Roger Parloff of Fortune describes Peter Thiel:
A gifted rhetorician and provocateur with a bottomless pocketbook, Thiel has drawn upon his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic readings in philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, and culture to become perhaps America’s leading public intellectual today, assuming a mantle once held by the likes of Thorstein Veblen or Norman Mailer. The conspicuous difference is that Thiel—a libertarian, gay Christian—espouses views that are far harder to anticipate, and he has earned his pulpit largely through commercial rather than literary or scholarly masterworks.