Founder as Victim, Founder as God

1. The Paradoxical Traits of Founders

Start with PayPal's six founders: four were born outside the US, five were 23 or younger, and four had built bombs in high school. One had fled the collapsing Soviet Union and was briefly a citizen of no country; another grew up in a trailer park; another took a 66% pay cut to skip investment banking and join. Is this coincidence, or are founders systematically extreme people?

• Natural: some founders really are born different.
• Nurtured: environment and cultural feedback amplify the difference.
• Self-created: founders learn to exaggerate their own extremes.
• Other-created: crowds project and inflate the myth — and all four feed each other in a loop, so founders end up more extreme than they started.

The examples write themselves. Richard Branson is perpetually crowned 'king' of something, lion mane included. Jack Dorsey swung from nose ring and unkempt hair to Prada suits — extreme outsider branding to extreme insider branding. Sean Parker cycled from teenage hacker with criminal associations to the cover of Forbes, with Justin Timberlake playing him on screen. And Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way' is itself the question: born, made, self-made, or crowd-made?

2. Mythology: Gods and Monsters Are the Same People

Overlay mythology on the inverted curve and it fits disturbingly well: in most myths the line between god and monster is thin, and often they are the same figure. Were the heroes born extreme, made extreme, or exaggerated into legend? The same four-way question applies.

• Oedipus: abandoned infant and foreigner, yet the brilliant king who solved the Sphinx's riddle — then the ultimate transgressor.
• Achilles: incredibly strong and perfect, except exactly where he was weak and flawed.
• Romulus and Remus: orphans raised by a wolf — total outsiders — who became Rome's founders and lawgivers.

Romulus killed Remus for jumping over the city's boundary line, then codified the rule in blood: whoever leaps Rome's walls dies. Was Romulus a criminal outlaw or the lawgiver who defined Rome? Both. Even his death is doubled: Livy records that he vanished in a great storm and was proclaimed a god; a rival account says the senators killed him in the chaos and disposed of the body. Founder-as-god and founder-as-victim are the same story told twice.

3. The Scapegoat Mechanism

Cultures without institutions kept sliding into a war of all against all — a dynamic Thiel notes has a striking parallel in startup life. The way out was not the Enlightenment's rational social contract; it was polarizing all hostility onto one victim. Killing the scapegoat converted chaos into peace, so successful cultures ritualized it: scheduled sacrifice instead of waiting for random collapse. Selection methods varied — a charcoal-marked piece of cake at Gaelic Beltane fires, or a Gaulish footrace where the slowest man was offered up — but the dynamic was identical.

The victim can't be a random average person: the crowd would see itself in him and fear being next. The workable scapegoat must be outsider enough to be safely 'other,' yet insider enough to be plausibly blamed for the community's internal strife. The perfect victim occupies both extremes — exactly the founder's profile. And because his death buys peace, he is judged omnimalevolent and omnibenevolent at once.

Every king was a living god. Every god was a murdered king.

Monarchy, on this reading, descends from scapegoats who figured out how to delay their own execution: Aztec god-kings were crowned and then sacrificed; 19th-century Zulu kings were deposed and killed once their hair turned white — which is why they begged British traders for hair dye. Aristotle read tragedy as political technology: watching the great fall converts commoners' envy into pity, so they go home instead of plotting. Revolutions run the machine in reverse — France's revolutionaries refused to give Louis XVI a trial, because a verdict of innocent would make the people guilty; the king had to be slaughtered without one.

4. Sacrifice Endures: Celebrities, Presidents, Tech Founders

We say monarchy is dead, yet we literally anoint our stars as kings: the King of Rock, the King of Pop, the Princess of Pop. The crowd that crowns is the crowd that devours. At her peak, Britney Spears drove roughly $100 million of a $400-million-a-year paparazzi industry, with one to two thousand people earning a living by chasing her. And dead stars get resurrected as god-kings — Elvis, Michael Jackson, and the 'Forever 27' musicians who died young and live on as icons, much as Alexander the Great drank himself to death at 32 yet remains forever the great conqueror.

1. 1

   Bill Gates

   The '90s 'Bill Gates is god' era: Harvard insider, dropout outsider, nerd glasses possibly accentuated on purpose. Then rival CEOs formed a de facto 'We Hate Gates' club, the DOJ moved in, and the fall came fast. Thiel's dark reading: the charity circuit is Gates' ongoing punishment — paying tribute to the very people who ganged up on him.

2. 2

   Howard Hughes

   Parallel careers in movies and aviation made him America's richest man by 45. His favorite trick was playing crazy so nobody would dare compete — he even claimed a December 25 birthday. Had he died in his 1946 plane crash he'd be remembered as the century's greatest entrepreneur; instead came painkillers and 30 years sealed in penthouses, refusing to eat.

3. 3

   Steve Jobs

   College dropout, crazy diets, phone phreaking, LSD — the classic extreme profile. Exiled from Apple in 1985 for a 'normal adult' CEO, he returned in 1997 to a 14-year arc that remade the company. The options-backdating scandal stayed a footnote — partly, Thiel suggests, because there is little power in scapegoating a man whose life is visibly waning.

Towering genius disdains a beaten path. — Lincoln, Lyceum Address

Politics runs the same script. Lincoln — log-cabin outsider, probably the poorest president, who may even have uglified himself with that beard — warned at age 28 that America's founding was over and that Alexander-scale ambition would never settle for a seat in Congress. His assassin reenacted Caesar's murder, shouting 'Sic semper tyrannis.' Four of 44 US presidents have been assassinated in office and four more nearly were — roughly a 9% fatality rate worth pondering if the throne is your goal.

5. Extending the Founding, Surviving the Trial

Startups are monarchies in all but name: nobody votes on the org chart. Thiel's spectrum: pure democracy fails because putting everything to a vote yields lowest-common-denominator results, while pure dictatorship fails because nobody talented will join. The best arrangement is quasi-mythological — a king-like founder who can do more than a democratic ruler but remains far from all-powerful. As companies mature they drift toward constitutional republics, and once process replaces substance, much less gets done.

Your job as founder is to survive the trial.

• Treat every board meeting as a trial: the board is a jury (probably not of your peers) or a mob seeking a victim — the most fatal wounds come from internal, not external conflict.
• Downplay the dangerous title: after Caesar's murder, Augustus never called himself king, only 'first among equals' — founders can likewise de-emphasize the CEO crown.
• Buy succession insurance: at PayPal, Thiel got David Sacks made COO — the natural replacement slot — partly because Sacks was perceived as crazier than Thiel himself.
• Have co-founders: a mob needs a singular victim, so pairs like Hewlett-Packard, Moore-Noyce, and Page-Brin are structurally much harder to scapegoat.
• Keep innovating: the founding lasts only as long as genuine technological creation does, so build strategies to extend that moment.

Apple's 12 lost years under conventional CEOs versus Jobs' 1997–2011 arc show the power of the returning king — though resurrections come only after a death. Thiel closes with a heresy: society is organized to reward people who play by the rules, but perhaps the people who don't play by the rules are, in some key way, the most important — and perhaps we should let them off the hook. The whole argument, he notes, is built on René Girard's theory of scapegoating and mimesis.

Then vs. now (2026)

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