The Radical Moneymaking Schemes of Peter Thiel’s Youth Movement

“Youth is a must for the new breed,” writes Alexandra Wolfe in Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story (Simon & Schuster, $27), a jauntily paced anthropological look at Northern California’s techtopia. The Palo Alto semispoof is becoming a crowded genre (Mike Judge’s HBO show, Antonio García Martínez’s memoir Chaos Monkeys, etc.), but Wolfe, a Wall Street Journal reporter and former Bloomberg Businessweek columnist, has found relevant new eyes through which to show outsiders around: PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel’s first fellows.

In her prologue, Wolfe tells us she befriended Thiel in 2006 when he invited her to a salon at his New York home. One of the libertarian Trump supporter’s pet contrarianisms is that the tech revolution has made college obsolete. So in 2011, he started his fellowship program, giving 20 kids under age 20 $100,000 each to “stop out” of college for two years, move to the Valley, and start a business—preferably one that would change the world. Wolfe, given entrée by Thiel, loosely stakes her story on three fellows, though the narrative isn’t entirely theirs.