In 2004, Peter Thiel created a company, Palantir, that built on his PayPal cofounder Max Levchin’s algorithms for analyzing and making judgments based on an individual’s highly personal digital records. Named after magical stones in The Lord of the Rings, Palantir helps governments and private companies make judgments from online and offline records based on patterns recognized by algorithms. For example, the company produces software that in seconds can scan through hundreds of millions of pictures of license plates collected by the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, pieces of information that can be interpreted with the help of other large data sets. Palantir’s chief executive, Alex Karp, a law school friend recruited by Thiel, defends his company’s role in sifting through this material, which was collected by the government, after all. “If we as a democratic society believe that license plates in public trigger Fourth Amendment protections, our product can make sure you can’t cross that line,” Karp said, adding: “In the real world where we work—which is never perfect—you have to have trade-offs.”

Copyright © 2017 by Noam Cohen. This excerpt originally appeared in The Know-It-Alls: The Rise of Silicon Valley as a Political Powerhouse and Social Wrecking Ball by Noam Cohen, published by The New Press. Reprinted here with permission.

For someone identified as a “libertarian,” Thiel has been comfortable operating businesses that relied on analyzing the personal information of its customers or the general public. Just as profiling by PayPal kept it afloat by excluding potential fraudsters, well-conceived government investigations, Thiel contends, keep America safe. After revelations by Edward Snowden about the government’s surveillance capabilities, Thiel was asked if he thought the National Security Agency collected too much information about United States citizens. Thiel didn’t object to those practices from a libertarian perspective but, rather, said he was offended by the agency’s stupidity. “The NSA has been hoovering up all the data in the world, because it has no clue what it is doing. ‘Big data’ really means ‘dumb data,’” he told readers of Reddit who asked him questions. “BTW, I don’t agree with the libertarian description of the NSA as ‘big brother.’ I think Snowden revealed something that looks more like the Keystone Kops and very little like James Bond.”

Similar to Andreessen, Peter Thiel lately has combined the roles of investor and public intellectual. Of Thiel’s many successful investments—LinkedIn, YouTube, and Facebook come to mind—perhaps his most far-sighted has been the decision to publicly back Donald Trump for president, which required Thiel to break ranks with his Silicon Valley peers. In return for his prime-time endorsement on the final night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, as well as $1.25 million in contributions to Trump’s campaign through affiliated super PACs and direct contributions, Thiel was rewarded with a place of privilege when president-elect Trump met with tech leaders during the transition, and an important advisory role in the next administration. Who knows what dividends are yet to be collected?

The Trump endorsement reestablished Thiel’s reputation as a uniquely polarizing Silicon Valley figure, a Trumpian character, you might say. Indeed, Thiel has become an almost toxic spokesman for the tech world, so much so that his close friends and business partners, like Zuckerberg and Hoffman, have felt obligated to defend their relationships publicly. During the presidential election, Zuckerberg was confronted by Facebook employees who objected to Thiel’s continued role on the company’s board of directors because of his support for Trump. In a fine example of rhetorical jujitsu, Zuckerberg referred to Facebook’s commitment to diversity to answer those who were appalled by Trump’s disparagement of Mexicans, Muslims, and women, among others, and the idea that a board member could be supporting his candidacy. “We care deeply about diversity,” Zuckerberg wrote in defense of Thiel. “That’s easy to say when it means standing up for ideas you agree with. It’s a lot harder when it means standing up for the rights of people with different viewpoints to say what they care about. That’s even more important.”

No doubt Thiel is an odd bird with a penchant for fringe ideas. In his pursuit of limited government, he has given substantial financial support to seasteading, which encourages political experimentation through the development of floating communities in international waters, presumably outside the reach of governments. He is unusually obsessed with his own death and sickness, a condition he traces back to the disturbing day when he was three and learned from his father that all things die, starting with the cow who gave his life for the family’s leather rug. Thiel supports a range of potential life-extending innovations, including cryogenics, which involves keeping a body alive by cooling it; genetic research to fight diseases; and, most resonantly, a treatment based on cycling through blood transfusions from young people in the belief that the vigor therein can be transferred to the older recipient. Thiel says he is surprised that his obsession with death is considered weird—for what it’s worth, he considers those complacent about death to be psychologically troubled. “We accept that we’re all going to die, and so we don’t do anything, and we think we’re not going to die anytime soon, so we don’t really need to worry about it,” he told an interviewer. “We have this sort of schizophrenic combination of acceptance and denial...it converges to doing nothing.”