The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley’s Pursuit of Power review — a liberal-baiting tech-supervillain – The Times

Peter Thiel? Pronounced “teal”, like the green. Or the duck. He’s not Mark Zuckerberg and he’s not Jeff Bezos. He’s not Elon Musk, although now you’re getting close. Nothing to do with Napster, Google, Twitter or Apple. He’s the guy who said, brilliantly, “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” And yet, he’s also the one behind PayPal, which is not at the “flying car” end of the digital revolution. Still, he wants the super-rich to be free to live on oil rigs and pay no tax, and he wants to live for ever.

Max Chafkin’s The Contrarian is a portrait of a man who in some respects utterly defies the Silicon Valley tech overlord archetype, but in others could be responsible