Peter Thiel is a geek's favorite billionaire. Thiel, the German-born entrepreneur who, with Elon Musk, co-founded PayPal in the 90s, has spent the last decade mobilizing his billions in the service of genuinely visionary, often sci-fi-ish projects. (He has also financed at least one really bone-headed stunt. Sorry, Peter.) He was, famously, Facebook's angel investor, and he is the greatest patron of Patri Friedman's SeaSteading Institute. He's the lead backer of the Singularity Institute, and has recently dumped considerable capital into Musk's space exploration firm, SpaceX.

We at the JREF like Thiel primarily because he's so audacious. Sure, the SeaSteading project is likely a dead end – but what if it's not? Yes, Singularity studies may not bear fruit in the near-term – but what if they do? Reasonable people from all walks of life think privatized space travel is a terrible idea. But what if they're wrong? Thiel takes big risks with possibly enormous payoffs – payoffs for himself, personally, but also for the world in general. To us, this is a sign of nigh-heroic chutzpah. 

According to Slate's Jacob Weisberg, it is a sign that Thiel is an intellectual midget.  

In a Slate column of really staggering meanness (which also appears verbatim in Newsweek magazine), Weisberg deploys cheap pejoratives to denounce Thiel as a cash-crazy Babylonian. Thiel's well-documented libertarianism is “uninteresting” and “puerile.” His futurism is “fantasy.” His approach to entrepreneurship exemplifies the “ugly side of Silicon Valley politics.” Incredibly, Weisberg crams all of these insults into a single sentence.  

Elsewhere, Weisberg happily employs some of the more subtle dirty tricks of the journalism biz. Early in the story, he takes his subject's words (Thiel's assertion that giving American women the vote in the 1920s made laissez faire capitalism impossible) and spins them into strawmen (by suggesting that Thiel is against women's suffrage). Two paragraphs later, he includes a trivial detail of one of Thiel's associates (Patri Friedman wears pajamas!) to trivialize that associate's entire cause (Friedman's SeaSteading project is characterized as “the most elaborate effort ever devised by a group of computer nerds to get invited to an orgy”). Such distortions sacrifice serious debate at the altar of snappy writing, as Weisberg surely knows.  

Weisberg would have us believe that, at least at the moment, his real gripe with Thiel has nothing to do with politics or with Thiel's chosen associates, but with the project recently rolled out by Thiel's Clarium Capital. Clarium is now accepting applications from students who don't want to wait to receive their BA's before becoming entrepreneurs. They want to start now. Come the end of the year, Clarium Capital will give twenty of these young people up to $100,000 a piece.  

Says Thiel:  

One of the things we think is very important is to encourage potential young entrepreneurs to get involved in science and technology and create all this great value for the next generation. […] One of the initiatives we're gonna be starting over the next few weeks [is a program] offering grants for up to $100,000 to up to twenty people under age twenty for starting something new. […] I do think there are a lot of things people learn in school; I don't think they learn much of anything about entrepreneurship. A lot of companies have been started by people who've been quite young, and we think trying to encourage that is very good.

About which Weisberg asks:

Where to start with this nasty idea? A basic feature of the venture capitalist's worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneself – perhaps literally in Thiel's case. Thus Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible, and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or contributing to the advances in basic science that have made the great tech fortunes possible.

Poor, poor Weisberg, living in a world where nobody would want to advance humanity's technological development through entrepreneurship, and where any statement to the contrary is a cosmetic fluffing of one's disinterest in “helping others.”  

We at the JREF do not necessarily share Peter Thiel's politics (I certainly do not), but we do agree with him on several important points. We know that most education happens outside the classroom. We know that business is not inherently immoral, or even amoral, though it can be either of those things. We know that businesspeople are not necessarily more greedy than non-business people.  

Most of all, though, we know that there are many ways to contribute to the world. Weisberg points out, almost as an afterthought, that “[t]here is, of course, another model of Silicon Valley politics, which finds its exemplars in the clean-tech race, in Google's self-driving cars and wind farms, and Bill Gates' philanthropy. [Mark] Zuckerberg, too, shows signs of actually caring about people, having just donated $100 million to support change in Newark's blighted public schools system ” It's a shame that Weisberg cannot see how SpaceX and the Singularity Institute are themselves manifestations of “caring about people,” even if these are not projects about which Weisberg himself is passionate. And it's a shame, too, that Weisberg fails to realize that without Peter Thiel's allegedly “nasty” interest in young entrepreneurs, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't have $100 million to give away.  

Let's hope the 20 youngsters to win his grants do half as well, or give half so much.