Everything Peter Thiel has said about contrarian thinking
Thiel organizes his worldview around the question of what important truth very few people agree with him on, arguing that answering it takes courage, that many secrets remain between conventions and mysteries, and that the developed world's real crisis is technological stagnation rather than disruption.
6 points · 3 appearances · 2015
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6 points · 4 appearances · 2015–2017
“I think that, um, all — if you're a founder or entrepreneur, what you want to aim for is monopoly. You want to aim to build a company that is one of a kind, uh, and that it's so far, um, differentiated from the competition that it's not even competing. Um, and, um, and I think this is the — conventional wisdom is always that capitalism and competition are somehow synonyms. I believe they're antonyms. A capitalist is someone who's in the business of accumulating capital. A world of perfect compet— competition is a world where all the profits are competed away. If you want to compete like crazy, um, then you should just open a restaurant in Chicago. Um, and, um, and, uh, and I think the, the great companies, like, uh, Google, sort of the paradigm example I use, has had no serious competition in search since 2002, when it definitively distanced itself from Yahoo and Microsoft, and as a result it's been generating enormous cash flows for the last 12 years.”
8 points · 7 appearances · 2019–2025 · changed view
“Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out — although that's probably a lower use of productivity — but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”
5 points · 5 appearances · 2024–2026 · changed view
“The observation is that don't die is the most played game by everyone all over the world every day. You and I breathe every few seconds, we look both ways before we cross the street, we all play don't die. So it's played more than capitalism, it's played more than any religion. It's the most played game in the world.”
6 points · 4 appearances · 2007–2020 · changed view
“Well, you can say everybody knows that. Well, I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”