Jonathan Levin

Jonathan Levin (born November 17, 1972) is an American economist who won the 2011 John Bates Clark Medal, served as dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business from 2016 to 2024, and became the thirteenth president of Stanford University in August 2024. He was named among the confirmed 2026 registrants of Dialog, the invitation-only society cofounded by Peter Thiel, in the membership roster leaked to WIRED in June 2026, which identified him as the president of Stanford University.¹

A Family of University Presidents

Levin was born in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of the economist Richard Levin, who served as the twenty-second president of Yale University from 1993 to 2013. The two are both economists who became presidents of elite American universities, a pairing that framed the coverage of Jonathan Levin's appointment, and Stanford itself published a joint interview with father and son on university leadership. He took dual undergraduate degrees from Stanford in 1994, a bachelor of arts in English and a bachelor of science in mathematics, then an MPhil in economics from Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1996, and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999 under Bengt Holmström.²³

He joined the Stanford economics faculty in 2000 as an assistant professor, became a full professor by 2008 as the Holbrook Working Professor of Price Theory, and chaired the economics department from 2011 to 2014. His research spans industrial organization and microeconomic theory, including relational and incomplete contracts, market design and auctions, asymmetric information in credit markets, health insurance, and radio-spectrum allocation.³⁴

The Clark Medal and the Stanford Presidency

Levin received the John Bates Clark Medal in 2011, awarded by the American Economic Association to the American economist under forty judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought. He became the tenth dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 2016, holding the post for eight years through 2024 while also holding the Philip H. Knight professorship. From 2021 to 2025 he served on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology under President Biden, appointed in September 2021; his work on radio-spectrum auctions and internet market design is his principal bridge to the technology industry, though no public corporate board seat for the economist is documented.⁴⁵

The Stanford Board of Trustees announced Levin's appointment as the thirteenth president of Stanford on April 4, 2024, and he took office on August 1, 2024. He succeeded the classicist Richard Saller, who had served as interim president since September 2023, after Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned effective August 31, 2023, following a research-misconduct scandal. A Stanford-commissioned panel, prompted by Stanford Daily reporting that began in November 2022, found data manipulation in papers from Tessier-Lavigne's laboratories; the panel found no evidence that he personally committed or knew of the manipulation but concluded that he had failed to "decisively and forthrightly correct mistakes in the scientific record."⁶⁷

Stanford and the Thiel Network

Thiel took a bachelor of arts in philosophy at Stanford in 1989 and a JD from Stanford Law School in 1992, and as a sophomore in 1987 founded The Stanford Review, the conservative-libertarian student newspaper that a Stanford Politics investigation later described as "one of the surest paths to success in Silicon Valley." The investigation documented roughly three hundred employment relationships between Review alumni and about sixty institutions founded by Thiel or Joe Lonsdale. David Sacks was a later editor-in-chief of the Review and a Stanford undergraduate in the class of 1994, Keith Rabois was its opinion editor in the class of 1991, and Lonsdale and Palantir cofounder Stephen Cohen were Stanford undergraduates and Review affiliates.⁸⁹

René Girard, the Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature, and Civilization, taught at Stanford, and Thiel took his courses as an undergraduate in the late 1980s; Girard's mimetic theory became foundational to Thiel's worldview, and Thiel spoke at Girard's memorial after his death in November 2015. Alex Karp, Thiel's Palantir cofounder, took his JD at Stanford Law in the same 1992 class as Thiel, where the two met, though Karp's undergraduate degree is from Haverford College and his doctorate from Goethe University Frankfurt. Reid Hoffman met Thiel as a Stanford undergraduate, where he studied symbolic systems before taking a philosophy degree at Oxford. The Hoover Institution fellow and former Reagan speechwriter Peter Robinson, who hosts the program Uncommon Knowledge, has interviewed Thiel within the same conservative-Stanford orbit.¹⁰¹¹¹²

The network continued to operate through Stanford institutions during Levin's tenure as dean. In January 2018 the Stanford "Cardinal Conversations" series opened with an event titled "Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel on Technology and Politics," moderated by Niall Ferguson under the Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute. The Stanford Daily reported that an invitation found in the Epstein files indicates Levin attended Dialog's 2013 retreat, more than a decade before the 2026 leak.¹²¹³