Interesting—-do you have a source for either of these statements?
The second one is pretty obvious, Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005.
With what we know of Peter Thiel I think the burden of proof is on you that he doesn't make use of the knowledge he has on specific network work effects of youtube.
Just like he installed Donald Trump with Facebook in the White House.
Maybe people are intimidated by his intelligence and contrarian stances?
Thiel's reasoning on one thing or another may be flawed, but he definitely doesn't work this way. And he has a ton of money. So that can make the back-of-bookers both irritated and resentful.