In Silicon Valley’s unofficial literary canon, few works loom as large as The Sovereign Individual. A kind of survival manual for 21st-century tech billionaires, it has been enthusiastically championed by Palantir and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel (mentor to JD Vance), who wrote the foreword to the 2020 edition.
The “libertarian manifesto” offers a radical vision of economic transformation – while justifying a solipsistic retreat from the obligations of shared society. Published in 1997, it was co-written by former Times editor William Rees-Mogg (who died in 2012) and private investigator and financial advisor James Dale Davidson.
