Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire's Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire

He read Machiavelli at thirteen. He’s fascinated by power and knows that Peter is a means by which he can wield it.

leaders. He relies on what might be called the plenipotentiary model—empowering trusted, skilled people on his behalf to execute the bold vision he has created.

Genghis Khan supposedly called the greatest of life’s pleasures: to overcome your enemies, to drive them before you, to see their friends and allies bathed in tears, to take their possessions as your own.

Discourses over his right shoulder as he describes his personal war against Gawker in

To strategize, coordinate, and sustain a concerted effort to remove someone from power, to secretly move against an enemy, to do what Machiavelli would say was one of the hardest things to do in the world: to overthrow an existing

We could almost always use more boldness, and less complacency. We could use less telegraphing of our intentions or ambitions and see what secrecy, patience, and planning might accomplish. We could use a little more craziness and disruption, even from the people we disagree with.

Peter Thiel, whom you will also come to know, has famously become associated with one question, which he uses in interviews and over long dinners: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”

One of the most profound intellectual influences on Peter Thiel is a French thinker named René Girard, whom he met while at Stanford and whose funeral he would eventually speak at in 2015. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire holds that people have no idea what they want, or what they value, so they are drawn to what other people want. They want what

Too little scheming, rather than too much. What would happen if more people took up plotting, coordinating how to eliminate what they believe are negative forces and obstacles, and tried to wield power in an attempt to change the world?