He was arrogant, and set his worldview against those who mocked him for it. Young Thiel had the usual dandruff-club hobbies: He played Dungeons & Dragons, read Tolkien and aced the SATs. Unsmiling, solipsistic and at pains to conceal his forever wounded vanity, Thiel in Chafkin’s telling comes across as singularly disagreeable, which is evidently the secret to both his worldly successes and his moral failures. Thiel stalks through Chafkin’s biography “as if braced for a collision,” spoiling for a fight with whomever he designates a “liberal” - meaning anyone he suspects of snubbing him.

Where did these far-right Americans, powerful and not, ashamed and proud, come from? Why does a stock lecture about mortality lead some 3-to-5-year-old boys to develop contempt for the frailties in themselves - and in everyone else? Like the anonymous white supremacist, Thiel never recovered from bummer death news, and, according to Chafkin, still returns compulsively to “the brutal finality of the thing.” Thiel also turned to swaggering and, later, an evolving, sometimes contradictory, hodgepodge of libertarian and authoritarian beliefs. It will happen to you.”Ī near identical far-right coming-of-age tale - a Rechtsextremebildungsroman? The coincidence kicked off a wave of despair that crashed over me as I read Chafkin’s book. When he was 3, according to Chafkin, Thiel asked his father about a rug, which his father, Klaus Thiel, explained was cowhide. An epiphany from Thiel’s childhood sounded familiar.

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