One of the most expensive houses in Washington D.C., if you’re counting by the biggest sale in the last year, is at 2850 Woodland Drive, about ten minutes northwest of the city. It went for $13 million and looks like an American version of a French country home — Disneyland Versailles. It has seven bedrooms and ten bathrooms, two marble terraces, statue fountains, an outdoor pool, a 12-seat cinema, an acre of bucolic gardens, staff quarters, dressing rooms with enough wardrobe space to kit out an army, and ceilings that go all the way up into the stratosphere.

It’s also close to Embassy Row: if the new owner of the Woodland Drive mansion stepped out onto one of their terraces and yelled at the top of their voice, the staffers inside the nearby British, Italian, and Bolivian embassies might be able to hear them. Who the owner was remained a mystery as they had gone to great lengths to buy the house from a former Trump official through a front company. But then last month, Washington insiders named Peter Thiel, the secretive German-born billionaire and Silicon Valley tycoon, as the proud new owner of a D.C. outpost.

This is a tidy addition to his property portfolio. Thiel already owns pads in Manhattan and Los Angeles, as well as two adjacent waterfront mansions in Miami Beach ($18 million), another on the Hawaiian island of Maui ($27 million), and is constructing an apocalypse-proof 477-acre estate designed by the architect of Tokyo’s Olympic stadium in New Zealand ($13.5 million).

&#8216;American Disneyland'&#8221; Peter Thiel&#8217;s new Washington D.C. pad


Thiel, 54, is a fascinating character who bothers and beguiles Americans in equal measure. He is worth around $3.3 billion, having co-founded PayPal, invested in Facebook, and then set up Palantir, a big data analysis company used by armies and police forces. His first major move into politics was in 2016, when he poured $1.5 million into Donald Trump’s campaign and spoke at the Republican convention. His line on Trump, after the unhinged 2016 campaign (“grab em by the pussy” now feels a long time ago), was to take him “seriously, not literally”

He has since given separate donations of $10 million to elect J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona. His liberal opponents love to stick the knife in. “Unsmiling, solipsistic and at pains to conceal his forever wounded vanity,” sniffed a 

writer in a recent profile. “Comes across as singularly disagreeable, which is evidently the secret to both his worldly successes and his moral failures.”

What Thiel actually believes is the subject of endless debate, because he will not be interviewed on the record about his political views. He has written in the past about being libertarian, but a recent biographer said Thiel leans closer to authoritarian. Max Chafkin, who has tried to pin Thiel down in a new book, told Politico that his subject’s ideology is “super-nationalistic, it’s a longing for a sort of more powerful chief executive, or, you know, a dictator”.

Thiel with Trump. &#8220;Take him seriously, not literally,&#8221; the tech baron once said.


 magazine, where he said Thiel’s beliefs are “bordering on fascism” and “hostile to the idea of democracy”, all while being the most powerful man in Silicon Valley. Thiel hints at this in 

, a tedious advice book, in which he says the best tech companies “often resemble feudal monarchies” because they can “make authoritative decisions, inspire strong personal loyalty, and plan ahead for decades”. A thousand years perhaps?

The best evidence that Thiel is libertarian is that he is deeply allergic to tax. Otherwise, the signs point in other directions. In 2009 he wrote an article bemoaning the “extension of the franchise to women”. Critics question his commitment to free speech after Thiel funded a lawsuit that bankrupted a gossip website called Gawker because it outed him as gay several years before. They also question his involvement in wacky start-ups. Thiel has been interested in a company that experiments with parabiosis, which injects older people with young blood in the hope of boosting longevity. He has also invested $3.5 million in a cryonics company that freezes your body after death in the hope that medical science will one day be able to resuscitate you.

Thiel, who is interested in living to at least 120, also takes human growth hormone, the substance used by Hollywood actors to boost muscle mass and recover from injuries. Thiel has also donated to the bonkers Seasteading Institute, which advocates for floating cities to be built on the ocean. There, on these wobbly yet politically autonomous communities, citizens will not have to pay tax and get to talk about cryptocurrency as much as they like in between bouts of seasickness.

Silicon Valley loves to make messianic figures out of its successful entrepreneurs, sort of like Jesus Christ abandoning his faith to join the tax collectors. Thiel has his Thiel Fellows, who he pays $100,000 to drop out of university to start projects and work within his inner circle. He also hosts dinnertime “salons” at his home, which as one 

 reporter found out to his dismay, do not actually include dinner. At his Silicon Valley mansion, Thiel provides for his journalist and tech overlord guests “one large bowl filled with edamame and a plate with some sushi that looked like it had been picked up from a local Stop & Shop”.

Still, this lacklustre hosting is an improvement on Thiel as a young man. In a Reddit Q&A a few years ago, Thiel was asked what he was like as a 22-year-old. His reply: “I didn’t think it was important to meet people.” He must have been fun at parties. Thiel’s advice was lapped up by his young male fans, who see him as a powerful superstar whose declarations hold the secrets of success. His most liked response was on how to dress, suggesting something about the state of his audience. “Wearing a suit in a pitch meeting makes you look like someone who is bad at sales and worse at tech,” he wrote. This is an odd one as Thiel only ever seems to be snapped wearing a suit. That online “ask me anything” session was seven years ago. Now Thiel’s sights are set on a much higher prize. His new home on Woodland Drive is only three miles from the White House. The sky’s the limit.

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