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Peter Thiel, renaissance man.
Suzie Katz via Flickr
It isn't easy to pinpoint exactly what Peter Thiel is most famous for. His interests range from the mundane (online payments) to the fringes of scientific thought (immortality and floating cities).
He co-founded PayPal and acted as its CEO before the company sold to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002.
Since then he launched the global hedge-fund Clarium Capital and the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm. He was Facebook's first outside investor, making him a billionaire when the company went public.
He is one of the most original, controversial thinkers in tech today.
On higher education: "University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it's not a consumption decision, it's an investment decision. Actually, no, it's a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties."
On responses to his "20 Under 20" Thiel Foundation drop-outs: "Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It’s like telling the world there’s no Santa Claus."
On the future: "Yes, a robotics revolution would basically have the effect of people losing their jobs, as you need fewer workers to do the same things, but it would have the benefit of freeing people up to do many other things."
On ideas: "There are still many large white spaces on the map of human knowledge. You can go discover them. So do it. Get out there and fill in the blank spaces. Every single moment is a possibility to go to these new places and explore them."
On progress: "People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology — all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is, why?"
On choosing who to fund: "As an investor-entrepreneur, I’ve always tried to be contrarian, to go against the crowd, to identify opportunities in places where people are not looking."
On where we're going: “It seems like we’ve not been thinking about the right issues for a long time. I actually think it is a big step just to ask the question ‘What does one need to do to make the U.S. a better place?’"
Jillian was most recently an enterprise technology editor based in San Francisco. She started at Insider as an intern on the technology desk in 2013 and rose to a senior reporter position, covering Alphabet, Facebook, and ecommerce. After three years at the site, she left to spend time freelance writing abroad, before taking reporting positions at CNBC and then at Forbes, where she covered Alphabet, Silicon Valley culture, and artificial intelligence. She returned to Insider in March 2020 and worked on the enterprise technology desk until August 2021. Jillian graduated from Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications with a degree in magazine journalism and information management and technology.
