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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWho's Afraid of Peter Thiel? A New Biography Suggests We All Should Be
https://www.yahoo.com/news/whos-afraid-peter-thiel-biography-164023071.htmlDo you see Thiel as dangerous?
Its really important that we understand the ideology of Silicon Valley. Five of the top 10 companies in the world are tech companies. They exert an enormous cultural and economic influence over our lives. Those companies have been really successful at telling a story about the world and their place in the world: were just trying to make the world a better place. Thiel comes with a very different perspective. He comes out of activist conservative media. I think its really important that we explore the ideology of what somebody like Peter Thiel believes. When you start peeling back the layers, what you find is this very out-there political and economic philosophy that I think is a little bit scary.
What do you find scary about his economic and political philosophy?
Its bordering on fascism. Thiel taught this class at Stanford and then turned it into a book called Zero to One. He talks about how companies are better run than governments because they have a single decision makera dictator, basically. He is hostile to the idea of democracy. Thats pretty scary when you consider the role the companies that hes been involved in play. Facebook, Id say is the most influential media entity in the history of humanity, but he also has a major stake in several defense contractors, including SpaceX.
Did Thiel get blowback about the January 6th attack on Congress?
I think certainly his reputation in certain corners of the establishment has suffered. But I dont think he really cares about the blowback; he seems to really take pleasure in that.
Response to Carlitos Brigante (Original post)
Chin music This message was self-deleted by its author.
Casady1
(2,133 posts)zaj
(3,433 posts)Note the date....
Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries
https://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/
dalton99a
(81,073 posts)A lot of people are really excited about cryptocurrency and you can connect it back to to PayPal, which is the company that Thiel co-founded in the late 1990s with an explicitly libertarian ethos. Theres this aspect of crypto-world now, where people are really excited about the idea of taking power away from institutions and governments and thats something that Thiel and his libertarian brethren that were starting that company were really interested in. Its not something that happens accidentally.
If you look at his convention speechwhich I think was a really good speechhe talks about Trump as this guy whos gonna shake things up, whos going to remake government, so I think thats one part of it. The other part of it is, Thiel is very committed to the idea of being able to say the unpopular thing. Thats a core part of what Trump was. I also think that Thiel is a really savvy investor and he correctly diagnosed that Trump had a pretty good chance of winning and that there wasnt a lot of downside to betting on him.
He didnt formally endorse Trump during the 2020 election, but if you look at the candidates hes [now] supporting, theyre Trumpers: J.D. Vance, whos running for Senate in Ohio was an employee of Peter Thiels and an investor in his fund. Before announcing that he was gonna run for Senate, Vance said that he was wrong in 2016 to oppose Trump, and around the same time, he got this $10 million dollar donation from Thiel to his super PAC. Another candidate that Thiel is supporting in the coming cycle is Blake Masters, who is literally an employee. He runs Thiels foundation.
Response to Carlitos Brigante (Original post)
bucolic_frolic This message was self-deleted by its author.
WarGamer
(12,106 posts)Dozens of interviews and speeches.
Here's his Ted Talk
WarGamer
(12,106 posts)They're economic fascists, cynical of government, yes... but stunningly liberal in many ways.
They're LGBT friendly, Thiel is gay.
They're pro-choice, for the most part.
They're pro-legal weed.
They're atheists or agnostic.
They have a different set of talents and characteristics compared to ANY previous Republican.
They're hyper-educated. In fact they think the other 99.99% of the country is stupid.
Fortunately for us (electorally)... many of them are NOT Americans, Thiel is German, Musk is Canadian/South African...
Farmer-Rick
(10,072 posts)He wants himself an easily manipulated idiot dick tater, like Trump, in order to loot the remains of our national wealth.
This is why people want to eat the rich.
csziggy
(34,120 posts)Thiel has got to be one of the worst human beings alive today. Other than maybe Steven Miller. Both of them seem to have been flawed at birth considering how young they showed their sociopath tendencies.
September 21, 20211:22 PM ET
Heard on Fresh Air
Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Max Chafkin talks about the tech billionaire who broke with most of Silicon Valley in backing Trump. Thiel also secretly funded the lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker.
DAVE DAVIES, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies in today for Terry Gross. The American tech industry is known for producing some interesting characters as CEOs - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg. Our guest today. Bloomberg Businessweek tech reporter Max Chafkin has a new book about one of Silicon Valley's more unusual figures, Peter Thiel. He co-founded PayPal, made a fortune running a hedge fund and was an early investor in Facebook, where he still serves on the board of directors. He's also a libertarian conservative who broke with most tech industry figures by embracing the candidacy of Donald Trump. He's known for secretly financing wrestler Hulk Hogan's invasion of privacy lawsuit which bankrupted the website Gawker. And he's shown an interest in some unconventional ideas, like establishing independent city states that float on the ocean, free from oppressive governments, and fighting aging by getting blood transfusions from young people.
Max Chafkin is a features editor and tech reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek. His work has also appeared in Vanity Fair, Inc and The New York Times Magazine. His new book is "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel And Silicon Valley's Pursuit Of Power." Well, Max Chafkin, welcome to FRESH AIR. You write that, when you were a tech reporter, that Thiel seemed to hang behind or above or somewhere in the middle of almost every story I reported about the tech industry. And we're going to talk about his career some. But what do you mean that he was hanging in and over these stories?
MAX CHAFKIN: Yeah. You mentioned the kind of top line biography. You know, he invested in a bunch of well-known companies. I think, most famously, he's the first investor in Facebook. But the thing that makes Peter Thiel kind of really interesting and who, especially back then, you know, from the perspective of a tech reporter in the mid-2000s was this thing called the PayPal Mafia. It was a group of people, you know, an informal collection of entrepreneurs and investors - basically led by Peter Thiel - that were moving money around and doing some really interesting and, you know, in retrospect, amazing things with it. And so that group includes Thiel and some of his co-founders, you know, Max Levchin and Elon Musk.
So the PayPal Mafia finds its way into SpaceX, Elon Musk's company. It finds its way into YouTube, Yelp, LinkedIn. There's just this really long list of really important kind of influential companies that came out of Silicon Valley at the same time. And they all either have Peter Thiel's money in them or they're run by friends of Peter Thiel. And what you start to see is this kind of influence network growing where employees are bouncing from one PayPal Mafia company to the next.
More: https://www.npr.org/2021/09/21/1039247214/the-contrarian-profiles-peter-thiel-paypal-co-founder-and-political-provocateur
ETA - Audio at link.
intheflow
(28,407 posts)I'm a librarian and I just ordered this book today by chance. His name sounded familiar but I (humaniities major) was just assigned the economics section so... playing catch-up. Anyway, good to see it pop up on DU. That means my collection development Spidey-senses are spot on. It's something should be freely available to the public.
Now I'm gonna go put it on hold.