Take Mr. A. In 2011, Thiel’s net worth was roughly $1.5 billion, and conservatively the interest on a billion dollars is hundreds of thousands of dollars a day. Having hooked Peter’s interest in the project, finagling himself into a role as the man on the ground, essentially anything he could have asked for would have been his, had he run back the playbook he used in Berlin. Instead of asking to be paid from the beginning—which he could have—he waits. “You prove what you can do and you get paid even more,” he says. Though he would come to draw a $25,000-a-month retainer plus expenses from
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