Hey Guys,
In my opinion, Peter Thiel isn't some super-villain. He's been really unpopular on reddit lately and there's been a lot of stuff spreading about him that isn't true (at least, I don't think it's true). So, I wanna go over some of the usual criticisms against him.
1) Peter Thiel is sexist and said that women getting the right to vote was bad for democracy.
So, this criticism comes from this essay Peter Thiel wrote in 2009 about The Education of a Libertarian (It's a pretty interesting read). He made this statement in the essay
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
If you actually read his essay, it is extremely obvious that the comment was just saying that women's suffrage has been bad for the Libertarian movement. This is because, women aren't libertarian and you can look at polls and see this is true. Thiel was saying that women's suffrage has been bad for the Libertarian movement and that's a true statement.
2) Peter Thiel just got lucky off Facebook. He's actually an idiot!
Well, Peter Thiel is has a 2200 FIDE chess rating and has the USCF Life Master title. He went to Stanford undergraduate and Stanford Law. He took over as CEO of Paypal after Elon and took the company to a $1.5 billion acquisition (He made ~$55 million off the acquisition). Then he invested in Facebook (and made ~ 1 billion off that). After he managed a macro-focused hedge fund and got extremely good returns, so much so that the macro fund grew from $10 million to managing $7.2 billion dollars. He did fail though post-financial crisis and the hedge fund lost a lot of money and closed ( A LOT of macro fund managers strugged post 2008, so I wouldn't exactly call him a failure for that ). He started Palantir (he's the largest shareholder) and that company has grown to be valued at $20 billion ( more on this later ). He's made early-stage investments in LinkedIn, Quora, Stripe, Tesla, SpaceX, Lyft, some weed company (although that might be overhyped idk) and some others I've probably forgot. He also bought a lot of bitcoin in 2013 and bought $15-20 million worth when it was ~$2500. He also said Uber was the most ethically challenged company in Silicon Valley 3 years before the Travis Kalanick was forced to resign (due to tons of Uber scandals). I could honestly state a bunch of other things he's said that ended up being true (he's been saying Google and Facebook have monopolies for years, he predicted the rise of Amazon in 2012 ), but my point is Peter Thiel is actually a really smart dude.
3) Peter Thiel is a Libertarian who hates competition and supports Monopolies
So, this comes from his book Zero to One, where he states that when you start a business, you want to start a monopoly. He's stated multiple times that this is just how you should think as an entrepreneur, and that obviously monopolies aren't necessarily best for society. BUT, if you're an entrepreneur, than you want to capture as much market value as possible and you want to avoid competition since competition will kill your profit margins. If you're an investor, you want to invest in monopolies. This is advice purely from an investor/entrepreneur's perspective, which makes sense as the fucking book's target audience was entrepreneurs/investors.
4) Peter Thiel thinks colleges should be abolished
Nope. He said there is a place for college but it isn't for everyone, and he questioned why college was getting so expensive. He said that there was a bubble in higher education as the price of college was increasing rapidly and the quality of education wasn't matching the price increase. Therefore in 2010, as a trial, he gave 20 kids $100,000 if they dropped out of college to pursue any idea ( Those kids have since raised $400 million dollars in funding for their ideas ). You can see his views of higher education here
5) Gawker
So, somehow people seem to have forgotten that the guys at Gawker were fucking assholes. They outed people who were in the closet (Peter Thiel, David Geithner ), outed one of r/politic's moderators (Gawker links were actually banned from reddit for some time because of this), posted a video of a random college girl getting gang-raped and refused to take it down despite pleas from the girl and her father and of course, posted a video of Hulk Hogan having sex (where Hogan didn't know he was being filmed) and refused to take the video down despite Hogan's pleas. So, I don't think it's a stretch to call Gawker a group of pieces of shit. They also had a ton of lawyers on retainer because they knew people would sue them for the shit they were doing. However, no one was able to because 1) Lawyers are really expensive and Gawker would easily outspend you and 2) Gawker was able to use free speech argument so suing them would be incredibly difficult. Peter Thiel decided that he wanted to take Gawker down and he realized that he was one of the few people who had the resources to do so. Even so, Hogan was the underdog. From the beginning of the lawsuit, Gawker NEVER took it seriously. The gawker editor who posted the video said under deposition that he would be fine with posting child pornography. The editor also said that Hogan's sex tape was NOT news worthy. You'd have to be retarded to say this kind of shit in a deposition and the editor later said he was joking about the child porn remark. This just shows how cocky Gawker was. Even the day before the trial, Nick Denton predicted Gawker had a 90% chance of victory. All of this stuff made Gawker look like huge assholes to the jury and that's why Gawker lost. Saying that Thiel could use this tactic to take down an actual news organization is absurd. I'd highly recommend Conspiracy by Ryan Holiday. The entire story is fascinating, and Ryan Holiday gets exclusive access to both Nick Denton and Peter Thiel.
6) Palantir
So, a lot of criticism has been directed at Thiel from Reddit for his involvement with Palantir. Thiel's actual reason for why he started Palantir was because he rejected the traditional notion with regards to Privacy. The standard narrative is that you can either have no government tracking of your data but you will have less security and more terrorist attacks OR you can have less privacy but more security and fewer terrorist attacks. Thiel rejected this notion and created Palantir with the aim of applying advanced machine-learning & computer science so you can have more privacy AND more security. Thiel talks about this here
7) Trump
I suspect this is one of the biggest reason people don't like Thiel. I'll just link this video where he spends 10 minutes going over why he supported Trump.
8) He has a blood boy and injects the blood of younger people into himself
In my opinion, taking down Gawker was something good Peter Thiel did. I think his book Zero to One is a great read and I think his views on the "stagnation" are extremely insightful and important (He's been saying that innovation has been slowing over the past 40 years. All the innovation has been IT/Computer related and none of it has been related to "the world of atoms". He wants to people to put more effort into changing this). I think he's been a net positive to humanity and look forward to reading your guys' counterpoints.
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