Peter Thiel, receiving the Axel Springer Award on Thursday evening, asked why so much of the press had “degenerated into a sort of left-wing hate factory.”
The media landscape, he said, was “very, very one-sided” and “nowhere near as free as we would like it to be.”
He praised Axel Springer chief executive Mathias Döpfner, CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss, who also spoke at the ceremony, and Springer’s own journalists as “dissenting voices.”
Without people like them, he said, the situation would be “really very, very bad.”
He thanked them for their “courage.”
Döpfner presented Thiel as an entrepreneur who thinks against consensus and called him, in remarks to German news agency dpa, probably “the most impactful German of our times.”
Palantir chief executive Alex Karp, speaking by video, called Thiel “the last standing German.”
Thiel, born in Frankfurt and raised in the United States, answered in German that he had learned the language at home as a child. He also said he was “for democracy and elections.”
On the Left Party’s recent result in Berlin he said he could understand why people had voted for it, pointing towards the expensive housing prices.
However, he warned for their solutions, saying that rent control could even massively damage Berlin and “turn the city into a slum”.
The Axel Springer Award is not endowed.
Previous recipients include Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Tim Berners-Lee and Sam Altman.
Springer cited Thiel’s role at PayPal, his early stake in Facebook, Founders Fund and Palantir.
Several hundred people demonstrated outside the Axel Springer building under the slogan “Thiel shall not pass,” a play on Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, and staged a “queer Gandalf costume contest.”
During the ceremony a contractor walked on stage with a banner reading “They know that we know that they lie.”
A discussion featuring Thiel at the Vienna Festival was cancelled last month after protests.
Springer said it stood for open debate. Thiel and the group have long-standing business and personal ties.
In conversation with Döpfner, released with the award coverage, Thiel turned to Germany’s company-building record.
People in Germany, he said, always talk about a fear of failure and a “no risk” culture; there might also be a fear of success.
A firm that works is sold rather than scaled in the way Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg scaled theirs.
Few large new companies had been built in the country for decades.
Thiel noted that of the 50 wealthiest people in the United States, 12 were Generation X or younger, and nine of those 12 had made the money themselves.
In Germany 20 of the top 50 were of that age or younger, and all 20, he said, had inherited it.
“Not a single person did something new, made some new money, built a large, new scalable company.”
Peter Thiel says Europe fears success:
"One of the things in Germany that people always talk about in this entrepreneurship context is there's a fear of failure. A 'no risk' culture… Perhaps there's also a fear of success."
"If you have something that works, you're not going… pic.twitter.com/I55U1qjQIJ
— Jawwwn (@jawwwn_) September 24, 2026
