Currently worth $2.7 billion USD, the 48 year old Peter Andreas Thiel, a German-American entrepreneur, venture capitalist and hedge fund manager, currently serves as serves as president of Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund with $700 million in assets under management; a managing partner in Founders Fund, a venture capital fund with $2 billion in assets under management; co-founder and investment committee chair of Mithril Capital Management; and co-founder and chairman of Valar Ventures. Most renowned for his role as cofunder of PayPal, Thiel has continued to build an impressive resume of success as a leading investor or partner in a number of industry changing startups including Facebook, Linkedin, and Y Combinator.  

After receiving a B.A in Philosophy from Stanford in 1989 and acquiring a J.D. from Stanford Law School in 1992, Thiel co-foudned Paypal (PYPL  ) in 1998 with Max Levchin and later merged with X.com, then run by Elon Musk. With the stated goal of providing people an option to safeguard the value of their currencies from macro changes including inflation, PayPal went public on February 15, 2002, and was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion later that year in which Thiel's 3.7 percent stake in PayPal was valued at approximately $55 million at the time of the acquisition.

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In August 2004, Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in the social network Facebook (FB  ) for 10.2% of the company and joined Facebook's board. As a board member, Thiel was not actively involved in Facebook's day-to-day decision making; however, he provided key guidance with respect to the timing of various rounds of funding; notably, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, credited Thiel with helping him time Facebook's 2007 Series D to close before the 2008 financial crisis. Immediately following, Facebook's IPO in May 2012, sitting at a market cap of nearly $100 billion ($38 a share), Thiel sold 16.8 million shares for $638 million, and in August 2012, following the conclusion of the early investor lock out period, Thiel sold almost all of his remaining stake for for a total of more than $1 billion. After retaining 5 million shares, Thiel still holds a seat on the board of directors. 

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Much of Thiel's notable activity has come through the formation of several major investment funds that have since gained respect on the back of strong performances through. In 2005, Thiel launched Clarium Captial, an employee-owned firm that invests in public equity with a focus on micro cap companies, fixed income, and hedging markets. Clarium was recognized early on as global macro fund of the year in 2005 by both MarHedge and Absolute Return, two trade magazines. In June 2012, Peter Thiel launched Mithril, a late-stage investment fund with $402 million at the time of launch, intended for companies that were at the cusp between being private and going public.

Peter Thiel's role as an angel investor and venture capitalist has had lasting influence, especially within technology sector. Espousing deep rooted ideological beliefs, Thiel has stated, "There's a sense in which technology is, by definition, non-repetitive. And every moment in technological history only happens once." His early stage investments in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp Inc., Palantir Technologies, Airbnb, and Quora have demonstrated a remarkable capacity for leadership in an investors role in addition to a prescient insight and influence on the future direction of the industry.

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Thiel was ranked #293 on the Forbes 400 in 2011, with a net worth of $1.5 billion as of March 2012. He was ranked #4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014 at $2.2 billion. Currently, his largest holding is in Palantir, the CIA-backed big data company he cofounded and chairs.