Peter Thiel

Dropping out of college doesn't have to be a career setback. Just ask Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg — or Kevin Wang. Wang, 18, a Vernon Hills native and graduate of the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, is among this year's 22 recipients of...

The New America of George Packer's ambitious history, "The Unwinding," is a morally compromised patchwork of failed institutions, Ponzi schemes, bankruptcies, foreclosures, ignorance and fear. But it is also a country where idealism still exists, and...

Matthew Guthmiller is a Golden Eagle that's flying high.  The Aberdeen Central High School senior is working toward getting his commercial pilot license, pitching a business endeavor to investors and finishing up his final quarter of high school.  He'...

PALO ALTO -- Forget building a startup. Max Marty and Dario Mutabdzija want to build a startup colony. And they want to put it in the Pacific Ocean –- out of the reach of restrictive U.S. immigration laws they say keep high-skilled immigrants...

Most parents in our community take it as a given that their kids must attend college, and statistics certainly bear out the view that a college degree pays off. A Brookings Institution study released last year, for example, concluded that college is...

Nothing like a splash of tech/Internet entrepreneur money to pick up the local real estate market. Making tsunami-like waves so far this year are three Westside transactions: Billionaire venture capitalist and hedge fund manager Peter Thiel cherry-...

Maybe the attraction is Silicon Beach, the swath of Los Angeles that is home to so many tech start-ups. Or maybe it's just the beach. Either way, Northern California technology titans and wannabes increasingly are sinking money into trophy homes from...

NEW YORK -- Peter Thiel, Facebook's first big investor, has sold off most of his stake, turning his initial $500,000 investment into more than $1 billion in cash. Thiel became a Facebook investor in 2004, when Mark Zuckerberg first set out to turn his...

Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor, is launching a $402-million venture capital fund focused on mid-stage companies dealing with major global problems. He’s calling it Mithril Capital Management. If that sounds familiar,...

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook’s newly public stock is sliding further on its third trading day as investors reconsider how much the social network is worth. The company’s long-anticipated initial public offering of stock raised $16 billion,...

To find out where the smart money is buying real estate these days, one need look no farther than the Hollywood Hills. Billionaire venture capitalist and hedge fund manager Peter Thiel recently cherry-picked a house there for $11.5 million. Thiel has a...

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and a "super PAC" working on his behalf spent more than twice as much as they raised in January, underscoring how persistent challenges by rivals Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum have taxed the former...