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Upon graduating from Stanford, Thiel first clerked for Judge J. L. Edmondson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th circuit for a year. Then, from 1993 to 1996, Thiel traded derivatives for Credit Suisse Group and in 1996, he founded his own multistrategy fund, Thiel Capital Management.

 

 

In 1998, he cofounded Paypal with Max Levchin, which later merged with Elon Musk’s X.com, but kept the name. Musk was later ousted as CEO during a series of conflicts between the founders known as the Paypal Wars, that increased especially as the dot-com bubble started to wane. After going public on February 15, 2002, Paypal was sold to eBay for $1.5 Billion. Although Musk, who would later co-found Tesla and SpaceX, walked away with $165 million for his 11.7% stake in the company, Thiel managed to salvage $55 million from his 3.7% stake.

 

 

After Paypal, Thiel launched Clarium Capital, a global macro hedge fund that later became the global macro fund of the year in 2005, honored by trade magazines, MarHedge and Absolute Return. Clarium Capital later invested in top companies, including Facebook.

 

Facebook co-founders were seeking investors. They initially approached Reid Hoffman, who was the CEO of LinkedIn. Hoffman declined the offer but redirected the young entrepreneurs to Thiel. Thiel and Mark Zuckerberg became good partners, and Thiel invested $500,000 for a 10.2% stake, later converted to equity. Thiel also joined Facebook's board of directors.

 

 

In 2005, Thiel launched Founders Fund, a venture capital fund based in San Francisco. Through Founders Fund, Thiel invested in numerous top companies, including Yelp, Quora, Big Think, Linkedin, and Palantir Technologies. Palantir Technologies was founded by Thiel himself, but he currently serves as the company's chairman.

 

Thiel received the TechCrunch award for being venture capitalist of the year for 2013.

 

Thiel also launched Mithril in June 2012, a late-stage investment fund with $402 million, intended for funding companies about to go public. In March 2015, Thiel joined Y Combinator, an American seed accelerator, labeled by Forbes and Wired as the most successful commercial seed accelerator in the world.