Books Recommended by Peter Thiel
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Cryptonomicon
Neal Stephenson
Source: "The early PayPal team worked well together because we were all the same kind of nerd. We all loved science fiction: Cryptonomicon was required reading." - Peter Thiel
Atlas Shrugged
Source: "When I first read [Ayn Rand's books] in the late 80s, it felt pretty crazy. And in the last decades, it's in many ways felt much more correct." - Peter Thiel
Bloodlands
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Timothy Snyder
Source: "Tells how the Nazis and the Soviets drove each other to ever more murderous atrocities as they fought to dominate Eastern Europe." - Peter Thiel
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World
Rene Girard
Source: "We [followers of Girard], had sort of a sense that we had figured out the truth about the world in a way that nobody else did." - Peter Thiel
Psychopolitics
Conversations with Trevor Cribben Merrill
Jean-Michel Oughourlian
Source: "For a fresh application of Mr. Girard’s insights into power politics, that great international theater of irrationality." - Peter Thiel
The Reasonableness of Christianity
John Locke
Source: "Said that Christ obviously had to mislead people, since if he had not done so, the authorities might have tried to kill him." - Peter Thiel
Paradise Lost
Source: "The mind is its own place and of itself can make a hell of heaven, and a heaven of hell." - Peter Thiel
The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World
From Marathon to Waterloo
Edward Shepherd Creasy
Source: "Peter [Thiel] would, at one point, pass me a copy of [this book], the book he had read as he’d mulled his options over." - Ryan Holiday
The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
Source: "The devil shows up in Stalinist Russia, [...] and gives everybody what they want, and everything goes haywire." - Peter Thiel
Discourses on Livy
Niccolò Machiavelli
Source: "Something in these pages planted itself deep into [Peter Thiel]’s mind when he first read it long ago." - Ryan Holiday
Anna Karenina
Source: "All happy families are alike, and all unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way." - Peter Thiel
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty
Source: "Accurately describes inequality in the past and present of countries like the United States." - Peter Thiel
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Ben Horowitz
Source: "[The author] has written the first true guide for protecting a startup from self-sabotage." - Peter Thiel
The Decadent Society
How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
Ross Gregory Douthat
Source: "Sets the stakes for the most urgent public debate of the 2020s: How do we get back to the future?" - Peter Thiel
Holy Bible
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Source: Peter Thiel says The New Testament has influenced him more than The Old Testament.
The Sovereign Individual
Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
James Dale Davidson
Source: "One of the books that tremendously influenced me when I started PayPal." - Peter Thiel
Resurrection from the Underground
Feodor Dostoevsky
Rene Girard
Source: "The great French thinker René Girard’s classic study of Fyodor Dostoevsky." - Peter Thiel
The Great Illusion
A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage
Norman Angell
Source: "I like the genre of past books written about the future." - Peter Thiel
The American Challenge
Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
Source: "I like the genre of past books written about the future." - Peter Thiel
The Diamond Age
Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer
Neal Stephenson
Source: "I like the genre of past books written about the future." - Peter Thiel
The New Atlantis
Sir Francis Bacon
Source: "I like the genre of past books written about the future." - Peter Thiel
Life After Google
The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
George Gilder
Source: "The future depends on human action." - Peter Thiel
The City and the Stars
Arthur C. Clarke
Source: "One of [Peter Thiel's] favorite novels." - Ryan Holiday
The Messianic Character of American Education
Rousas John Rushdoony
Source: "[The author's] best book." - Peter Thiel
6 books