Michael Steinberger

I think his path in life would suggest otherwise.

I think the library saw a lot more of him than it did of me, which may go some way to explaining why he became a billionaire and I did not.

But as a young man, he identified very strongly with his Black heritage.

At Haverford, he was very involved with Black student affairs.

In our senior year in college, he helped organize an anti-racism conference at Yale University.

After Haverford, he goes to Stanford Law School.

which he considers one of the biggest mistakes of his life.

He's miserable there.

He finds the intellectual climate very dissatisfying.

The only thing that makes law school tolerable for Karp is the friendship he strikes up with another first-year law student at Stanford, Peter Thiel.

Exactly.

They bonded over their shared dislike of law school, and they also bonded over their love of political argument.

As Thiel said to me, he was more the capitalist and Karp was the socialist.

We've been having these feral discourses now for 25, 26 years.

Karp says that they argued like feral animals.

These dorm room bull sessions were apparently epic.

That's right.

So, you know, Carpenteel graduated from Stanford Law in 1992.

Carp had no intention of pursuing a career in the law.

Instead, he went to Germany to pursue a doctorate in philosophy.