What's it like working with two mavericks, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk? Palantir's co-founder says

Joe Lonsdale is one of the co-founders of Palantir and a member of the "PayPal Mafia". While he was 15 years younger than Peter Thiel and 12 years younger than Elon Musk during his time at PayPal, earning him the label of a "Junior kid", he witnessed firsthand the working styles of these two legendary figures and was deeply involved in Palantir's early entrepreneurial journey.

Palantir is an American big data analytics company co-founded by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and others. The company focuses on delivering customized AI platforms for government and commercial clients.

What follows are his recollections of that era.

1. Elon and Peter: Two Completely Distinct Leaders

"To be honest, I didn't usually attend meetings with Elon," Joe admitted, "But these people are extremely opinionated, intensely curious, highly ambitious, and move at incredible speed, with zero tolerance for anything broken. You have to fix it immediately. You get everything done today, no discussions about what to do next week."

Describing the differences between the two men, Joe put it this way:

"Peter is more of a strategist, philosopher, and thinker. He isn't a technical person. Elon, by contrast, is a doer who dives right in. A few weeks ago, I was in Palo Alto, and Elon was right behind X.AI running engineering reviews, working there in person. He's the kind of person who just grinds away — pushing forward and diving deep into the details of solving technical problems."

So who was the hardest-working person?

"Elon has always been one of the most relentless people I've ever met. But there were other engineers who were there grinding nonstop too. In that 'execution mode', people like Max Levchin and others, from what I saw, were always working."

Joe recalled the early PayPal atmosphere: "People would stay late into the night solving problems, and they were genuinely passionate about what they were doing."

At the time, most of the team was in their 20s. Joe noted that 16 distinct companies eventually spun out of PayPal, all quickly growing into billion-dollar enterprises — YouTube (Chad and Steve), LinkedIn (Reid Hoffman), Tesla and SpaceX (Elon), IronPort…

"So many things came out of that place."

2. The Founding Story of Palantir

How did Joe become a co-founder of Palantir?

He was working at Peter Thiel's hedge fund at the time. "That fund was kind of messy, so I started bringing in my smartest friends to help out. They weren't interested in finance at all; they thought it was too boring."

Meanwhile, Peter and Joe often talked about their PayPal days: they had to stop Russian and Chinese mafia from stealing money, which led them to connect with people from the Secret Service and the FBI. Shortly after that, the 9/11 attacks happened.

"The government was spending $38 billion a year collecting and analyzing data, but they still failed to stop the terrorists, all while misusing civil liberties. It was a total mess."

They realized: The technology capabilities of Silicon Valley, Google, and PayPal were far ahead of what the government had. That was a problem, but also an opportunity.

"Point A: I wanted to stop the bad guys from attacking us again, to catch them. Point B: I didn't want everyone in the government to be able to see all my data without any controls. That was crazy."

So they said: "Why don't we just do this ourselves?"

Joe started getting that group of friends to help build a prototype. It sounded crazier than finance, but at least it was interesting.

They went to VCs to raise money — they covered the entire Sand Hill Road.

"Accel rejected us, Sequoia rejected us. The guy at Kleiner Perkins laughed at us over the phone because Alex Karp didn't have a technical degree. He said: 'You guys don't even know what you're doing. You have PhDs, but not even relevant ones.'"

Joe recalled that experience: "Basically, they laughed us right out of the room."

Peter Thiel told Joe: "This might be a good thing — it gives you a bigger 'chip on your shoulder', making you even more determined to succeed after being mocked and rejected."

But Peter couldn't cover all the funding on his own. Later, they found the venture capital arm of the CIA, which gave them a small amount of money, and Peter put in more. "That was absolutely critical."

Joe revealed that the name Palantir came from Peter Thiel.

"When we built this thing, we said: 'This is a powerful, potentially dangerous tool.' But we believed it was worth creating. It took a lot of courage."

They could have done many other things to make money, but what really mattered was making an impact.

"We've likely neutralized as many as 10,000 terrorists. We worked side by side with all kinds of government teams, using our technology and capabilities to support them. We helped protect civil liberties by making sure the government's overseers were also being overseen."

Of course, he also acknowledged: "If this technology falls into the wrong hands, and the audit trail gets turned off, who knows what bad things they could do with it. So there's a good side and a bad side to it."

From PayPal to Palantir, Joe Lonsdale witnessed firsthand how two of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley history — Peter Thiel and Elon Musk — shaped culture, drove execution, and pursued their missions. He also lived through how an idea that "everyone said was impossible" eventually grew into a giant that transformed how governments fight terrorism.

And his summary might carry the most weight: "When we got rejected by over 30 investors and laughed out of the room, Peter said it might be a good thing — it made you more motivated to prove them wrong. And he was right."

This article is from the WeChat public account "Post Wave Evolution Planet", written by Mark, and republished with authorization from 36Kr.