Peter Thiel (Founders Fund)

Midas newcomer has reaped billions betting against conventional wisdom. His early bets on Facebook, LinkedIn and Zynga have propelled Thiel to the top of our list. So did his early investment in anti-spam concern IronPort Systems, which sold to Cisco for $830 million.

Thiel's venture firm Founders Fund is reinventing the wheel by offering portfolio companies Series FF stock, which gives founders the option to take some cash off the table in subsequent funding rounds (and keeps them swinging for the fences). Thiel's current investments include: SpaceX (rockets), Spotify (music), Yammer (Twitter for corporate America), Palantir (software to ferret out terrorists and financial scamsters) and Halcyon Molecular (DNA sequencing). Thiel still serves on the board of Facebook and has become something of a consigliore to Mark Zuckerberg: "Whenever I am not psyched about the way things are going and there don't seem to be a lot of good choices, I can get some advice by talking to him," says Zuckerberg.

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