People’s motive’s have nothing to do with whether or not what they are saying is true or false. They are either speaking truth or not. Motives can explain WHY they are saying something untrue. But not IF what they are saying is untrue.
You are saying that Thiel has a reason to lie. But you aren’t addressing whether or not he is actually lying. Instead of attacking what he said, you are attacking him.
I don't understand. Supposedly Thiel "claimed that Google was unpatriotic for dropping the government project Maven" - why are we talking about truthiness? How is this a provable statement?
If someone without his proposed motives had made the same statement, the statement wouldn’t be more or less true.
However Thiel has a vested interest in making Google look worse. They're a competitor.
He wants to say that Google is no longer innovating and then uses a thin excuse to validate his claim. And we're supposed to trust his reasoning. But all he's really done is back-fitted a reason to his conclusion. He wants to believe that Google is no longer innovating, so he picked something Google is already doing and claims that that is evidence.
The first step would be to define "innovation" in a way all relevant parties can agree upon. Then we need to agree on the things Google has done that would qualify as innovation. Then we can plot how much innovation they've done then compared to now.