Peter Thiel Quotes
There's absolutely no bubble in technology.
This quotation illustrates on how even recent history can be perceived differently depending on one’s philosophy and world view. In America, we tend to minimize the government’s role in important innovation and great leaps forward. Many people from Communist or Socialist cultures, tend to minimize the role of private enterprise. For example in the case of the Internet, it is true that all the initial R&D was funded by DARPA, a unit of the Defense Department. And it is also true that the World Wide Web innovation and development was done and paid for by CERN a scientific consortium of European Governments. However, the total amount of those two government expenditures would not equal Microsoft’s R&D budget for 1 day. Most of the developmental capital came from the private sector and the people who did most of the innovative work were private sector employees. However, there would have been many years delay if the U. S. Government had not funded the first small but critical activity. The government sector provides a very large proportion of the sales income for Microsoft, Apple, Intel and the many other Silicon Valley firms, not with contracts for innovation but as buyers of their hardware and software. There are government contracts but those applications are specialized for the government and are a small fraction of the revenue received by Silicon Valley.
Peter Andreas Thiel is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. A co-founder of PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, he was the first outside investor in Facebook. He was ranked No. 4 on the Forbes Midas List of 2014, with a net worth of $2.2 billion, and No. 391 on the Forbes 400 in 2020, with a net worth of $2.1 billion. In 2016, Thiel confirmed that he had funded Hulk Hogan in the Bollea v. Gawker lawsuit because Gawker had previously outed him as gay. The lawsuit eventually bankrupted Gawker.
