It seems like Silicon Valley is full of people who love espousing their noble ideas but got rich via (as Thiel admits) at best socially neutral things like Facebook and Paypal.<p>As for the anti-aging research: Fund the NIH. Basic science like that needed in aging research isn't going to come on a startup timescale. Thiel makes a big deal about encouraging people to leave universities, but the smartest PhD students are generally not the ones leaving academia.
Don't get me wrong, I really like Peter Thiel, but it's hard to consider him 'Libertarian', whilst selling advanced snooping software to the U.S. government.
I have to say, the writing style of this article is an immense time-waster. Even skimming it doesn't get to the point quickly because the history of Thiel (large in size but mostly unimportant) is inter-mixed with the ideas he's espousing (small in size but really the part we care about).<p>What ever happened to 'summary' then 'summary with more depth' then 'summary with even more depth'?