Yes, but it's a lot of money. Thiel apparently 'only' has 27 billion USD, so if this is mostly his investment it's 1/27 of all the money he has, and I think wh

Yes, but it's a lot of money. Thiel apparently 'only' has 27 billion USD, so if this is mostly his investment it's 1/27 of all the money he has, and I think when you're spending those sums on highly technical stuff involving physics and precision, you'd have the person representing the project you're planning to invest in, some physicists you know and trust, some people from a relevant industry, and then you sit down and think about the idea as you do when you read a paper, and you'd sit in this seminar for hours and use the blackboard, and my assumption is that you'd go away very close to knowing for sure whether it would work or not.