Peter Thiel

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

Subtitled 'Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus'

Peter Thiel biography with substantial Palantir founding material.

PayPal from Confinity and X.com through the merger to the 2002 sale to eBay.

Insider account by an early PayPal marketing hire; partisan but first-hand.

The secretly funded litigation that destroyed Gawker.

Oral history; Thiel and the PayPal cohort speak in their own words.

Alex Karp and Palantir's path from CIA funding to the surveillance state.

A novel in which industrialists vanish from an economy run by government directives.

A novel of wartime codebreakers and their descendants building a data haven.

A novel of a nanotech future and a stolen copy of an interactive teaching book.

A novel of the quest to destroy a ring of power that corrupts all who use it.

A novel in which the devil, as Professor Woland, brings chaos to Soviet Moscow.

A reading of Xenophon's Hiero, where a tyrant and a poet weigh the uses of tyranny.

Girard reading Dostoevsky; mimetic rivalry and resentment

Bacon's utopia of organised research; science as an institution

What justice is, answered by building an ideal city in dialogue.

Mimetic rivalry, where rivals grow alike, and the violence it unleashes in societies.

Argues that ethics and politics rest on a real distinction between right and wrong.

Hayek's 1944 warning that central economic planning corrodes political freedom alongside economic efficiency. Written for a British Left audience, it argued that the path to socialism and the path to fascism share structural features. Its critics say it proves too much; its admirers say history vindicated it.

Why liberal democracy may be the end state of political change, and how people react.

Machiavelli's handbook on political strategy remains disturbing because it separates effectiveness from morality — a distinction every strategic thinker eventually has to confront. His analysis of how new rulers consolidate power is still the sharpest treatment of legitimacy under conditions of uncertainty.

1997 forecast of digital money weakening the nation state

1968 warning that American corporations would come to dominate Europe

Conquest no longer pays, since modern prosperity rests on trade and credit.

Subtitled 'Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers'

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

PayPal from Confinity and X.com through the merger to the 2002 sale to eBay.

Rare, unforeseen, high-impact events drive history, explained only after the fact.

Six principles of compliance, from reciprocity to scarcity, and how sellers use them.

Radical life extension and what longer lifespans do to markets

Argument that rich societies have stagnated into repetition and sterility

The case that blockchain architectures displace the centralised web