Who is Peter Thiel, really? Maverick, or monster? Little is known about the eccentric billionaire manipulating our world from assorted bunkers, but what we can say for sure is that the man was once a boy. And as some of you may have already inferred from the name of his company, Palantir, that boy was obsessed with J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Though famously circumspect, Thiel is pretty open about his nerdy past. Besides Palantir, he’s owned several other companies named in homage to LOTR, including Mithril Capital, Valar Ventures, Lembas Capital, and Rivendell One LLC. In 2023, he told The Atlantic he’s read the series at least a dozen times.
And according to Max Chafkin, author of the exhaustive Thiel biography, The Contrarian, his senior yearbook quote was this, from The Hobbit: “The greatest adventure is what lies ahead. Today and tomorrow are yet to be said. The chances, the changes, are all yours to make. The mold of your life is in your hands to break.”
All well and whatever, as cultivated eccentricities go. But as Matthew Sitman pointed out on a recent episode of “Know Your Enemy,” a podcast that analyzes right wing bigwigs from a leftie perspective, this exact quote was not from the book The Hobbit. It was from the 1977 animated cartoon.
