Peter Thiel's Contrarian Strategy

&gt; Thiel has drawn upon his wide-ranging and idiosyncratic readings in philosophy, history, economics, anthropology, and culture to become perhaps America’s leading public intellectual today, assuming a mantle once held by the likes of Thorstein Veblen or Norman Mailer.<p>That&#x27;s a laughably preposterous characterization. Leading public intellectual? Comparison to Veblen, author of &quot;The Theory of the Leisure Class&quot;, a scathing critique of the wealthy?

&gt;He raised $1 million from friends and family and started his own hedge fund, Thiel Capital.<p>Hence the major difference between him and everyone else, including Stanford Alum, Sullivan &amp; Cromwell Lawyers...somehow he found himself $1M.<p>There is no way I or really most people, could go out today and from the people I know gather $1M I simply do not know people with those kinds of pockets.

Rough timeline of Peter Thiel&#x27;s accomplishments:<p>- Started his hedge fund at age 29<p>- Co-founded Paypal at 31<p>- Paypal acquired at 35 (Thiel took home $55M)<p>- Angel investment in Facebook at 37, co-founded Palantir the same year<p>- Founder&#x27;s Fund at age 38<p>Interesting that he&#x27;s had all of his big wins starting in his 30s, that each success compounded into more successes and enabled him to go up to bat for even bigger wins, and that it&#x27;s the result of 10+ years of hard work and intense focus.

Well, I can scratch him off my list of insightful individuals. I don&#x27;t know what it is with &quot;success&quot; but it seems to really mess with your mind. I wonder if it&#x27;s that certain types of &quot;successful&quot; people live in a bubble where everyone is agreeing, cajoling, and otherwise brown-nosing that you start losing touch with reality and cannot think clearly.<p>To say that a bubble cannot be a bubble because the &quot;broader public is not involved&quot; is just flat out stupid. Sure, it&#x27;s the last stage of a bubble, the defraud the general public stage where the crooks gather up all the money and run for the getaway car, but it&#x27;s still a bubble.

Is this excerpt from one of Peter Thiel&#x27;s lectures a cheap shot at his buddy Elon and Tesla?<p>&quot;Consider the automotive industry. Trying to build a car company in the 19th century was a bad idea. It was too early. But it’s far too late to build a traditional car company today. Car companies—some 300 of them, a few of which are still around—were built in 20th century. The time to build a car company was the time when car technology was being created—not before, and not after.&quot;

Has anyone read his CS183 class notes? Are they worth reading?

I think this is the first time I&#x27;ve heard his voice. Wow. The guy who played &quot;Peter Gregory&quot; in HBO&#x27;s Silicon Valley nailed his voice. lol.