A biography for Peter Thielhasn’t been written yet.
“Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.”
“A conventional truth can be important - it's essential to learn elementary mathematics, for example - but it won't give you an edge. It's not a secret.”
“There have been a lot of critiques of the finance industry's having possibly foisted subprime mortgages on unknowing buyers, and a lot of those kinds of arguments are even more powerful when used against college administrators who are probably in some ways engaged in equally misleading advertising.”
“I think competition can make people stronger at whatever it is they're competing on. If we're competing in some athletic event for competitive swimmers, really intensely competing, it's likely that both of us will become better, but it's also quite possible we'll lose sight of what's truly valuable.”
“In Silicon Valley, I point out that many of the more successful entrepreneurs seem to be suffering from a mild form of Asperger's where it's like you're missing the imitation, socialization gene.”
“When I was starting out, I followed along the path that seemed to be marked out for me - from high school to college to law school to professional life.”
“If the whole U.S. was like Silicon Valley, we'd be in good shape. But now, the entire U.S. is not driven by technology, is not driven by innovation.”
“If I had known how hard it would be to do something new, particularly in the payments industry, I would never have started PayPal. That's why nobody with long experience in banking had done it. You needed to be naive enough to think that new things could be done.”
“Is there something about the gay experience, being gay and the gay experience, that pushes us even more than other people toward competition?”
“In a world where wealth is growing, you can get away with printing money. Doubling the debt over the next 20 years is not a problem.”
“People don't want to believe that technology is broken. Pharmaceuticals, robotics, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology - all these areas where the progress has been a lot more limited than people think. And the question is why.”
“I do think there is this danger that our society has made its peace with decline. I'd like to jolt them out of their complacency a little bit.”
“I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years - part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion.”
“There's always a sense that people will do things quite differently if they think they have privacy.”
“As an undergraduate at Stanford, I started 'The Stanford Review,' which ended up being very engaged in the hot debates of the time: campus speech codes, questions about diversity on campus, all sorts of debates like that.”
“From my perspective, I think the question of how we build a better future is an extremely important overarching question, and I think it's become obscured from us because we no longer think it's possible to have a meaningful conversation about the future.”
“Anti-aging is an extremely under-explored field.”
“Our society, the dominant culture doesn't like science. It doesn't like technology.”
“I would not describe myself as a super early adopter of consumer technology.”
“'Perfect competition' is considered both the ideal and the default state in Economics 101. So-called perfectly competitive markets achieve equilibrium when producer supply meets consumer demand.”