Peter Thiel

Co-founded PayPal and Palantir, was the first outside investor in Facebook, and set out his thinking in Zero to One, assembled from a Stanford course.

The argument is that competition is for losers and that real value comes from building something genuinely new, then holding a monopoly on it. He asks what important truth very few people agree with you on. His politics and his funding of a lawsuit that destroyed Gawker are part of the public record and inseparable from how the book is read. Take it as a document of a particular Silicon Valley worldview stated more honestly than most.