13 Quotes That Show Why Libertarian Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Is A Scary Genius
February 1, 2014 Leave a comment
13 Quotes That Show Why Libertarian Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Is A Scary Genius
JAN. 29, 2014, 9:28 PM 216,226 38
Peter Thiel, renaissance man.
It isn’t easy to pinpoint exactly what Peter Thiel is most famous for. His interests range from the mundane (online payments) to the fringes of scientific thought (immortality and floating cities).
He’s a libertarian. But he has also funded the secretive data-mining company Palantir, which works for the FBI and the CIA.
He co-founded PayPal and acted as its CEO before the company sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
Since then he launched the global hedge-fund Clarium Capital and the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm. He was Facebook’s first outside investor, making him a billionaire when the company went public.
He supports the Methuselah Foundation, whose goal is to reverse human aging, and the SeaSteading Institute, a libertarian group founded to create independent floating cities in international waters.
He’s also launched the controversial “20 Under 20” initiative which gives 20 teens $100,000 to drop out of college for two years to pursue their own tech projects.
He is one of the most original, controversial thinkers in tech today.
On living: “Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.”
On higher education: “University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it’s not a consumption decision, it’s an investment decision. Actually, no, it’s a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties.”
On responses to his “20 Under 20” Thiel Foundation drop-outs: “Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus.”
On libertarianism: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”
On the future: “Yes, a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs, as you need fewer workers to do the same things, but it would have the benefit of freeing people up to do many other things.”
On ideas: “There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them.”
On progress: “People don’t want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology — all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is, why?”
On choosing who to fund: “As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking.”
On defining a personal world view: “This is always a problem with elites, they’re always skewed in an optimistic direction.”
On success: “The most successful businesses have an idea for the future that’s very different from the present.”
On where we’re going: “It seems like we’ve not been thinking about the right issues for a long time. I actually think it is a big step just to ask the question ‘What does one need to do to make the U.S. a better place?’”
On not accepting the status quo: “I think that one of the most contrarian things one can do in our society is try to think for oneself.”
On failure: “Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.”*
*Technically, this is a Vince Lombardi quote, but Thiel has made it something of a personal mantra.
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