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This podcast "The Peter Thiel Paradox" [1] explained a lot about the mystery of Peter Thiel to me. Turns out that there is less than meets the eye but he does have a specific talent for manipulating the political systems and government coffers to enrich himself, much like Richard Branson, or so the British podcast claims.

[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/the-lrb-p...

One nitpick; Theil said "We were promised flying cars and call we got was 140 characters" not "We were promised bases on the moon and all we got was Facebook"

Link claims Buzz Aldrin said "You Promised Me Mars Colonies. Instead, I Got Facebook."

http://files.technologyreview.com/magazine-archive/2012/MIT-...

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There was a comment in a thread on HN a while ago by someone that interviewed with Thiel's hedge fund. Apparently the fund lost a lot of money and Thiel was directing the trading decisions. Other investors pulled their money and it was mostly Thiel's money in the fund going forward.

That was maybe me? If not someone else had the exact same experience. Was an odd interview, took place at a mostly empty office building in the presidio. Afterwards I was wandering around in the fog trying to get a cell signal to call an Uber which added to the ghost town feeling.

My understanding is that Thiel's public fund often takes loss because he is hedging other financial risk he is taking.(e.g. holding palantir after IPO, large VC investments in industries that may turn out to be based on immature research)

Hahaha you don't believe that, do you?

If that's true, it's more evil than just being bad at investing. Leveraging other people's money to make contrarian bets as a hedge to the investments you believe in enough to put your money in, when the reason those people are giving you money is to align their money with yours, is ethically if not legally fraud.

Wasn't Eric Weinstein also involved with that hedge fund? Or am I mixing things up?

Possibly. Thiel has Clarium, “Thiel Capital” and “Thiel Macro” associated with his name. Weinstein was a managing director at Thiel Capital.

I interviewed with Thiel Macro years ago when I got the story of the investors pulling out and the fund being primarily Thiel’s money from my interviewer. Not sure which if any of these are the same corporate entity.

Why do people with this much wealth want even more wealth for themselves? I've never understood this.

Is being the 50th best basketball player on the planet good enough? Why do athletes continue to dedicate their lives in the hopes of being #1?

Once your basic needs are met and you have a comfortable standard of living, everything else is a game, and people like to win. Why does anyone need a fancy car? Why does anyone need to compete with their neighbors and coworkers? Why does a billionaire need a superyacht when an adequately sized one will do? This is simply how some (or maybe even most) people are wired.

> people like to win

True, but there are a host of other things that people like. The idea that "winning" is the ultimate goal in life is more socially induced than immanent.

If as a society we decide to foster different attitudes and goals we will obtain different outcomes and different kinds of people (to a certain extent, of course).

> The idea that "winning" is the ultimate goal in life is more socially induced than immanent.

That idea will be a lot more prevalent among people who end up being the winners than among those who don’t, at every scale. Effort doesn’t get everything but it gets a lot.

It is game with millions of human lives being destroyed as a consequence at times.

If you don't like the game, you should probably vote for politicians that change the rules. There isn't a real bound on wealth within the system we're in, until that changes this is reality and expecting people who play it to be inherently moral is naive.

Note that Im not stating a judgement either way, just pointing out how the system currently works.

as pointed out in the parent comment that started this chain, politicians are captured by the same assholes who benefit from the system, as structured. if you change the politicians, they either buy or destroy their replacements. so if the system must change, what is to be done?

On a practical level, this may or may not be true depending on the politician.

I haven't seen an actual push for "taxing the super rich" go through. Sanders ran on that and lost. Reality at the moment is that at the moment if what you said is true it wouldn't matter because Americans don't care.

Except it doesn't work since politicians themselves that benefit from the system.

Think incentives, not ideals.

This system is all encompassing, politicians are in it as well.

The only real system change is through revolution, and revolutions are never pretty.

Why would it have to be pretty?

Change needs sacrifice.

Are you ready to sacrifice yours and your family and friends convenience and comfort for system change? Because everyone will suffer in some degree until a new system takes root.

That's the hard part, I'm all up for overthrowing this shit but the consequences are always the biggest deterrent.

Humanity, the game. In the original version, conquest, you got points for taking other people’s stuff, which almost always required injuring or killing them. With the addition of the extended economic growth (capitalism) expansion pack you could gain points by making things or providing services people wanted more than what they already had.

The economic growth expansion also brings a whole lot of new ways to exploit people for points. No need anymore to kill or injure them directly, you can decide to injure millions at once through a web of complex shell companies to extract some shiny rock the other people want and play the "it's all the free market" card to not get points deducted!

Honestly, no one has ever put it this way. I like the reference to sports! I'd still be happy as a backup QB for 10 years making bank though. Cushy!

Backup qbs don’t make much more then software engineers… just saying. The league minimum is like 700k.

A third stringer might make the minimum, but the backup is very likely to start at least a game or two during the season, and is often clearing a couple million dollars in annual salary.

https://boardroom.tv/nfl-backup-qb-salaries/

The league minimum for a rookie is something like 700k. It goes up with experience/longevity.

In the case of Peter Thiel, the Koch family, and Robert Mercer, it is quite clear that the end goal is no longer wealth, but reshaping politics, geo-political power, and thought for multiple generations.

Wow. No one on the left does that?

here are some names that do more than just donate cash. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/most-influential-dem...

I really doubt you could call any of these billionaires "left".

Not to the same extent, simply because the raison d'etre of the left is to (at the extreme end) eliminate those types of people in the first place.

Why isn't there a OANN of the left? Sure the MSM has a mainstream liberal bias, but there's hardly any Big Left (as in full on communist) media, at least in the English speaking world. There's a multitude of reasons, but I believe a big part of it is there simply isn't funding for that sort of thing.

Because OANN true believers are the kind of people who watch TV, and their closest equivalents on the left do not. The preferred media can differ.

So what's an equivalent on the left in your opinion?

Soros?

I don't think Peter Thiel is in it for the money, not anymore anyway. He is fairly straightforward and has talked about his motivations in various long-form interviews over the years. In my observation, his actions are aligned with his motivations that he has expressed.

Partisan media assigns fabricated evil motivations to explain his actions, like they do with everyone who they view as not on their side. People who get their idea of him from these sources have distorted view of him.

I would consider it evil to say that women shouldn't vote.

I consider it evil to manufacture a false statement to slander someone you disagree with. He never said women shouldn't vote.

What he actually said:

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. 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.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

It is rather obvious that he thinks women shouldn't vote given he blames them, in part, for the decline of "capitalist democracy".

I could have also mentioned his work to make sure the general public has much less privacy while fighting with lots of money to make sure his privacy is respected. I have little use for those who wish to have separate rules for themselves than they want others to follow.

It isn't at all obvious you know what Thiel thinks, but it is obvious you don't like him. You can't go around making up quotes based on what you imagine people you don't like think.

He didn't say what you claimed, why not just edit your post and retract it. By not doing backing down it makes it look like you knew it was untrue, but just wanted to take the cheap shot.

I have read a great many things he has written actually. Thiel is a big believer that people like him should be able to make most / all the decision in government because he is so successful and that most who think differently then him are just flat out wrong.

He uses his money to support people who would make marriage be hetrosexual only because he has enough money to work around the issues bothers me. His doesn't think those who aren't as rich as he is are worthy of having all the rights and privileges he has.

Strip away the frilly language and the message is "democracy went down the toilet when women and poors started voting because they don't swing libertarian".

> the extension of the franchise to women […] ha[s] rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron

It’s quite clear he believes women voting and “capitalist democracy” are fundamentally incompatible.

From what I know, he doesn't think anyone should vote... because he understands that democracy is a tool used by the establishment to give people the illusion of freedom. This view is not unique to him. He shares it with several other libertarians, historical and contemporary.

From what I know, he doesn't think anyone should vote

How about you cite a source instead of jumping on the false accusation bandwagon.

It's not an accusation, it's high praise.

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/05/01/peter-thiel/suffrage...

IIRC he sold most of his stake in 2012 after the IPO. He would be far richer today if he had just let his investment in Meta ride, even with the recent fall. It seems clear he's not in it for the money.

> He would be far richer today if he had just let his investment in Meta ride

You mean if he had had a crystal ball, which absolutely nobody on the planet possesses.

Hyper concentrating your wealth in a highly risky investment, is not a good investment strategy. In the absence of a crystal ball, he made a very reasonable choice to cash the Facebook position out given his exposure to numerous other high-risk tech-related positions.

Bill Gates would be richer if he had never sold a share of Microsoft, and it would have similarly been a really bad approach to personal wealth management. That doesn't mean Gates wasn't interested in the money (for his goals, the more money the better), it means he was acting rationally, prudent, in diversifying.

> You mean if he had had a crystal ball

Amusingly isn't that what a Palantir actually is?

You don't become Peter Thiel rich if money is a means to an end rather than an end in itself for you.

Perhaps part of getting 'this much wealth' is a desire for more, more, more that doesn't seem to be something they can turn off?

I have enjoyed seeing PG just sort of fade into the background of YC and enjoy his kids (his twitter feed). He seems to have done well by doing well and seems fairly satisfied with all of it.

If you're poor it tends to look like "How many houses could a person want?"

If you're rich, it looks like "Everyone else, especially governments, sucks at allocating resources. I will do a better job."

And here's the kicker, being extremely wealthy is the result of being good at the skill of resource allocation.

> And here's the kicker, being extremely wealthy is the result of being good at the skill of resource allocation.

If you add skills such as 'externalizing costs', and 'diverting resources', sure, I'll buy what you're selling.

I mean usually throughout history at some level of wealth people want some kind of political type of glory.

If not that then some kind of patronage of the arts.

The problem with leisure is pretty constant really once you don't have to work.

You can only party all the time for so long before your addictions catch up with you. It is like the delusional of retiring to the beach to drink wine all day. Maybe fun for a few weeks but 6 months? You will be in bad shape rather quick.

It could be he feels passionate about his ventures and just wants them to be as successful as possible. The money is just a consequence.

Personally it is harder to understand that upper middle manager who works on something they aren't passionate about, who isn't a co-founder, and yet keeps committing more and more of their life and ambition to the company.

It's not about wealth once you reach a certain level. That's a simple and incorrect way of thinking about it. It's about legacy. Wealth is freedom and power to make change in society, politics, and the world that governments frankly are to ineffective, don't have the stomach, or intentionally choose not to change.

People with this much wealth start competing to up their position in the world's richest ranking. And, when you're #1 in the ranking you work hard to keep that ranking .. and so on and on ..

Me, I would just retire if I had a fraction of that, or so I think since I'm nowhere there ..

Ok well I'm not there really so I have no idea what I'm talking about but I'm guessing, probably by the time you get "this much wealth", this is the only game you can play, and it's fun, so you continue playing.

Maybe people who have everything at the top are afflicted with chronic boredom and playing the "game" is the only way to assuage it.

I imagine its fun for them. I personally cannot relate to this either, but you could apply this question to so many things. Like why would a world record sprinter want to run faster? I imagine with that reframing makes it more relatable.

At some point net worth becomes self worth for these people.

It's power. A guy who thinks that the 19th Amendment was a mistake doesn't care about more money, he cares about winding back the clock.

You could say that when you have that much wealth, you can retire and live the good life.

But it's true that these people keep going. Like Elon could have retired at any stage when he sold a company, but instead invested it in a new one. You know, spend time with family and friends. Instead he's running multiple companies.

My theory is that this is exactly the reason why they are so wealthy, and the rest of us are not.

"When you've helped 100 little old ladies cross the road, why bother with number 101?"

"When you've done so much useful work, why would you ever want to do any more?"

"If you have so many friends, why would you ever be nice to somebody new?"

"You love your family so much, why not stop now?"

"Michael Phelps already has a gold medal, why does he keep swimming?"

Helping a little old lady cross the road is improving the world in some manner. Acquiring bigger numbers in a bank account... not so much.

If you subscribe to the pre-modern idea that there is a limited overall amount of wealth, right.

But if you fast forward to the modern age, you’ll find that almost all work creates new wealth.

> you’ll find that almost all work creates new wealth.

Not necessarily for the person doing the work, though.

Personally I find it scandalous how we treated "essential workers" during the pandemic. But I'm afraid I'm digressing here.

Even if building your wealth didn't take it from somebody else, it still hadn't improved society.

True. Tabacco companies exist. But generally for someone to hand over money it strictly has to improve their life in a disproportionate way.

Two of the largest companies in the world are advertising companies. I don’t see such a strong correlation between improving the world and making money. To me, tobacco companies aren’t the exception.

There is vast value add in good advertising. You’re essentially matching products and consumers. Without ads, it would be very much harder for consumers to find the same quality and variety of products.

I, for one, have made many purchases from ads that I’m very happy with. Some were even life-changing. I would not have known that I wanted these things without the ad, and I’m better off now than before.

The poor and the aspirational class works for the wealth.

The wealthy work for power and control.

Points. It’s just about bragging rights. There’s nothing to it more than that. It’s literally just hoarding like dragon.

"number go up", they are obsessed with a high score and having more than others playing the same game.

It would be sad if it were just that, but the fallout effects so many.

I like the idea someone had that beyond a certain point you get a big party to say you won capitalism then the rest of the money you earn goes back into society.

It is a worthy feature of the system that the winners get to direct the resources. Musk used his winnings to found SpaceX and Tesla and other moonshot companies. The alternative is to redistribute everything to people who have proven only that they mismanage resources.

Musk also got a considerable amount of government assistance, assistance that he now says others shouldn't get.

I consider such a position to be rather strange.

Trickle down economics doesn't work.

The two companies you named exist and are profitable entirely because Musk was able to drive government spending in his direction (launch contracts and subsidies, respectively).

Same thing that makes people grind eternally in MMORPGs to max out a character.

hoarder mentality

thiel isn't that talented or smart, but he did get hella lucky, and that's a sore point for him. so he's used his paypal riches on an extended PR campaign to make everyone believe he's something more than he is. literally every quote and quip i've heard from him is recycled directly from elsewhere, rather than being even a semi-original notion, but he passes it off as wisdom from on high. he wants more than just respect; he wants to be worshipped. if i ever met him, i'd tell him to just go the scientology route and found another fake religion already. he could even fashion himself up as the new new jesus.

Jeez. I hate to burst your bubble, but Peter is more talented and intelligent than most of the readers/writers on this website. It's easy to make your claim when your perception of the guy is based solely on news articles and hit pieces. I don't agree with him on everything, but there is no denying that he's gotten where he is through maneuvering and foresight.

A lot of people think intelligence means people behave according to their ethics. In reality intelligence doesn’t mean that you are a good guy. A lot of “bad” guys are very intelligent. Not many people could pull off what Pablo Escobar or El Chapo did. Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos is pretty smart.

Elizabeth Holmes is facing 20 years in prison. Pretty smart.

A lot of smart people do dumb things. The Enron guys were pretty smart and went to jail. The people who blew up the financial markets in 2008 were very intelligent. Actually they were the smartest: made the public believe the world would go under if they couldn't keep their bonuses and receive a bailout.

I consider myself pretty intelligent and I have done plenty of dumb things although with some thinking I could have known they are dumb.

Also he is a ~2200 ELO-rated chess player. That alone would make the baseline IQ and ability to think through logic, analytical thinking, calculation skills and stratetic planning beyond most HN users, even though in a small domain of Chess; I'd wager more broadly.

https://ratings.fide.com/profile/2022389

Personally, I find his thinking savagely brutally straight to the point and cuts through cultural rust we've built up in our thinking process. It is fascinating, I don't agree with him on a lot of things but I admit, he is interesting.

I don’t understand how this rating is calculated? The fide profile doesn’t have any recorded matches or statistics on him, just the rank number that I can see.

Got any links to reading on this? You piqued my interest.

> Personally, I find his thinking savagely brutally straight to the point and cuts through cultural rust we've built up in our thinking process.

I agree with both of you

> thiel isn't that talented or smart, but he did get hella lucky,

This is true for more than 99% of extremely successful people. It is only worth mentioning when one does not like any particular successful person.

99% of internet posts make claims without sources.

76% of all statistics are made up.

He has a whole chapter in his book about this nonsense viewpoint that is quite thought provoking.

"Everything is just stochastic process bro" is such a dumb view of the world masquerading as an intelligent thought.

His Sea steading ideas are actually pretty idiotic in my book.

Proof: Everybody who tried it just to find out how extremely expensive it is to maintain structures in the middle of an ocean.

But it's not only that. They also find out in a very painful way that the high seas are just about the most regulated entity apart from aviation and possibly medicine.[0]

It seems that very smart people are totally able to maintain very dumb ideas.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...

While I see your point, a lot of invention happened when someone ignored conventional wisdom and others’ failures.

He’s actually very Christian and I’m told attends services every week. I’m not sure what denomination though.

Being a Christian usually doesn’t have much impact on how people behave. You can be super greedy, super generous, never cheat on your spouse, cheat all the time and so on. Somehow people find a justification for their behavior within their faith no matter what it is.

i suspect a number of narcissistic christians secretly wonder if they're actually the second coming. it wouldn't surprise me if thiel were in that group.

Now I'm curious: do the scriptures say when Jesus became self-aware, that he was (the son of) God?

from what (little) i remember, he was pretty self-aware in all of the bible that i read growing up. i'd guess a supreme being who wasn't really "born" would always have had self-awareness.

He's also human, and most of us do have to develop self-identity as children. That part of his life is mostly omitted from scripture though, as I recall.

edit: Googled and remembered there's the episode where he goes wandering off from his parents, they find him in the temple, and he asks why they'd think he would be anywhere else but in his Father's (God's) house. So, well aware at least as a twelve year old. Luke 2:41-59

it’s been a while since i read anything biblical, but i think he convinced himself of this pretty early on.

he told people to worship him pretty much right away.

it's not expressed exactly when he realizes, but awareness of identity is demonstrated in John 8:58 and John 17:5.

I read his book "Zero to One" and I felt like it did learn good things from it, for example that "competition is for losers". Before I thought capitalism was all about competition, but maybe I was a rube in not knowing that.

Buffett's "good businesses have moats" is roughly equivalent.

"Saying you like “moats” is just a nice way of saying you like oligopolies" - Musk

sure, information has many channels and routes into our brains, so that's not unusual or a criticism of how you learned that bit of information. but the idea that you try to avoid competition is straight from a first-year strategy course at any business school, in which this has been taught for at least the last 5 decades, if not much longer.

capitalism, the ideal, puts competition on a pedestal, as a broad mechanism to ensure profit margins gets squeezed out of markets as they mature (that is, as risk stabilizes, the risk premium does as well). capitalists don't want their profit margins minimized, so they employ as many mechanisms as they can get their greedy hands on to minimize competition. capitalists are literally anti-competitive. capitalism is not.

You weren't a rube at all, that view of capitalism as being characterized by competitive markets is popular and the result of Milton Friedman style ideas being almost propagandized from the 80s onward.

His points in the book however do basically go back to Schumpeter who argued the same thing. That oligopolistic markets in which outsized firms earn excess profits, are significantly more dynamic than overly competitive market economies.

The economic definition of competition, beyond its simplest variety, allows for natural "moats" and differentiated firms. Looking for a "moat" is just engaging in competition on a larger scale than that of a single product - and the "excess" returns involved are ultimately a reward for good positioning. (Of course artificially-created 'moats' are a form of rent seeking and should be eliminated via antitrust regulation, but this can take some time.)

“ thiel isn't that talented or smart, but he did get hella lucky,”

To get and stay where he is you have to be pretty smart. Maybe not in the way you define it but most people wouldn’t be able to do what he did. This will get me in trouble but I think the same can be said about Trump. The way he pushed himself into the presidency against resistance from the media and the established parties was pretty phenomenal. You have to be very capable to pull that off and not many people would be able to do the same.

Being intelligent doesn’t mean that you do things people view as ethical.

i wasn't claiming thiel was dumb, just that in his case, luck overwhelmed, and that he's not as smart and talented as he'd want the world to believe (that everything he's achieved is solely due to his own brilliance only).

trump is, in a way, a good analogue. he also claims rare intelligence, but it's pretty clear he's not smart at all. he happened to be propelled by daddy's wealth, and translated that into infamy via a second-tier reality show that saved him just as he was floundering in real estate, another stroke of luck. along the way, he was bailed out time and again for billions of dollars, something almost no american has the luck to have access to. trump is decidedly not smart, just extremely lucky. sheer statistics say we're bound to have a few trumps; people with extraordinarily dumb luck but little talent otherwise.

You think he could bully his way into becoming president and dominating the republican party by sheer luck? Even if I wanted to I couldn't do it what he did and I doubt you could do it either.

you're right, the universe has deemed you and me to not be as extraordinarily lucky as trump.

i get that our primal belief in our own agency creates strong cognitive dissonance against the centrality of chance in our lives. it's almost as if evolutionarily, it doesn't matter to our egos that we often get the causality exactly backwards. esteem rises either way, even under false premises.

You sound pretty brilliant yourself . Mind sharing your achievements that would illustrate how much more talented and smart you are than Thiel?

thanks random internet person! in my infinite modesty however, i'll decline to boast about my many amazing and wonderful achievements. but y'know, just between you and me, i did once receive a canned award from my state senator AND my state congresscritter! with fake-signed certificate and everything! *puffed-chest*

notice that i'd made no reflexive or comparative claims. but comparatively speaking, thiel on a daily basis most assuredly looks at musk with full-on green-faced envy.

> thiel on a daily basis most assuredly looks at musk with full-on green-faced envy

How do you know?

> he does have a specific talent for manipulating the political systems and government coffers to enrich himself

That gave me Epstein-verse vibes.

Only that Epstein was probably more a tool of the political systems and governments than they were tools of his. Symbiotic, I guess, but only one person got suicided in a prison cell while the cameras happened to be offline the guards inattentive.

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