Most of what's false is the spin, including paraphrases such as "winner-take-all capitalism", a phrase I doubt Thiel actually used. Seasteading in particular i

Most of what's false is the spin, including paraphrases such as "winner-take-all capitalism", a phrase I doubt Thiel actually used. Seasteading in particular is a really exciting project. Thiel funds it because he wants to live in a world that still has frontiers, places people with unpopular ideas - religious, ideological, technological or otherwise - can escape to and try to live in new ways. Seasteading could revitalize political experimentation generally, yet here again the paraphrases are uncharitable and inaccurate - the claim that seasteads are intended or expected to be "law-free floating communes" is Jacob Weisberg's uninformed take on the subject, not Thiel's. There's approximately zero chance Thiel himself would want to go live on a seastead - he invests anyway in large part to make the world a better place - the same reason he invests in kids who'd likely do better without college. And how, exactly, is investing in long-term longshot bets less noble than to fund shorter-term projects like self-driving cars? Don't get me wrong, I love self-driving cars and I'm glad Google is throwing weight behind them, but self-driving cars were inevitable already. Google funds them because it fell naturally out of their other business interests and they stand to make vast sums off it in the short term - it's an easy bet for them to make. If Thiel likes to take the longer road, what's wrong with that?