Thiel registered a company called Palantir with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2004, he would found it in earnest. The company would take antifraud technology from PayPal and apply it to intelligence gathering—fighting terrorism, predicting crime, providing military insights. It would take money from the venture capital arm of the CIA and soon take on almost every other arm of the government as clients. That same summer, just around the time that the Gawker blogs found their footing, Thiel placed a $500,000 convertible note into the hands of a twenty-one-year-old Mark Zuckerberg,
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