Who's Afraid of Peter Thiel? A New Biography Suggests We All Should Be (2021)
time.com
time.com
Would you mind elaborating on why you'd call Palantir 'evil' in particular? I wouldn't exactly hold the company up a a role model of good corporate citizenship, but I also wouldn't put them down as particularly more 'evil' than your average multinational. Say, on a level with -- to pull an example not-quite-entirely out of thin air -- Airbus.
That being said, I feel like we need to be more nuanced when we discuss "intelligence", because I think that it can have a multifaceted definition and people have a wide array of skillets.
So I perhaps a better question would be something along the lines of "Intelligent in what way?"
God rewards those who are good, and punishes those who are bad. Therefore, if you're rich, its God rewarding you for being good, and if you're poor, God is punishing you. Therefore, we should help the rich, because they're good, and not help the poor, because they're bad.
It's not spelled out this explicitly, but this has very much become the philosophy of the right-wing Evangelicals, and a big part of why they love Trump. He's rich, so anything he does is good, and he's really punishing those wicked poor people.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something
I know they are portrayed as a cabal of woke leftists, but a third of them are veterans and they probably broadly reflect American professional demographics.
You could argue that many of the people voting Trump are also simultaneously ignoring a big chunk of politics and reality more generally I suppose, but it's not the standard meaning of ignoring politics.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/47...
If you opt out of the system, for the most part the system is not interested in you.
Opting out of the system, in this case, by living in a forest in Singapore, is not an option for most people.
People who are engaged in the system (by e.g. buying things, having jobs, raising a family) are touched by government policy every day.
Sure. They would also die whenever there was a famine, some disease ran rampant, Mongols or crusaders pillaged everything, some recent council decreed they were all heretics, etc.
https://metro.co.uk/2024/07/08/worlds-loneliest-man-lives-70...
Or the Lykov family.
Because what are you going to do about it? Say the same thing everyone else is saying? But a little different?
That doesn't make any sense. The small minority of people who are involved in politics affect politicians completely disproportionately to their number, and this is completely unrelated to whether they actually know what they're talking about or have reasonable concerns.
See e.g. throwing oil on famous paintings, or everything re Palestine in the past couple of years.
Protesting effectively is a skill which the present generation lacks. They don't even realize it's a skill issue. "Surely if we just care harder somebody will do something..!", they think, over and over. Doesn't make it so.
I will also tell the friends I made/lived with in NDDL that our action had no impact and that the airport is being built (given that a couple of them bought a house where the airport was supposed to be, they might not all believe me).
But yeah, to be neither sounds nice too!
The documentary gives the examples of Neocons's hyping up the threat about Islamic terrorism and Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction. It's really rather good.
I'm always wary of earnest calls for people to be scared. Scared people are scary.
The people abiding by the principle "strive for peace, prepare for war" are not "scary scared people" despite being very afraid of war on some level.
It’s working. 36% of eligible adults didn’t vote in 2024.
That allowed what we see happening today.
> When you combine the hostility to democracy and institutional norms with the bankroll of a billionaire you can potentially do some damage.
'Potentially'.
> That said, it’s not productive to be afraid.
Chalk this one up to clickbait to sell a book I guess?
Personally I feel like the false aura around wealthy people like Peter Thiel works to their favor and advantage. We all think they are these powerful scary incredibly smart people when they are actually slightly above average people who got lucky, and sometimes only got lucky once.
Peter Thiel would be a nobody if PayPal or Facebook failed, and there was always a high chance for those things to happen. He could just be the nobody guy who seeded $500,000 into Friendster instead of Facebook.
He earned $55 million from the PayPal sale and $1 billion from his Facebook sale. If you stick your money in an index fund it will double in value every 7 years (before adjusting for inflation). Do that for $55 million at the PayPal sale and you get $880 million, do that for his Facebook stock in 2012 and you end up with $4 billion.
So around $5 billion of his net worth can be attributed to hypothetical passive investment of his original windfalls, attributed to being at the right place at the right time with just two companies, and he would not have been able to invest in the second on without winning the lottery at the first. In other words, with 100% disposable income that could be gambled on moonshots (unlike our 401ks), he only beat the market by 15% per year.
Any idiot with a wealth manager and tolerance for risk can do that.
And we, the people, have lots of power over people like this if we exert it.
I think there are people who take big unlikely risks. Statistically some of them succeed. Now they are big risk takers with survivorship bias and illusions of self importance, AND lots power/money. And that can be scary.
I can’t risk my retirement nest egg.
If Peter Thiel ended PayPal with $55 million that means he could set aside ~$5-10 to live the rest of his life and risk the rest.
So really I would argue that having a risk-adjacent personality isn’t related to skill. Thiel was willing to throw half a million dollars at random tech startups done by college dropouts and he also had a social network of his own thanks to doing the same with PayPal.
So it’s about networking, capital, and timing more than skill.
Thiel would be a nobody if he was born 10 years later. Where is the PayPal-like opportunity in today’s tech landscape? The modern startup is wildly capital heavy and loses money for possibly decades (e.g., Lyft just made its first profit EVER in 2024).
What he's had is an army of internet bots pumping up his supposed credentials (visible even in the voting patterns here on YN)
In every instance, a lot of other people did all the work. Musk provided funds, which a machine could do.
And, he did fail. A lot. But the more money you have, the more you can fail.
Maybe for Peter (I don't know) but not for Musk. He did X/PayPal, but then blew everyone away with Tesla, crushed it with SpaceX, succeeds with Starlink...
Some people really do have something that is more than just getting lucky once.
He would not have the money to do so if PayPal failed.
Musk has gotten wildly lucky many times, like when he was "gifted" a factory by the federal government in the wake of the 2008 automotive crisis. If the 2008 financial crisis never happened Tesla would not be a mass market manufacturer today. In an alternate timeline GM/Toyota would still be building the Pontiac Vibe and Corolla Matrix in Fremont.
Musk has been hitching his businesses to government money ever since (SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Starlink) and I say that's a direct result of his astonishing success in getting cheap/free money for Tesla.
And you don't convince the government to buy your products so easily unless you have a success story like Tesla's government investment under your belt.
When you think about it this way his infiltration into the executive branch is a logical conclusion of his "genius" strategy. Now he can just tell the government to buy his products. It's the exact kind of thing that a middling manager with mediocre products would do rather than compete on quality and value.
Yeah, and then he took it over, and transformed it from a fledgling garage based company with near 0 market penetration into a serious competitor in the international automobile market, defying all the odds, keeping it alive when it should have gone bankrupt many times. I don't think a typical person who happens to have money is going to take on Ford, GM, Toyota and win the early EV game.
I don't doubt that he has gotten wildly lucky many times, but I do doubt that there isn't something special there. I could get lucky many times...I'm not taking over industries beating Toyota, beating NASA, no matter how lucky I am. I don't have the vision, I don't have the drive, I don't have the obsessive focus that is sometimes necessary, I don't have the capital allocation skill, etc.
If the US government didn’t enable Tesla in the way it did, it would still be a garage company regardless of how good of a manager Elon was.
I think it should also be explained why Elon is suddenly an objectively horrendous manager by the metrics of his own quarterly reports. Did he get hit in the head sometime recently? Does he have long covid? Why are Tesla sales declining by double digits when other brands and the EV market as a whole is growing rapidly? Why is Twitter’s advertising revenue and active user count (allegedly, it’s a private company) in rapid decline when neither was true before it was taken private? Has the Boring company delivered any successful projects? Why is xAI behind all of its competitors? Why is Starlink losing its 100 million dollar contract with Canada? Why did Elon invite 100% tariffs on his vehicles to Canada? If I were an investor I would be furious. The questions are piling up.
My hypothesis is that his companies are not doing so well as of late because he was never a particularly gifted leader, and he’s letting his own hubris cloud his judgment.
A most basically informed manager who just graduated with an MBA from a low-tier public university would know not to take public political stances that alienate their main customer base. Imagine if the CEO of Ford was walking around telling the press that people who buy big lifted trucks have small penises. That’s exactly what Elon has been doing with his electric vehicle brand.
LeBron James isn’t the greatest basketball player of all time because he was good for a few years. He’s the greatest player of all time because he’s consistently good. If you had to pick one draft pick that you were stuck with for the next 10+ years he would be the unanimous pick.
If Elon was only good at managing companies for ~10 years that just doesn’t establish much of a trend, and points directly to my hypothesis that he got a lucky break and was successful in spite of his own poor instincts and judgment.
And if GM didn't receive a massive 50+ billion dollar bailout in 2008 it wouldn't exist now (new legal entity or not). Plenty of companies get government assistance. I don't think it diminishes Elon compared to say, the multiple GM CEOs around the time of the crash.
> I think it should also be explained why Elon is suddenly an objectively horrendous manager ... why ... why ... why
His priorities seem to have shifted from company to politics. I think he's letting his own hubris cloud his judgment as well. And he is into something else now. He definitely doesn't seem to be as focused on company performance anymore.
> Imagine if the CEO of Ford was walking around telling the press that people who buy big lifted trucks have small penises. That’s exactly what Elon has been doing with his electric vehicle brand.
That's a pretty direct insult to the primary customer base. What exactly are you talking about here? Did Elon say Teslas are not green and that people who buy Teslas are virtue signalling sycophants?
> If Elon was only good at managing companies for ~10 years that just doesn’t establish much of a trend, and points directly to my hypothesis that he got a lucky break and was successful in spite of his own poor instincts and judgment.
We're talking 15 years since he took Tesla public and it took him over a year to get it there. It peaked late last year. And isn't Grok 3 competitive against GPT-4.5? Anyway, I don't think you get lucky for 15 years across multiple industries. I think what's more likely is maybe you start to go through something and it hurts your performance. Elon seems to have lost his way. But if he were to decide to take on some other industry and seems really motivated (and steps away from politics), I wouldn't bet against him.
While ATVM was known for other automotive startup failures it also led to the Nissan Leaf thanks to the battery plant in Tennessee, and it led to Ford’s EV and hybrid programs along with a turnaround. Most of the more established recipients of funding came out with positive results, and that includes Tesla, which was much further along than other smaller startups who received the loans. They got to develop the Model S on the cheap.
I disagree that success in multiple industries is meaningful. My 401k is successful in every industry. Big whoop. Again, Elon’s companies with few exceptions all have a commonality of government contracts/assistance which all stems from Tesla’s unexpected success giving him a positive relationship with the government. Networking and capital, not strength of management. Survivorship bias, not excellence in management.
He has never proved himself at turning around struggling companies like so many storied managers that I read about in business school, e.g., Steve Jobs. His most recent “turnaround story” is Twitter, buying a company and making it smaller while building the conditions for competitors to pick up marketshare (Threads, BlueSky, Reddit’s IPO and traffic explosion, and up next is Digg).
Grok isn’t competitive with OpenAI because their revenue and customer list is a fraction of the size. They are squarely behind Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI.
He did not found Tesla, and arguably the company took a downturn since his takeover. Cars became unreliable and ugly (cybertruck...), and now that people are starting to associate the brand with Musk's terrible public image, sales are going down fast. The only positive was this irrationally inflated stock due to his cult following in the investor class.
SpaceX is cool but received a lot of money from tax payers in the form of government contracts. And let's not mention The Boring Company, Hyperloop, Neuralink...
That's the odd things with odds, with this many people on Earth, one of them was bound to get to the very top. And you don't get to the very top by working 100000x more, you get there by starting a millionaire and taking insane risks, then getting insanely lucky many times.
* The first one, not Twitter. Although there's a story here too.
I feel sorry for anyone who worships people like Musk or Theil. Sure Theil was supposedly a talented chess player in his youth, did well in school etc. But so do millions of other kids. These dudes don't have so much money because they are intelligent, they have so much money because they are willing to do damn near anything to get it - including trampling over people that helped them in the first place
I assumed he was a fairly clever libertarian/contrarian, who'd made it big. I then read this https://www.ft.com/content/a46cb128-1f74-4621-ab0b-242a76583... (his op ed in the FT)
Where I realised he's just a dipshit. He's obviously reads about history, but the reek of 4chan level "media conspiracy" overpowers it. The constant littering of references to vaguely related historical words is pointless, and I'm not sure who its meant to impress.
This drowns out some of the big points he's trying to get across in the piece.
The biggest red herring is the assumption that "Distributed Idea Suppression Complex" is a thing separate from society, run by shadowy cabals.
Its really not, its just society. That's how humans organise. You have a shared narrative and so long as you're within a certain percentage of it, you'll not get ostracised.
Its cute that he still appears to think, with all his business experience that a shadowy cabal can be that well organised, effective and powerful without leaking. Just look at white house now, the exec is leaking like a fucking sieve.
All of that may or may not be true, but the wrinkle not addressed is the vibes between Musk and Thiel.
Anyone whose only reason for believing there was waste was because a talking head told them there was, sure.
[1] - https://www.inc.com/bruce-crumley/doge-cost-cuts-zero-in-on-...
2) Presumably not all of that was waste? Like screw consulting firms but presumably at least more-than-$0 of that is non-waste, and probably a fair amount of it.
3) Other sources make it clear some amount of the $65 billion is spread over multiple years (unclear exactly how it breaks down)
4) That’s the spending with the top-10 consulting firms across a large set of agencies? I’d have guessed it was higher.
Which, to me, intuitively makes sense. More hops is more complexity is more friction is less efficiency.
A decade ago, palantir was competing to win a contract for a system to compete directly with DCGS-A
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Common_Ground_Sy...
Read through this and it certainly paints a picture of our government spending a lot of money on a legacy tool that was less efficient. The army was trying to convert a system from 1991 to be “as easy to use as an iPad”. And the biggest complaint about palantir as a competitor is that is was “not sufficiently funded” to support a broader role.
Take a step back and I just don’t see how the Army can be expected to bring the UX of an iPad to the battlefield. That would be like asking Apple to send their SWEs to the trenches.
Would you like to make a guess now on how much will ultimately be saved by DOGE?
Lonsdale comes off as a ‘yes’ man for the wagon he’s hitched his fortunes to.
When in doubt, he’ll suggest tons of fraud, but offer no substance, and Sorkin just lets his guests speak.
If you think things are bad now and headed towards disaster over next few years, imagine an even worse puppet sitting only a heartbeat away.
I remember the first time I heard someone say they thought there shouldn't be Billionaires, we shouldn't even allow there to be Billionaires my Capitalist mind reeled, "Say wut?"
And then I started watching the world careen further out of control and could see that in fact the problem might just be wielding of financial power that really is the root of the problem.
We waited until the ultra-wealthy figured out how to weaponize their power against us. It may be too late. But we have to reduce the wealth gap as a priority step to fixing democracy.
It doesn't happen because the elected government doesn't want to. In the USSR, it would have happened, but such politics didn't work well in the end. The current system that allows billionaires is not perfect, but unless shown otherwise, it is the least bad.
Some of us wouldn't mind at least going back to before (so called) Citizens United.
Billionaires go radically apoplectic and turn into propagandistic freaks when the US government is simply not reducing their taxes fast enough. I actually think most people don't want this massive wealth gap, but we're reaching the point where it's impossible for the will of the people to find expression in our government, especially now that the billionaires are literally running the joint.
We have billionaires but not because we desperately try to lure such piece of scheize like thiel, they come or don't leave because they want all it offers and know when to shut up and respect rules just like effin' everybody else. And they are well taxed btw, wealth tax is here, pretty real albeit not crushing and not something introduced recently.
Things can be done, well within framework of typical western democracy, people just need to get down from their hyped egos that 'their way' is the best way bar none. Emotional discussions vs rational ones.
You're skipping over the point of why they don't want to seize the billionaire his assets: because a billionaire is a valuable ally to a politician seeking to stay in power. In fact, a billionaire is more valuable to a politician than his actual constituents. And that's how we get oligarchs.
In case anyone hasn't read it yet, I highly recommend you read his (short) Q42024 letter to the Palantir shareholders: https://www.palantir.com/q4-2024-letter/en/
It starts with typical SV hype, but by the end he espouses Samuel Huntington's theory that the world will soon fall into a vicious race war, and that the White ("western") World--the US, the white-majority Commonwealth states, and Western & Central Europe--should strike first to assure its dominance. Our enemies in this war will supposedly be primarily 2) team Every-Muslim-Country ("civilizational conflicts are particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims") and 3) team China+Korea, but there's also six other races ("civilizations") in the mix: 4) Latin America, 5) Sub-Saharan Africa (minus South Africa), 6) Russia+West Asia+Eastern Europe, 7) Southeast Asia, 8) Japan, and 9) India.
I know it sounds like I'm being absurdly hyperbolic, but... well, lets just say I'm afraid of Peter Thiel:
As Samuel Huntington has written, the rise of the West was not made possible “by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion . . . but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.” He continued: “Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”
And your reading of this letter, and Huntington's theory of the clash of civilizations, is absurdly alarmist and misleading. I'm not saying Huntington was correct but he's not some fringe far-right nutjob hoping for a "vicious race war".
My point of view is that these large entities seem and have the power to pretend that they are efficient. In the long run, as with all monolithic structures (think large cities, geographically large countries, large monolithic software projects), the inefficiencies start tearing them at the seams, each in different ways.
Ultimately, if large megastructures were the most efficient, then humanity should strive for a single country (or a corporation) to run the whole humanity but that's never the case - never was, never will be.
And that's tightly related to your argument that billionaires should not exist. As another commenter pointed out, it's difficult to calculate the wealth of a person. Therefore, we should make it easy. Is your cash and your assets worth over X amount? If so, choose which ones to transfer to public national escrow during the upcoming fiscal year. It's not perfect, and I am sure clever lawmakers could come up with more nuanced and fair approaches, but it's better than the current state.
The wealth of billionaires is mostly in things like company ownership. Imagine for a minute that Musk could somehow made be worth only $1M. He's still where he is, he just doesn't have billions worth of shares to sell.
Does that solve any problems?
I don't think that it solves much, no. He might not have billions' worth himself anymore, but he's still in control of huge companies. So rather than giving millions as direct political donations he could do things like hiring people as a favor or promising to build a factory here or there. His ability to wield political influence wouldn't change much it'd just take a bit more work.
So I think "no billionaires" isn't nearly enough, you need to somehow transition to some system where there can't be a person (or just a few) on top of a multi-billion company.
Also, at least in the US, it's the side that spent a lot less money that won. Just like in 2016.
Besides, having money is only one form of influence. One might also have influence from a massive federal bureaucracy, legacy media, Hollywood, academia, workers' unions, and other places.
I'm sorry, which side purchased Twitter?
We may instate rules to prevent such buying. No problem, undo the rules because undoing rules can be bought because everything can be bought.
Look at something like Citizens United. Does anyone want that outcome? Not really. A few, very rich, people want that outcome. And so it is made. How we got there is unclear. What is clear, in my mind, is that the benefactors made it happen.
> [Americans] want us to end a corrupt campaign finance system, which allows a handful of billionaires to buy elections. It is beyond crazy that someone like Elon Musk can contribute over $270 million to help get Trump elected and then gets to run the government.
> It is absurd that any Member of Congress who stands up to Netanyahu’s brutal war in Gaza can expect to be opposed by millions of dollars in campaign contributions from AIPAC.
> [Americans] want us to end the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision and move to the public funding of elections. Democracy is supposed to be about one person, one vote – not billionaires buying the political candidates of their choice.
https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/prepared-remar...
Regardless of your feelings about Elon, what would the strategic implications for the US vs Russia and China be minus SpaceX?
SpaceX can exist solely because of the way our system is set up to reward founders with large amounts of capital. The same goes for large portions of our economy- the same parts that have kept the US financially afloat vs the rest of the world and provide massive funding to states like California to support their progressive policies.
Imagine California without Silicon Valley and you imagine it without billionaires.
While there is probably correlation to things like intelligence and effort, it is guaranteed to be weak at the extreme tails of the distribution. Perhaps you are much more likely to be intelligent if you are ultra wealthy, but not significantly more than intelligent people of average income. Perhaps you put in more effort than an average person, but there are physical and temporal limitations than place a hard upper bound.
Success is much more correlated with what situation you are born into, what advantages you have, who your personal connections are, timing and ultimately luck.
It’s not all that unlike an investor who has repeated success, writes a book, becomes famous for being a “good investor” only to find out they can’t repeat their success. It’s just statistics to a point.
Historical counterfactual suggests that if a company like SpaceX, competition pressures would likely have driven similar innovation. Blue Origin might be a more dominant player, for instance.
I’m sure this is all very hard to believe if you are a person of great success.
Billionaires are not a fact of nature, they exist because the rules we have created allows them to exist. Different rules could make them not exist, and society would benefit hugely.
> Regardless of your feelings about Elon, what would the strategic implications for the US vs Russia and China be minus SpaceX?
Weird to think of everything in the view of great power competition. Like, you can't have healthcare cause spaceX needs to beat China? There are many options.
I don’t give a rat. I don’t need or want America to be the numba one nation ever. Doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather the USA take care of its citizens.
> Imagine California without Silicon Valley and you imagine it without billionaires.
This sounds like heaven.
I would wager most of what you take for granted out of "Silicon Valley" started as fundamental or applied research funded by a government. The current generation of AI hype certainly did.
How many Silicon Valley made billionaires required Silicon Valley billionaires to come into existence? I remember a valley where billionaires really didn't make themselves known other Ellison being and asshole and flying into SJO past sound restriction and things like the Monterey Aquarium.
I think 'controlled opposition' is one of the ideas that conspiracy theorists tend to go overboard with. I sometimes wonder if maybe it is itself a narrative which exists to try to discredit any potential real opposition to make them seem fake and keep people down. We get deep into the tangled weeds of uncertainty here.
It's about power and control to them. They are actively against freedom and liberty.
These billionaires and corporations have long been a threat to the U.S. China actually recognizes this and does not allow billionaires and corporations to dictate.
They want a kind of feudalism where everyone is "free" to choose whichever Lord to serve, exchanging their life for whatever liberty and resources the Lord deems them worthy of.
Don't like Lord Musk's policy of prima nocta? You are free to pack up all your shit and travel (with proper papers, of course) to the court of Lord Bezos... assuming they are not currently in conflict, otherwise you could be turned away as a traitor or otherwise made an example of.
Most people think, and I tentatively agree, that democracy was the best way to achieve liberal outcomes. However, overall they are in tension. You can see it in the endless 1st amendment cases over the centuries - people really, really want to limit all kinds of speech by the power of the majority, but there's an absolutist undemocratic rule usually preventing them from doing so.
I think on the net classical liberalism (esp. free speech and markets) are more important than democracy. I don't think there's enough tension between them to ditch democracy completely, I guess thiel disagrees. But he's not a coward or a hypocrite, he said so explicitly and openly.
Pretty sure that is where Libertarianism always ends up. I think you want Utopianism.
That said, I do think fear is unproductive.
'Freedom' from the likes of Peter Thiel is best understood as "I should be allowed to do what I want". On the surface, it's silly and lame: Adam Something, a vlogger, did a great video demonstrating how Elon's driverless pod concept could never work in the real world. So it's easy to dismiss as rich people being stupid, but what we're seeing emerge here, is something much darker and far more sinister.
Money amplifies speech, reach and political power, and so one's freedom is commensurate with their wealth. Combine that with how big business and private equity have switched to basically strip-mining the middle class through rent-seeking, and we are looking at a future of fascist billionaire feral elites ruling over everyone else as serfs.
Peter Thiel is a key supporter of the 'Dark Enlightenment' intellectual movement: a metastasis of the alt-Right into an overly White-supremacist, elitist neo-reactionary movement, and they are getting serious traction everywhere.
Be afraid. I am.
That explains how the US lost its democracy.
And speaking of billionaires, why no complaints about Soros? The intellectual dishonestly is astounding. Soros has literally bought scores of radio stations, bought off district attorneys around the U.S., and Gates is doing vaccine experiments in ultra poor countries where oversight is minimal to non-existent. Pfizer did the same thing with drug trials in places where people can’t sue.
Gates even wants to release genetically modified mosquitos — without the consent of the people who live in the proposed areas. How about Laurene Jobs’s ownership of The Atlantic and the influence she has attempted to buy with her billions? What about the Clinton Foundation’s malfeasance in Haiti (among other places?)
But sure, let’s have another article complaining about Theil and by extension, Musk.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-9-2022-00294...
https://socialism.com/fs-article/the-robber-baron-as-lord-bo...
Can you explain this?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-we-knowand-dont-knowabo...
Good PR and philanthropy goes a long way.
For why, unfortunately most people see the philanthropy model as a generous fixing of problems instead of what it actually is: admitting our systems are so flawed that they must be propped up by these "kind" acts of "giving back."
Nick Denton is a terrible person in my opinion; a gossip columnist and the things he often published were pure trash. Anti-semantic drivel, outing people against their will, and other salacious click-farming nonsense. Let’s not forget that Gawker lost a jury trial and the verdict bankrupted him. That Peter helped fund the case doesn’t change that the jury found Gawker liable. Gawker’s actions caused their demise. If you want to play with gossip and attempt to destroy people, you have to be prepared to suffer the legal consequences when the targets seek legal recourse. Blaming Peter for the destruction of Gawker is ridiculous — Gawker did the thing and the thing had consequences.
As far as the article claiming that Peter Theil’s philosophy borders on fascism — that’s complete nonsense. Libertarianism is the opposite of fascism. Suppressing free speech, forcing businesses to close — all of the Biden era Covid policies — that’s fascism. Remember the days when we couldn’t talk about vaccine injuries? Or the times when scientific journals scrubbed articles that contradicted the prevailing directives on masks? Specifically articles published with flu studies that showed surgical masks as ineffective. One day, the articles were there, the next day, those articles seemingly disappeared aside from within the print versions which are harder to scrub for obvious reasons. Remember the social media bans for even expressing skepticism about mRNA covid shots? How about sharing opinions on the lab leak theory? What about the Santa Monica surfer who was arrested for surfing in the ocean with nobody within a half mile of him? That’s faciscm.
Fauci was unelected yet wielded incredible power, Sara Cody in Santa Clara county — also unelected yet had the sweeping power to shut down everything in her county during Covid. I never voted for her. Yet she had the singular, unaccountable power to destroy businesses and destroy children’s education. Covid-America was almost pure fascism, yet nobody on the left wants to have that conversation. People complain about Elon being “unelected,” while forgetting that Sara Cody shut down an entire region — including private businesses and schools.
Reducing the size and scope of government is not fascism. Using lawfare to go after political enemies is fascism. People are attempting to redefine words such as fascism in order to make their political opponents look scary, but ironically the real fascists are the ones calling everyone else fascist.
In much the same way as communism is the opposite of fascism and nazism. Yet their methods and outcomes are remarkably similar.
However I would say that anarcho-capitalism (i.e. what people like Thiel actually mean by “libertarianism”) is not that dissimilar from fascism.
> Reducing the size and scope of government is not fascism
It’s not. Replacing it with unaccountable mega-corporations controlled by megalomaniacal oligarchs. Well, that’s something else.
Anyway IMHO arguing about semantics i.e. are Musc & co. actually literally “fascists” or only figuratively is counter-productive. We should focus more on their goals and the tools they are using to achieve them.
> Fauci was unelected > Elon being “unelected,”
That justifies Musk/DOGE in what way exactly? I really don’t get this perspective, “the other was dishonest and/or made major mistakes so we get to lie through our teeth as well”? Fauci was a dishonest liar (or whatever) so we can use extreme falsehoods to justify our actions too? Really?
How more hypocritical can you get? I mean I do get that you might have valid and justifiable views but is dishonest demagoguery really the vehicle you want to use to share them? Why?
> to have that conversation
Perhaps. Doubling down on “fascism” (literal or figurative) does not seem like the best solution?
And words have meaning. If people don’t mean fascism, then they should say what they mean, but fascism is a convenient term because it invokes Mussolini, Franco, and Hitler in ways to imply that Theil is an aspiring Mussolini, Franco, or Hitler. Which is complete nonsense.
Fauci was a civil servant and also an appointed official advisor to the president.
It has been completely standard for presidential advisors to wield significant political power for decades just think of Kissinger, Brzezibski, Scowcroft, Rice, Rove etc. (for better or for worse, my point is just that Fauci wasn’t somehow particularly unique or special).
These are official positions in the Executive Office of the President.
Musk is just some random guy who is seemingly allowed to do whatever he wants. I won’t comment on what impact Fauci’s recommendations might have had. However as far as we can tell he had significantly less direct power than Musk has currently (despite not holding any office, he’s basically a private consultant..)
> If people don’t mean fascism, then they should say what they mean
Perhaps. Being only partially accurate is arguably still much better than continuously and obviously lying all the time and misrepresenting objective facts (like Musk or Trump).