Thiel, whose net worth is reported to be $2.2 billion, is Silicon Valley royalty, and a singular figure even in that rarefied world. He is a gay practising Christian, a libertarian who has thrown money and support behind the political campaigns of the Republican John McCain and the Libertarian Ron Paul, and who sits on the steering committee of the Bilderberg Group the elite band of the rich and powerful from politics, industry and business that convenes each year to discuss nobody-outside-the-inner-circle-quite-knows-what. Above all, he is a man with a utopian belief in the power of technology to change the world.

Through a variety of venture capital funds and his non-profit Thiel Foundation, Thiel has invested substantially in space travel, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and information technology. He has been one of the most public champions of seasteading the idea of establishing floating communities outside territorial waters and beyond the regulatory powers of governments. His Thiel Fellowship programme encourages clever people under the age of 20 to forgo a college education and start their own companies. And he has poured millions of dollars into what he calls the immortality project. I would like to live longer, and I would like other people to live longer. His belief is such that he has signed up with Alcor, the leading company in the field of cryogenics, to be deep-frozen at the time of his death as much as an ideological statement, he says, as in any expectation of being thawed out any time in the near future. In telling you that Ive signed up for it [cryogenics], theres always this reaction that its really crazy, its disturbing. But my take on it is its only disturbing because it challenges our complacency.

Peter Thiels fortunes may rest largely in Silicon Valley, but he lives and works in San Francisco. His office is in a low-slung building in the Presidio, the national park close to the Golden Gate Bridge, which is also home to George Lucass film business. Thiels offices house his hedge-fund business, one of his venture capital funds and the Thiel Foundation. Founders Fund, the venture capital firm that he runs with six partners, is in a neighbouring building. Thiels home, in the Marina district overlooking the ocean, is a five-minute drive away. He also owns a home in Maui, Hawaii.

Thiel has invited me to join him for breakfast, prepared by his own chef, which we eat in a glass-walled conference room. Thiel is of medium height, stocky in build, and moves like a man who, even at the age of 46, has not quite got used to his body. He has come from a run he does a three- or four-mile jog two or three times a week, and enjoys hiking and surfing and is dressed in a T-shirt, chinos and trainers. He is eating an egg-white spinach omelette Im on a crazy diet, he grumbles. I am eating a cheese omelette with the yolk left in, a side of bacon and a bowl of fruit, at which he occasionally throws covetous glances.

Almost the first thing Thiel does after we have been introduced is to ask what are the three most interesting things Ive encountered in the past year. He might learn something new, he explains, and it gives me a better idea of the kind of things you might want to explore.

Peter is very different from most people in Silicon Valley, Luke Nosek, one of the co-founders of PayPal, and now on the Founders Fund board, told me. With a lot of people the conversation is about how are we going to make more money; with Peter the conversation is How are we going to figure this out? He has a tremendous curiosity about how the world works, and all the philosophical and moral questions around that. Another colleague evaluated his ability for casual bar talk as very low. The ability to recall a data point what was gold trading at on day five of the Second World War and what was the impact of that? He has it like a record-book.

Thiel was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1967, the son of an engineer who moved his family to America when Thiel was one, eventually settling in Foster City, California. He has a younger brother, Patrick. Growing up, Thiel displayed all the traits of the brilliant, slightly nerdish loner.

He was a fanatical chess-player, becaming one of the highest ranked under-21 players in America; an avid reader of science fiction Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein in particular. He played Dungeons and Dragons, and was obsessed with Tolkien; two of Thiels businesses are named after Tolkien references: a technology investment fund Mithril (a precious metal found in Middle-earth) and Palantir, his data analytics company, named after the seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings.

Thiel studied philosophy at Stanford University before going on to Stanford Law School, and working in a law firm in New York and then as a derivatives trader on Wall Street. None of this quite answered what he describes as his world-changing aspirations.

The seed of Thiels libertarian beliefs was sown at Stanford. He founded a student newspaper, The Stanford Review, and co-authored a book, The Diversity Myth, attacking political correctness on campus. And he read Solzhenitsyn and Ayn Rand, the eccentric Russian author whose advocacy of ferocious laissez-faire capitalism, and her celebration of the heroic, individualistic genius fighting against bureaucratic regulation, made her something of a patron saint among the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. The charismatic founder is a characteristic of many Silicon Valley start-ups, Thiel says, but you need a whole team to get things done.

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Peter Thiel: the billionaire tech entrepreneur on a mission to cheat death