremes a few times a day. And so there was this incredible intensity. Maybe it was a little bit insane.

But I always say, you just think of March 2000, which was the month that all these things happened: it was in some sense the peak of insanity, but it was also the peak of clarity, because people thought the new economy would take over the old economy. And then you just had to, it was a wide-open field. You had to build it.

We knew nothing about payments. In 1999, one of the senior vice presidents from Visa asked us, "What are you going to do about fraud?" And we had no idea what to do, so we concluded he was just a very negative person, and that if you had a company with as friendly a name as PayPal, all the bad people would stay away.

Yes, sir.

And then, of course...

Fast forward.

...in the last six months, we were losing $10 million net per month to fraud losses. So we had six weeks to live when we figured it out.

We were dogmatic, but we updated fast.

Near-death moments

What was the biggest crisis at PayPal that the two of you experienced?

We never had a crisis between the two of us. I can't think of a moment where...

You always got along well, always peaceful and constructive?

The only time, I mean, you may have your own memory, it would be good to compare notes. We never had this conversation; this is live, unprompted. But there's one time where I had to ship one of the earliest versions of PayPal just so, and I called Peter during his fundraising tours, not to ask him how he was doing, by the way, because I was sure he was going to bring some money home, but to tell him we were going to be slipping the deadline again. And he got really upset: "Find yourself a new CEO, then." I was like, "Oh, wow, he's really..."

I don't remember that.

But then he called me back to ask something, and I was like, "Right, he doesn't mean it, it's fine." So that's the closest I remember to a real moment of, whoa, that's a new side of Peter Thiel.

But we launched without having everything double-checked, and there were all these levels on which it was pretty crazy what we did.

Yeah, the entire time one of us took the "I'll be the crazy one" side, and we rotated without ever planning to. Peter would be like, "Just launch it already, it's fine." I'm like, "We need to launch it to 1%." "No, no, launch it to 100% of the users. Well, let's just find out if it works." I would never do that on my own. And then sometimes Peter would be like, "Well, we should be careful, let's not do this." Like, "Nah, what could go wrong?" And so I think we kept on doing this. But in terms of our partnership, I think 100% of the time, in my memory, we were like the two kids snickering in the back, looking at the world going, "They don't get it. We do."

We generally had similar intuitions on people. There were probably some subtle people where you were more correct in retrospect, or I was, but for the most part, yeah. We initially had this idea that we were going to have this company that would never fire anybody. And then there was sort of a very near crisis we had with the sort of not-so-good employee who showed up the first day at work at 6 p.m. and tended not to wash and was smelly.

That wasn't actually the problem. The problem was that he unplugged the only hard drive on which the entirety of our source code was, and the hard drive burnt. And so we had no more source code, six months of work. But fortunately, one of the other software engineers had not trusted him and secretly backed up everything every day.

Yep. Yeah, but the number of near-death moments, I think we averaged significantly more than our fair share. The number of "now we're done" moments, where we were staring at each other going, "Well, this may be it," was significant.

There was a time when Peter was very excited about a piece of software that I wrote that allowed us to inject PayPal logos into eBay auctions automatically. And I wanted to do a very careful job testing it, because eBay sellers would tell us it's okay to put the PayPal logo on my auction so people know, so that sounds good. And I built this really clever little tool, and I launched it, and it worked a little bit, and Peter wanted it faster, so I just turned it up to 11. And then I had to go to a wedding in the Santa Cruz hills, and there was no coverage of any kind. I took my pager with me, but my pager didn't work. And then I finally decided I needed to go check my email, so I sort of dropped down from the hills, and I got 1,000 angry emails from all kinds of engineers saying, "Your script overwrote the eBay homepage. It's just packed with PayPal logos."

And I called Peter, and he's like, "Yeah, we're probably done. They're going to ban us. That's it. We're going to be thrown out." And I drove away from the wedding and worked all night to fix the problem. And eBay called and said, "We're going to turn you off." But then they didn't, because they needed us more than we needed them. And so there are a lot of these moments in our history at PayPal where it turns out that we were right with the intuition that it's probably going to work out.

An instant fan

Max, is there any weak spot of Peter that is so far unknown that you could disclose today? And perhaps, in order to be fair, is there a strength or virtue of Peter that is underappreciated?

I think on the evening of getting such an important award, it would be a shame to mock him any more than I already have.

I think his greatest strength is the thing that I saw. And by the way, I think the reason he transitioned so successfully from entrepreneur to investor is that thing that I saw in that lecture. The thing that makes Peter Peter is he is excited for the person he's talking to to win. He wants the person to win. He's so into you. For someone as smart, as successful, and as brilliant as he is, many people like that eventually retreat into the cave of "I already know better, I have it figured out." And every time I talk to Peter, and we've known each other for 30 years, and I hear the same story from people who met him on a pitch, they walk out thinking, "I can't believe how excited he became about the thing that I am working on. He didn't know me until an hour ago, and now he seems like my greatest ally."

And I think his greatest, maybe underappreciated, strength is this capacity to become an instant fan, helper, advisor, or ally, whatever the word is. I'm not sure there's an all-encompassing term for it, but I think it's very special. I think that's probably, many times, what kept me going when we were working together as closely. He was an investor in my current project for many, many years, and many times you want someone to not just tell you it's going to be okay, but to actually be excited for you.

Actually, it's interesting that you're saying that. We had a conversation today with other founders, entrepreneurs, and you were constantly focusing on that: how do you want to create a monopoly? Explain your monopoly to me. I mean, that is one of the theories that is widely misunderstood. Could it be that that is an element in it, that you challenge people because you want to make sure that they're really successful, and the ultimate goal is, in the spirit of Rupert Murdoch, who once said, "I hate monopolies, except if I own them"? Is that why you are challenging people with that?

You always want to push people on the places they don't want to talk about. So if people want to talk too much about the science, the technology, you push them on the business model. At some level, it's just about the individuals, the caliber of the people. And then, yes, it's some complicated combination of the people, the technology, the business model, and you have to try to push on all three.

The sharper edges

Okay, but I mean, because he got the award, I think he can live with the fact that you are disclosing one human weakness. How was his behavior with regard to parties in Silicon Valley?

Well, as you can see, he's obviously a fantastic dancer and has a great singing voice.

Yeah, I think we all polished off the sharper edges of our youth over the years. And so I think when we were younger, Peter probably one out of ten times would tell someone the very thing they really should not have heard that day, because it brought them from "I'm a screw-up" to "I'm a failure." But when you're in your twenties and you're trying to build a business and you have no time for mistakes, you kind of have to cut to the chase, sometimes fairly bluntly. I'd like to believe he's gotten better over the years, so I haven't heard him tell me how I've screwed up that day. But I think there was a small army of people that Peter made cry in the days of our collaboration.

Then and now

We have to come to an end sooner or later, but I would like to hear from both of you a little bit of a comparison of the Silicon Valley of the late '90s with the Silicon Valley of the present. What are the similarities? What distinguishes it? It used to be the anti-establishment then; today it is the establishment. What has changed culturally with regard to mentality?

I don't know. In some ways, both of us are probably, to some extent, very shaped by the PayPal years, so it's still sort of somewhat formed by the late '90s. And then, when I think about the enormous AI boom, my go-to thing is: is it like the internet in the late '90s? And so I'm tempted to always draw analogies where maybe it's very big, but it will take a little bit longer. So it could be a financial bubble, but still a real technology over time.

And then perhaps the more interesting questions are how it is different. Because you always tend to pattern-match and focus on the ways in which it's similar, and maybe the important questions are how it's different. So maybe it's a much bigger technology, a much bigger transformation. This was the holy grail of computer science for years: to pass the Turing test and get a computer that could fool you, or simulate a human being. And in all these ways it would be incredibly important economically, culturally, politically.

There's sort of a business model question. The way people thought of the internet in the '90s was that everybody could start a company and there'd be all these different businesses. And then it turned out there were these enormous returns to scale, and so you have these very, very large platforms that emerged and have sort of this winner-take-all dynamic. And I don't know, I wonder if the AI thing is actually the opposite, where maybe it's going to be extremely competitive at the end of the day. And so even though it's a giant market, maybe it will be less monopolistic in nature, and a lot of the value of AI will be felt more as consumer surplus and will actually be much more evenly distributed, even though that's not the standard view.

Was it more optimistic then, and is it more almost paranoid with regard to the future now? I mean, what you said about hard work, and this panic we see also these days: there are a lot of people in the Valley who are working like crazy, 16 hours a day, and basically saying, "We have six months to reinvent ourselves, otherwise we are bust." So is it more skeptical today, more pessimistic?

I think we're in a very weird moment of transition. In the '90s, at least by the time we entered, the tail end, when I started coming to Silicon Valley during college, I'm not sure exactly what was going on, but it was very exciting. People were pitching in outdoor cafés to each other, and it was being formed. But by '98, '99, when we started PayPal, you knew a little bit of the formula for success. You had to have really good technology. You had to have a business model that you could fully grasp, and a distribution strategy, et cetera, et cetera. And so you knew what the formula of success would look like. It would still require luck. It would still require a lot of hard work, an amazing team, et cetera.

I think in today's Silicon Valley, the payoffs are obviously great. It is hard to overstate how important AI is. And the downstream consequences of AI are already becoming obviously critical for humanity, and it'll only become more so. This is the time to reread science fiction. All the utopian, benign AI stories are coming true right in front of our eyes. But what's less obvious is: what is the formula for success? If you are a startup founder walking off the school bench today, you don't actually have a playbook saying, well, you need to work hard. Sure, but is it enough? What if Google just throws more capital at it? Which always was the case in the '90s, but you knew that if you were clever, and you worked hard, and you picked a niche, success was a little bit easier to predict. We don't yet know what the playbook of success looks like in this age, and that's where I think the angst comes from in Silicon Valley.

I think the angst outside Silicon Valley is "we'll be replaced by robots." It's all understandable. It was there in the '90s. It didn't materialize. We're not going to use less computing; we'll use more computing. Jevons paradox, proven time and time again. So all the sort of downstream consequences, I'm extremely, to be honest, dismissive of, because it's clearly going to repeat itself in all the positive ways. But what does it take to build an amazing company? That formula hasn't been written. We are writing it now, but we don't know the answer.

Integrity

One very last question to both of you. We are living in times of unlimited and unparalleled opportunity and at the same time a lot of uncertainty. In that world, as fathers (you have two kids, you have four kids), what is the one value that your kids should share and carry forward?

Integrity.

Correct.

Thank you very much, both of you. Wonderful.