The first time I encountered Peter Thiel’s name was in China, about a decade ago. He was scheduled to give a talk about his 2014 book, Zero to One, at tech-focused Tsinghua University (known as China’s MIT) where giant banners emblazoned with his face were hard to miss.

I dismissed the fascination with Thiel as another example of the “David Hasselhoff phenomenon”: second-tier American celebrities achieving disproportionate fame abroad. At that time in China, even tenuous connections to some US center of power — Silicon Valley, Wall Street, Hollywood — could be leveraged to elevate one’s profile, tapping into the country’s thirst for American-style modernity.

Unlike the Baywatch star, however, Thiel would soon become far more than a cult curiosity abroad. As the ideological architect behind the venture capital powerhouse The Founders Fund, cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, early backer of Facebook, and political patron of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, Thiel has become the philosopher-king of a growing techno-authoritarian movement.