Peter Thiel: 21st Century Free Radical

(Corrects James B. O'Neill's name.)

On a chilly December night, a few hundred people gathered at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts for an event called Breakthrough Philanthropy. For an hour the guests engaged in the familiar social rituals of Silicon Valley, trading business cards and startup ideas over sushi, spring rolls, and pinot noir, before filing into an auditorium to listen to fundraising pitches from eight nonprofit organizations. The groups had disparate agendas, but all shared a fantastic vision for changing the world—defy death through regenerative medicine! Harness intelligence from machines smarter than the human brain! Build self-governing communities on the high seas! They also had a common benefactor: Peter A. Thiel, the iconoclastic, libertarian 43-year-old venture capitalist and macro-hedge-fund investor. When the speakers finished, James B. O'Neill, who runs the Thiel Foundation, introduced his boss as someone "who works every day to reshape the world and focus on solutions to problems other people overlook."