The weirdness comes from the intersection of believing/espousing in the possibility and necessity of A, while also negating A. I'm not necessarily that annoyed by the straightforward hypocrisy. Everyone does that kind of thing. But once you start evangelising for A... either shut up about it or embody it. There's a difference between the minister moonlighting as a stripper, and a parishioner doing it.
Peter Thiel's a particularly onerous example. He's all talk about Bits & Atoms, objectivist ideals of productive billionaire industrialism. His post paypal investments are in: (1) fintech (2) paper trading (3) social media (4) data analytics for governments. He doesn't seem to have invested anything in "atoms" at all.
Hell, Peter Thiel is himself one of the clearest negations of the claim that billionaires and bankers perform the necessary and crucial function of capital allocation. None of Thiel's investments are in capital constrained businesses at all. There aren't really any investments one can point that lead to something happening which wouldn't have without him or his money. I suppose Palantir wouldn't exist, but I don't think that affects much.
> He doesn't seem to have invested anything in "atoms" at all
What are you talking about?
Just from their website (https://foundersfund.com/portfolio/) Founders Fund invested in SpaceX, Anduril, Varda Space, DeepMind, Synthego, 8Sleep, Oculus and ScaleAI, every single of which are deep tech startups.
Hell, the only other VC that have kept pace with that level of 'Atoms' investing is Khosla Ventures and Lux Capital.
Scale. How much, relative to the whole is (a) Thiel's contribution to this fund (b) the portion of the fund's investments which live up to above ideals.
Also.. IDK that even the best are examples of investments living up to the ideals Thiel projects.
Oculus is/was interesting, sure. It's hardware, but still pretty far from factories ports and "atoms". It also flipped to FB and is now a foundation stone for the Meta project.
Besides, "friends with Elon" there's not much there there.
I'm not saying he's a bad investor or that these are bad companies, but it's all pretty standard fare. Potential for fire "moat" in emerging industry, and minimal need for hard capital investment by the primary growth phase. He's trying to get a piece of the next Zuck. That's all.
The weirdness comes from the intersection of believing/espousing in the possibility and necessity of A, while also negating A. I'm not necessarily that annoyed by the straightforward hypocrisy. Everyone does that kind of thing. But once you start evangelising for A... either shut up about it or embody it. There's a difference between the minister moonlighting as a stripper, and a parishioner doing it.
Peter Thiel's a particularly onerous example. He's all talk about Bits & Atoms, objectivist ideals of productive billionaire industrialism. His post paypal investments are in: (1) fintech (2) paper trading (3) social media (4) data analytics for governments. He doesn't seem to have invested anything in "atoms" at all.
Hell, Peter Thiel is himself one of the clearest negations of the claim that billionaires and bankers perform the necessary and crucial function of capital allocation. None of Thiel's investments are in capital constrained businesses at all. There aren't really any investments one can point that lead to something happening which wouldn't have without him or his money. I suppose Palantir wouldn't exist, but I don't think that affects much.