File 029452

Images

Text

https://nyti.ms/2D6krmw
TECHNOLOGY
Peter
Thiel’s
Money
Talks,
in
Contentious
Ways.
But
What
Does
He
Say?
By DAVID STREITFELD MARCH 7, 2018
Peter Thiel is Silicon Valley’s homegrown Cassandra. He warned for years that the
big tech companies were arrogant and clueless and less good for mankind than
they believed.
Comeuppance, the billionaire investor warned, was coming.
Trouble has now arrived. Unfortunately for Mr. Thiel, the storm is centered on
Facebook, whose board he has been a member of practically since its founding. The
social network, which billed itself as bringing democracy and enlightenment to the
world, was used by the Russians to subvert democracy and sow confusion in the
United States.
Even people paid to see the future didn’t see that one coming.
“The board’s role is to help think about some of the medium- and longer-term
problems coming around the corner,” Mr. Thiel said. “We were far from perfect in
doing that.”
Mr. Thiel, 50, is at the center of nearly every issue that roils Silicon Valley,
ranging from the tech elite’s fascination with New Zealand hideaways (Mr. Thiel
obtained New Zealand citizenship) to Bitcoin (he is a major investor) to the
problems of herd thinking (he is moving from San Francisco to Los Angeles to
escape it) to the evolving role of content on the internet (he has been exploring the
creation of a media company that would outflank Breitbart and Fox for a younger
audience).
Two subjects are currently overwhelming everything else: President Trump,
whom Mr. Thiel aggressively backed for president, and Facebook, whose core
mission is being called into question in the wake of the Russian revelations. In a
typical Thiel move — he tends to run toward controversy even as his Silicon Valley
peers try to make themselves inconspicuous — he agreed, in a rare interview, to
talk about both.
“It’s been a crazier two years than I would have thought,” Mr. Thiel said in his new
Midtown Manhattan apartment, which is so far up in the clouds that it literally
looks down on Trump Tower.
Despite the proximity, the mutual enthusiasm between Mr. Thiel and Mr.
Trump seems to have cooled. After Mr. Thiel spoke at the Republican National
Convention in 2016, there were unsourced media reports that said Mr. Trump
wanted to put him on the Supreme Court. But now even photo ops are rare.
The investor said he had last spoken to the president “a few months ago.”
“We don’t talk that often,” he said, but added, “I can get access anytime I
want.”
The Trump whom Mr. Thiel touted at the Republican convention was a
candidate who would “end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country,” move
us past “fake culture wars” and start projects the equivalent of the Apollo space
program. That does not seem to be the president he got.
“There are all these ways that things have fallen short,” Mr. Thiel said. But he
said he had no regrets about his endorsement. “It’s still better than Hillary Clinton
or the Republican zombies,” he said, referring to the other candidates.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Thiel is routinely labeled a libertarian. On a bookshelf in the apartment, as
if in confirmation, is a hardback copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged,” the bible of
the movement. A gift, he said.
A lesser-known but possibly deeper influence was the French philosopher
René Girard, who taught at Stanford University when Mr. Thiel was an
undergraduate there. For 15 years, on and off, Mr. Thiel sat in on a study group
about Mr. Girard’s ideas. Mr. Girard believed human beings were deeply mimetic,
which is to say they copy one another.
“It’s very anti-Ayn Rand: There are no self-contained autonomous figures,”
Mr. Thiel said. “Our desires are not our own. They get shaped powerfully by the
society around us.”
It was this illumination that helped him see the potential of Facebook — where
people could find out in intimate and addictive detail what their friends were up to
— when it was barely a year old. He was the first outside investor, buying 10
percent of the company for $500,000.
He sold most of his holdings in 2012 as Facebook went public. A few months
ago, with Facebook’s market capitalization at about $500 billion, he sold most of
what he had left.
Last summer, there was a flap when a memo by a fellow board member, Reed
Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, appeared in The New York Times. In the
memo, Mr. Hastings wrote to Mr. Thiel that he displayed “catastrophically bad
judgment” in supporting Mr. Trump.
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, did not ask him to step down
from the board, and reports that he wants to leave the board are incorrect, Mr.
Thiel said, noting that among other things that he brings “ideological diversity.” He
declined to say exactly how much or what kind of advice the Facebook board was
offering Mr. Zuckerberg, but defended the company from criticism that it was slow
to wake up to what the Russians did.
“Remember when Trump said the election was going to be rigged? People said
that was crazy — ‘How dare you question the integrity of the electoral process?’
That was the view of most of the people working at Facebook, too,” he said. “They
did not think things were so hackable. It was a mistake, but an understandable
mistake.” Facebook declined to comment.
The anger now being turned on Facebook, Mr. Thiel argued, is less about
Russia specifically and more about tech arrogance — its failure to do so much for
so many. It is a sentiment that helped put Mr. Trump in the White House.
“The Trump campaign slogan, ‘Make America Great Again,’ was perhaps the
single most offensive thing you could say to Silicon Valley,” he said. “Silicon Valley
says the future is going to be better than the past. That is the propaganda, if you
will.”
A friend of his in Silicon Valley had the idea of running for governor of
California this year. Mr. Thiel’s advice was that he had better have a good answer
to this question: Why is tech good for the average person in California? The
answer, he cautioned, couldn’t be a banality, such as “it’s making us more
connected,” and it couldn’t be utopian, such as “it’s going to cure all diseases.”
“He wasn’t able to come up with an answer, and I couldn’t come up with one,
either,” Mr. Thiel said. He declined to identify the friend, but it is well known in
tech circles that Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, the prominent startup
accelerator, was thinking about running. Mr. Altman confirmed it was him and
said he had decided not to run “for many reasons.”
There is a big painting of a cresting wave in Mr. Thiel’s living room, and it
might as well be a visual metaphor for what is going on in big tech now.
“Having some ambition that transcends just making money is a critical thing
for a company,” he said. “But there is some point where it gets crazy and selfdelusional.”
He added that the companies “are probably in some trouble — maybe
it’s a little, maybe it’s a lot.” The prospect of government regulation looms.
In 2015 and 2016, Mr. Thiel gave $300,000 to Josh Hawley, who was
campaigning to become Missouri’s attorney general. Mr. Hawley won, and in
November he opened an antitrust investigation of Google. A spokeswoman for Mr.
Hawley, a Republican who is now challenging the state’s Democratic senator,
Claire McCaskill, said there was “no connection” between Mr. Thiel’s donation and
the investigation. Google declined to comment.
The news last month that Mr. Thiel is moving from San Francisco to Los
Angeles reflects a shift that is as much mental as literal. Getting out of the tech
bubble, he figures, will give him more clarity about his investments.
“Network effects are very positive things, but there’s a tipping point where
they fall over into the madness of crowds,” he said.
Another of Mr. Thiel’s contentious ideas was destroying Gawker, the online
publisher. He secretly financed the privacy lawsuit that Hulk Hogan, the former
pro wrestler, filed against the media company, which Mr. Hogan won. That led to
Gawker’s bankruptcy in 2016.
A news operation that specialized in deflating the arrogance of Silicon Valley
should have been to Mr. Thiel’s liking. But he argues that his philosophy is
consistent here.
“Gawker was trying to cut people down to size for not conforming,” he said.
“The ability to speak and not have every word you say get distorted, to have wrong
ideas and then be able to correct them — these notions were powerfully undercut
by Gawker.”
Mr. Thiel is still pursuing the remnants of Gawker in court, which has
prompted accusations that he wants to remove all of its content from the internet
as a final victory.
He denied this. “Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hulk Hogan, is still owed some money
from the Gawker sale, and that is what I am trying to get,” he said. “I don’t want
the archives. I don’t think it makes sense to destroy them. Preserve them, study
them instead.”
Follow David Streitfeld on Twitter: @DavidStreitfeld.
4
© 2018 ARTICLES The REMAINING New York Times Company
SEE MY OPTIONS
Subscriber login