This article seems to posit that Peter Thiel, David Sacks, Keith Rabois are somehow "moving to the right," which kind of ignores the history of the three of them all the way back to their Stanford days when they were already extreme rightwing trolls from basically the start.
This story is fun:
"He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy"
“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator”
Rabois was reprimanded for standing outside a gay professor's home wishing that he died of AIDS -- allegedly due to his love of free speech. They've honestly not changed or grown at all.
This episode was even more disturbing, to me anyway, when I learned that Rabois is a gay man who came of age in the 80s. Nobody should act like this and harass people at home, but it's esp callous for a gay man to wish this on a person.
He is depraved.
I mean, the pop psych temptation is to say he was working something out, but every other indication, including every time I met him, just suggest he’s an awful human being.
"Peter Thiel and his merry band of shitheel fellow travelers are moving to the right!" is the sort of technically-correct-but-functionally-pointless analysis I love
Bonus points for the unflattering pic, though, like he just ate a piece of bad prosciutto
There's a strong reluctance to draw obvious but unflattering conclusions about powerful people.
Donald Trump is - quite straightforwardly - an idiot. Elon Musk is a right-wing bigot. Clarence Thomas is grossly corrupt. But to write a story you have to dance around it.
Thiel, of course, is the co-founder of one of the most profitable "surveillance capitalism" firms in the world...and I don't think one can claim to be a libertarian and simultaneously be a corporate ally and beneficiary of the Surveillance State. But perhaps I'm too judgy.
Also, please remember that Peter Thiel is “married to a man” from Goldman Sachs and also has a surrogate daughter.
Who in the midterm elections donated $140 million to Republican big lie candidates in #Ohio and Arizona. JD Vance.
So great that he made a fortune in the collapse of silicon bank 🤡
I enjoyed his "wrong. i know more about residential real estate that probably any one person in the US."
Especially given that this was a discussion about how everyone was leaving SF (and it was recently reported that Keith himself has quietly moved back)
That is incredible because that's the whole problem with these guys, they rolled three 7s in a row one time and it made them think they are geniuses across all domains
I remember going to a talk on Bay Area housing about a decade ago where Rabois was one of the speakers. I asked him a simple question in the Q&A and the dancing he did to avoid answering it erased any chance of my taking his opinion seriously.
That's a random distribution that has all of its weight on one result.
At the risk of being pedantic.
People often take "random" to mean "uniform distribution," but it doesn't.
There was a brief moment of time the tech industry was sucking up to the Obama admin, only it was mostly a "not get in the way of innovation" deal, but so much of the press still used to show how SF/SV is a liberal wonderland, not a "libertarian" hellscape.
