Above all, he is a man with a utopian belief in the power of technology to change the world.
 Through a variety of venture capital funds and his non-profit Thiel Foundation, Thiel has invested substantially in space travel, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and information technology.
 He has been one of the most public champions of ‘seasteading’ – the idea of establishing floating communities outside territorial waters and beyond the regulatory powers of governments.
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 Founders Fund was the first outside venture capital business to invest in Musk’s rocket company SpaceX (the fund made an initial investment of $20 million, and with additional investments Founders Fund’s holding in the company is now valued at $500 million).
 The British artificial intelligence company Deep Mind Technologies, which Founders Fund seeded with a $15 million investment, was bought by Google in January for £240 million.
 The Thiel Foundation, which perhaps most accurately reflects Thiel’s personal passions, funds a range of projects from a biotech company, Modern Meadow, that has developed methods of producing cultured meat and leather products without animal slaughter, to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a think tank devoted to the study of artificial intelligence, and ensuring that ‘smarter-than-human-intelligence’ machines behave as humans want them to do, rather than as the machines might want to do.
 The Thiel Fellowship is among his more controversial projects.
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 Thiel’s libertarian ideals, his evangelical belief in the power of technology to shape the future, and his network of powerful contacts have elevated him to the role of a prophet in Silicon Valley, if breeding a degree of suspicion in some quarters outside it.
 In the course of researching Thiel, I came across an article linking his investments in seasteading, artificial intelligence and CIA and NSA intelligence-gathering to his role on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group to place him at the heart of a ‘Zionist’ conspiracy, supposedly ‘deciding globalist agendas’ and advancing technology that will turn humanity into ‘the new slave-automatons of the Elite’.
 When I showed Thiel the article he speed-read the five pages in almost as few seconds, like a digital scanner, before tossing it aside with a bemused shake of the head.
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 And I’m not sure I could do that.
’ His friends are, for the most part, ‘loosely’ in the world of technology, who share his belief in the redemptive power of technology, his enthusiasm for conversations about macroeconomics, artificial intelligence, and, as Thiel puts it, ‘figuring things out’.
 He is, as you might expect, a definite optimist.