Peter Thiel's Reading List
The 5 books that shaped Peter Thiel — venture capitalist & contrarian thinker.
PayPal co-founder and iconoclast whose book Zero to One became a bible for startup founders seeking to build monopolies.
Influential Books
Zero to One
Peter Thiel(2014)
Thiel's manifesto on startups — the future belongs to those who create something genuinely new, not incremental copies.
The Girard Reader
René Girard(1996)
Girard's mimetic theory — that desire is imitative and competition is destructive — is Thiel's core intellectual framework.
The Sovereign Individual
James Dale Davidson, Lord William Rees-Mogg(1997)
Thiel has called this the most important book he's read — a prediction that technology would dissolve nation-states.
The Straussian Moment
Peter Thiel(2007)
Thiel's essay applying Leo Strauss's political philosophy to the post-9/11 world and technological change.
Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien(1954)
Thiel named his surveillance company Palantir after Tolkien's seeing stones. Middle-earth runs deep in his worldview.