[5][6] His most prominent investments include Baidu, Hotmail, Skype, Tesla, SpaceX, AngelList, SolarCity, Ring, Twitter, DocuSign, Coinbase, Robinhood, Ancestry.com, Twitch, Cruise Automation, PrettyLitter and Focus Media.

In July 2014, Draper received wide coverage[7] for his purchase at a US Marshals Service auction of seized bitcoins from the Silk Road website.

His father is the founder of Draper & Johnson Investment Company and former chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank of the United States.

[3] Draper attended Phillips Academy Andover before matriculating to Stanford University, where he graduated with a BS in electrical engineering in 1980.

While numerous publications intimate that he "invented viral marketing" in 1996, this major acclaim was his early support for the founders, due to his idea of automatically attaching a brief advertising message to the bottom of outgoing Hotmail emails.

[12] Draper and Jurvetson then coined the term "viral marketing", though the neologism itself is documented as early as a 1989 edition of PC User.

[27] On April 21, 2018, Draper predicted during an Intelligence Squared debate that "In five years you are going to try to go buy coffee with fiat currency and they are going to laugh at you because you're not using crypto.

[31][32] Draper was one of the first investors in the blood testing startup Theranos, whose founder Elizabeth Holmes was later charged by the SEC with committing massive fraud.

Draper's recent investments are centered around companies who use artificial intelligence, bitcoin, blockchain, smart contracts, and computational genomics to apply to industries like finance, health care, and government.

[citation needed] Draper has spoken out for free markets and entrepreneurship globally, and against Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, stating that they limit the viability of taking companies public.

[46] Draper stated that he met with—and donated to—both presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris in "roughly equal amounts."