Thiel's Threat-Detection Before Anyone Else Sees It

“Earlier than many of his colleagues, Thiel saw X.com as an existential threat. “Peter likes to confront things. He likes to know if he’s wrong,” Nosek said. “He’s actively looking for how things could break, how things could fail—constantly. Much more so, and much more proactively, than a lot of entrepreneurs I know.” Thiel determined that X.com could simply spend Confinity out of existence. “Peter was good to recognize that they were a real threat,” Malloy said.”

“Given a teetering market and a take-no-prisoners competitor, Thiel and others in the company began considering an alternative course. “A lot of us came to the conclusion that this would be a winner-take-all market, and that this should be a single company,” Confinity cofounder Ken Howery said. “Or both of us would spend ourselves into oblivion.””