New York (HedgeCo.net) – In the upcoming issue of The New Yorker, writer George Packer profiles hedge fund and venture-capital\u00a0entrepreneur Peter Thiel. The article \u201cNo Death, No Taxes\u201d comes out on November 28th.<\/p>\n
His venture-capital firm, Founders Fund, has an online manifesto about the future that begins with a complaint: \u201cWe wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.\u201d Thiel believes that this failure of imagination explains many of the country\u2019s problems\u2014from the collapse in manufacturing to wage stagnation to the swelling of the financial sector. As he puts it, \u201cYou have dizzying change where there\u2019s no progress.\u201d<\/p>\n
His hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management, \u201cbecame one of the meteors of the hedge-fund world,\u201d Packer writes.<\/p>\n
Thiel also founded PayPal, which he and his partners sold to eBay for $1.5 billion, he\u00a0also gave Mark Zuckerberg a half-million-dollar loan, the first outside investment in Facebook, in the summer of 2004\u2014a loan that Thiel later converted into a seven-per-cent ownership stake and a seat on the board.<\/p>\n
Packer writes, \u201cThe information age has made Thiel rich, but it has also been a disappointment to him.” The creation of virtual worlds turns out to be no substitute for advances in the physical world.\u201d \u201cThe Internet\u2014I think it\u2019s a net plus, but not a big one,\u201d Thiel tells Packer.<\/p>\n
Twitter has a lot of users, but it doesn\u2019t employ that many Americans: \u201cFive hundred people will have job security for the next decade, but how much value does it create for the entire economy?\u201d Thiel\u2019s questioning of the Internet\u2019s significance does not, however, come from an indifference to technology.\u00a0\u201cHe\u2019s enraptured with it,\u201d Packer writes. \u201cIndeed, his main lament is that America… has lost its belief in the future. Thiel thinks that Americans who are beguiled by mere gadgetry have forgotten how expansive technological change can be.\u201d<\/p>\n
He believes that education is the next bubble in the U.S. economy, and dislikes the idea of using college to find an intellectual focus; above all, because \u201ca college education teaches nothing about entrepreneurship,\u201d Packer writes. \u201cThiel thinks that young people\u2014especially the most talented ones\u2014should establish a plan for their lives early, and he favors one plan in particular: starting a technology company.\u201d<\/p>\n
Last September, Thiel and Luke Nosek\u2014Thiel\u2019s friend and a partner at Founders Fund\u2014came up with the idea of giving hundred-thousand-dollar fellowships to brilliant young people who would leave college and launch their own startups. The Thiel Fellowships \u201cwould help ambitious young talents change the world before they could be numbed by the establishment,\u201d Packer writes.<\/p>\n
Thiel has also poured money into futuristic projects such as artificial intelligence, space travel, life extension, and seasteading\u2014the establishment of floating city-states on the high seas.\u00a0He says, however, that even though he ideologically believes \u201cthat it\u2019s unhealthy if society is totalitarian or dominates everything, if I had been libertarian in the most narrow, Ayn Rand-type way, I would never have invested in Facebook.\u201d<\/p>\n
He hasn\u2019t backed a Presidential candidate for 2012 yet; he is spending his time and money building \u201cthe machinery of freedom\u201d outside politics, so that, Packer writes, \u201ctechnology will win the race.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thiel tells Packer that he is \u201cweirdly hopeful…… There is a very cathartic crisis that\u2019s gone on, and it\u2019s not clear where it\u2019s going to go. But at least everyone knows things are rotten. We\u2019re in a much better place than when things were rotten and everyone thought things were great.\u201d<\/p>\n
Editing by Alex Akesson New York (HedgeCo.net) – In the upcoming issue of The New Yorker, writer George Packer profiles hedge fund and venture-capital\u00a0entrepreneur Peter Thiel. The article \u201cNo Death, No Taxes\u201d comes out on November 28th. His venture-capital firm, Founders Fund, has an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,3,16023],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activist-funds","category-hedgeco-news","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26134"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55686,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26134\/revisions\/55686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgeco.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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