Co-founder of PayPal and Palantir
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.”
— Wsj.com
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.”
— Wsj.com
“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.”
— Splinter.com
“'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.”
— Amazon.com
“Google’s algorithms assume the world’s future is nothing more than the next moment in a random process. George Gilder shows how deep this assumption goes, what motivates people to make it, and why it’s wrong: the future depends on human action.”
— Amazon.com
“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.”
— Wsj.com
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.”
— Wsj.com
by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber & Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
“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”
— Reddit
“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?”
— Firstthings.com
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”
— Reddit
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”
— Reddit
“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.”
— A16z.com
by René Girard
“> What is the book (or books) you’ve most often gifted to other people? Books by René Girard, definitely — both because he’s the one writer who has influenced me the most and because many people haven’t heard of him. Girard gives a sweeping view of the whole human experience on this planet — something captured in the title of his masterwork, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — but it’s not just an academic philosophy. Once you learn about it, his view of imitation as the root of behavior is something you will see every day, not just in people around you but in yourself.”
— Tim Ferriss Podcast
by Hamilton Helmer
“[The author] 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.”
— 33 Peter Thiel Recommended Books (2026)
“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.”
— 33 books Peter Thiel mentioned, ranked! - Recommentions
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.”
— 33 books Peter Thiel mentioned, ranked! - Recommentions
by Ryan Holiday
“Ego Is The Enemy is one of my favorite books of all time.”
— Peter Thiel's Favorite Books (Updated 2023) | Publishous
by Robert B. Cialdini, PhD
“books recommended by Peter Thiel”
— Peter Thiel's Book Recommendations (updated 2025) | Good Books
“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.”
— Firstthings.com
by Adam Grant
“It can sometimes seem as if one must learn everything old before one can try anything new. [The author] does a masterful job showing that is not the case; we are lucky to have him as a guide.”
— 33 Peter Thiel Recommended Books (2026)
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“books recommended by Peter Thiel”
— Peter Thiel's Book Recommendations (updated 2025) | Good Books
“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?””
— Firstthings.com
by Jimmy Soni
“books recommended by Peter Thiel”
— Peter Thiel's Book Recommendations (updated 2025) | Good Books
by J.R.R. Tolkien
“"The classic [series] I always give." - Peter Thiel”
— 33 Peter Thiel Recommended Books (2026)
by Mikhail Bulgakov
“books recommended by Peter Thiel”
— Peter Thiel's Book Recommendations (updated 2025) | Good Books
by Francis Bacon
“Thiel’s other favorite books include _New Atlantis_ by Francis Bacon.”
— Peter Thiel Book Recommendations
by John Locke
“Thiel’s other favorite books include _The Reasonableness of Christianity_ by John Locke.”
— Peter Thiel Book Recommendations
by Tom Wolfe
“Thiel’s other favorite books include _The Right Stuff_ by Tom Wolfe.”
— Peter Thiel Book Recommendations
by James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg
“One of the books that tremendously influenced me when I started PayPal.”
— Peter Thiel Book Recommendations (All-Time) — Venture Book Club
by Peter Thiel
“This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”
— Google Books
by Niccolò Machiavelli
by Edward Shepherd Creasy
