If you are interested in learning about how our world got to this gilded age, where a few billionaires have amassed great wealth on the backs of ordinary citizens, a good place would be to check out of your local library Peter Thiel’s Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future. Thiel believes that monopolies are a good thing. His book is a business school manual and outlines how to create a monopoly and squash the little guy by getting the wealthy and hedge funds to invest in your company. You intentionally sell products for a loss. This process can last up to even ten years. Your competition eventually goes out of business. You then jack prices back up and become the only player in town. Such is the business plan for monopolies like Amazon and Walmart. Meta simply buys any competing company and often just shuts them down. This is the recipe whereby you dominate a market. It is the formula for our gilded age.
Creative monopolies give customers more choices by adding entirely new categories of abundance to the world. Creative monopiles aren’t good for the rest of society, they’re powerful engines for making it better.
– Peter Thiel, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
Of course, Thiel makes the usual ignorant assumption that all over the world people lived a “extremely hard life.” p.9 An anthropologist he is not. He then goes on to admit that during the late 1990s, while working on PayPal he worked 100 hours a week. Surely more hours and stress than fishing, gathering berries and root vegetables, playing with your kids and sitting around a fire and weaving baskets.
Today, Peter Thiel and his company Palantir Technologies is a key contractor for the U.S. defense department. It is presently taking all the data from various systems and creating a digital footprint for every citizen and probably non-citizen in the U.S.. It is very much like Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. We are all being surveilled.
But why should anyone care what Peter Thiel thinks or does? Because he is a very wealthy and powerful behind-the-scenes player in our world. It is a bit like why General George Patton read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s autobiography. If you want to understand the powerful, it is best to study their work which is often in plain view. Zero to One. is an easy read, a little book and less than 200 pages.
Peter Thiel’s influence in politics is large. He bankrolled JD Vance’s senate election. In this way he is a bit of a king maker. Of course, another book to check out of the library is Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by JD Vance. I read the book before watching the movie. It is a “rag to riches” memoir where the hillbilly instincts of his grandmother are idealized and the driving force of his character. JD Vance, in real life has steely blue eyes and a bit squat. In the movie, the actor playing him has soft brown eyes, and is much leaner. In our image-obsessed world, where fact and fiction are constantly blurred, biographic films often become a way to define the narrative.
Perhaps as long as we are going down this road, another book to read would be Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal but Trump surely wrote little of that book. It was written by Tony Schwartz who regrets writing the book. He has stated that if the book were written today, he would name it The Sociopath.
Peter Thiel is 57. JD Vance is 40. Both will be around for a few more decades. Thiel wrote his book with a student, Blake Master. JD Vance did actually write his memoir. These two men will be very influential for years to come. Understanding the realities and myths of where they have come from will be important to understand the future.