That's true, but I find it difficult to understand where it's coming from purely descriptively as well. I think Peter Thiel is a well-known venture capitalist w

That's true, but I find it difficult to understand where it's coming from purely descriptively as well. I think Peter Thiel is a well-known venture capitalist who is associated by the general public with Silicon Valley, but I would be very surprised if a significant fraction of the public thinks of him as a "public intellectual". If anything, I think he is often thought of (mistakenly) as mainly a technologist. I've frequently seen him referred to with the assumption that he has an Andreessen or Graham or Musk type background: a programmer/dev who got rich in the first dot-com boom, and then invested his tech winnings. It seems to be less well known that Thiel made his fortune in finance, before entering tech investment, and isn't a techie at all. If you were to ask people who they think of as America's leading public intellectual, some people who I think would come out ahead (on the basis of quite different audiences): Noam Chomsky, Daniel Dennett, Richard Posner, Paul Krugman, Jared Diamond, Clay Shirky, David Graeber, Francis Fukuyama, Neil deGrasse Tyson, etc.