This list is curated from 40 mentions and sorted by most mentioned, then by date of most recent mention. The more a book is mentioned, the more likely it's recommended and a favorite... or they just like talking about it a lot!
Last updated: .
This list is curated from 40 mentions and sorted by most mentioned, then by date of most recent mention. The more a book is mentioned, the more likely it's recommended and a favorite... or they just like talking about it a lot!
Last updated: .
Anna Karenina
by Leo Tolstoy
I think it's Anna Karenina where it's: all happy families are alike and all unhappy families are unhappy. In their own special way I think something like the opposite is true of companies: all great companies are special in a good way and then all failed companies somehow generic and and failed.
— Peter Thiel
Life After Google
by George Gilder
I thought I would try to double these three ideas up as a sort of a book review of a Gilder's terrific book Life After Google, so I'm gonna give you three contrarian ideas but I'm gonna weave in a little bit of a book review of a Life after Google as well.
— Peter Thiel
Atlas Shrugged
by Ayn Rand
When the Ayn Rand books were written in the 1950s, it felt like it was crazy. It's so bleak, so pessimistic, I think, or so busted, so broken. When I first read them in the late 80s, it still felt pretty crazy, and then the last decade, it's it's in many ways felt much more correct.
— Peter Thiel
Lord of the Rings (3 books)
by J. R. R. Tolkien
The classic [favorite novel] I always give is Lord of the Rings.
— Peter Thiel
7 Powers
by Hamilton Helmer
Hamilton Helmer understands that strategy starts with invention. He can't tell you what to invent, but he can and does show what it takes for a new invention to become a valuable business
— Peter Thiel
Paradise Lost
by John Milton
The line I always like to quote is uh from Milton's Paradise Lost: the mind is its own place and of itself can make a hell of heaven and a heaven of hell.
— Peter Thiel
The Messianic Character of American Education
by R. J. Rushdoony
It's sort of an extreme writer but there's the Rushdooney book from 1963 that I think it was his best book.
— Peter Thiel
The Sovereign Individual
by James Dale Davidson, William Rees-Mogg
One of the books that tremendously influenced me when I started PayPal.
— Peter Thiel
The Decadent Society
by Ross Douthat
If you can get a university president (almost every one of whom is a boomer) to take stagnation seriously, you are likely to hear two talking points: First, we need to spend more money on education and research. Second, progress is harder now than it used to be because the “low-hanging fruit” is all gone and we are up against the limits of nature. Douthat rejects these excuses. He maintains that more of the same is not enough, and stagnation is not a fate imposed by the universe. Choosing agency over boomer complacency, The Decadent Society sets the stakes for the most urgent public debate of the 2020s: How do we get back to the future?
— Peter Thiel
On Tyranny
by Leo Strauss
Back in 1958, when new technologies such as the Boeing 707 really were changing the physical world around us, Leo Strauss had already pointed out an “appalling discrepancy” between the exactness of science itself and our seeming incapacity to evaluate its progress.
— Peter Thiel
Dangerous
by Milo Yiannopoulos
'If you don't use your freedom of speech, one day you might find that it's gone. Buy this book while it's legal.
— Peter Thiel
Originals
by Adam Grant
It can sometimes seem as if one must learn everything old before one can try anything new. Adam Grant does a masterful job showing that is not the case; we are lucky to have him as a guide.
— Peter Thiel
The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations
by Kenneth Prewitt
The tax code leaves unanswered, of course, the question of why we allow foundations this privilege and this power. In The Legitimacy of Philanthropic Foundations, a recent collection of essays on the topic, the lead editor Kenneth Prewitt argues that private grantmaking foundations carry out a function no other institutions can perform. That uniqueness, however, is not immediately evident. After all, foundations redistribute wealth, support scientific and artistic endeavors, and seek to improve social conditions—all of which the government does as well. It is not, concludes Prewitt, what foundations do that makes them unique but what they represent: a Jeffersonian ideal, an American picture of individual freedom in service to moral ends.
— Peter Thiel
The Foundation
by Joel L. Fleishman
Thus, in The Foundation: A Great American Secret, another recent volume on the topic, Joel Fleishman asks whether society is getting its money’s worth. Are foundations living up to their “responsibility for achieving significant social impact through their programs”? And he answers: “The best response is clear evidence that foundations are adding significant value to the money they handle and investing it to create the highest possible level of benefits for society. Otherwise, why should society continue to subsidize them?”
— Peter Thiel
The Singularity Is Near
by Ray Kurzweil
There was this sort of hyperoptimistic book by Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near; we had all these sort of accelerating charts. I also disagree with that, not just because I’m more pessimistic, but I disagree with the vision of the future where all you have to do is sit back, eat popcorn, and watch the movie of the future unfold.
— Peter Thiel
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
If you want something a little more intellectual, it’s probably the Bulgakov novel The Master and Margarita where the devil shows up in Stalinist Russia, and succeeds, and gives everybody what they want, and everything goes haywire. It’s hard, because no one believes he’s real.
— Peter Thiel
The Reasonableness of Christianity
by John Locke
It was John Locke, in The Reasonableness of Christianity, 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
Bible
by
> New Testament, or Old Testament? Which has influenced you more, and why?I’d have to go with something like the New Testament. These things are always subject to so much interpretation. I don’t think something like any of these holy books stand on their own. If they did, that’s always an antireligious argument at the end of the day.
— Peter Thiel
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Piketty accurately describes inequality in the past and present of countries like the United States, but when it comes to the future he’s not even wrong: he traces a trend but doesn’t explain it, simply claiming it will continue unless we enact a global wealth tax. Piketty’s proposal is not just unworkable, it shows his whole premise to be strangely incoherent: at the global scale, inequality has been falling as millions of people in China and India escape poverty. Meanwhile, in the United States, the most urgent debate isn’t for or against inequality, it’s whether or not to accept stagnation. State and local regulations make it hard for people to start new occupations and even harder for anybody to build affordable housing. Those policies deny people opportunities every day in tangible ways, unlike the abstract idea of inequality.
— Peter Thiel
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
by Douglas Adams
The geek classic The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy even explains the founding of our planet as a reaction against salesmen.
— Peter Thiel
Outliers
by Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell, a successful author who writes about successful people, declares in Outliers that success results from a "patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages."
— Peter Thiel
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare
To Shakespeare, by contrast, all combatants look more or less alike. It's not at all clear why they should be fighting, since they have nothing to fight about. Consider the opening line from Romeo and Juliet: "Two households, both alike in dignity." The two houses are alike, yet they hate each other. They grow even more similar as the feud escalates. Eventually, they lose sight of why they started fighting in the first place.
— Peter Thiel
A Theory of Justice
by John Rawls
Their indefiniteness took different forms. Rawls begins A Theory of Justice with the famous "veil of ignorance": fair political reasoning is supposed to be impossible for anyone with knowledge of the world as it concretely exists.
— Peter Thiel
Superintelligence
by Nick Bostrom
Philosopher Nick Bostrom describes four possible patterns for the future of humanity.
— Peter Thiel
Cryptonomicon
by Neal Stephenson
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, and we preferred the capitalist Star Wars to the communist Star Trek.
— Peter Thiel
New Atlantis
by Francis Bacon
I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge Norman Angell, The Great Illusion Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
— Peter Thiel
The American Challenge
by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber
I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge Norman Angell, The Great Illusion Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
— Peter Thiel
The Great Illusion
by Norman Angell
I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge Norman Angell, The Great Illusion Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
— Peter Thiel
The Diamond Age
by Neal Stephenson
I like the genre of past books written about the future, e.g.: Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis JJ Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge Norman Angell, The Great Illusion Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
— Peter Thiel
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
by Ben Horowitz
Every management guide presumes that all great companies follow a formula. But successful startups don’t imitate; they build innovations that can't be copied. Ben Horowitz knows no recipe guarantees success, and with The Hard Thing About Hard Things, he has written the first true guide for protecting a startup from self-sabotage.
— Peter Thiel
100 Plus
by Sonia Arrison
Sonia Arrison's "100 Plus" was first published in 2011, but its message is evergreen: how scientists are directly attacking the problem of aging and death and why we should fight for life instead of accepting decay as inevitable. The goal of longer life doesn't just mean more years at the margin; it means a healthier old age. There is nothing to fear but our own complacency.
— Peter Thiel
Bloodlands
by Timothy Snyder
Timothy Snyder's "Bloodlands" is also just released in paperback. He tells how the Nazis and the Soviets drove each other to ever more murderous atrocities as they fought to dominate Eastern Europe in the 1930s and '40s. Even as he calculates the death toll painstakingly, Mr. Snyder reminds us that the most important number is one: Each victim was an individual whose life cannot be reduced to the violence that cut it short.
— Peter Thiel
Resurrection from the Underground
by René Girard
"Resurrection From the Underground," the great French thinker René Girard's classic study of Fyodor Dostoevsky, was reissued in paperback for the first time this year. There is no better way to think about human irrationality than to read Dostoevsky, and there is no better reader of Dostoevsky than Mr. Girard.
— Peter Thiel
Psychopolitics
by Jean-Michel Oughourlian
For a fresh application of Mr. Girard's insights into power politics, that great international theater of irrationality, try Jean-Michel Oughourlian's "Psychopolitics," a brief, freewheeling 2012 work by one of Mr. Girard's closest collaborators.
— Peter Thiel
