Earlier this month, billionaire Peter Thielâfounder of PayPal, investor in Facebookâannounced his plan to offer 20 college students (or groups of students) $100,000-dollar grants to drop out of school and become entrepreneurs, like him.
Slate columnist Jacob Weisberg calls this idea "nasty" and frames it around his portrait of Peter Thiel: a Libertarian douchebag who believes that empowering women with the right to vote wrecked the country, and who wants to colonize space (and, um, the ocean) so he can create a new world of politicsâwhere losers are losers and winners take allâbecause, as he put it, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." Weisberg asserts that Thiel wants to create proteges with the "narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible."
A basic feature of the venture capitalist's worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneselfâperhaps literally in Thiel's case. Thus Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible, and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or contributing to the advances in basic science that have made the great tech fortunes possible. Thiel's program is premised on the idea that America suffers from a deficiency of entrepreneurship. In fact, we may be on the verge of the opposite, a world in which too many weak ideas find funding and every kid dreams of being the next Mark Zuckerberg. This threatens to turn the risk-taking startup model into a white boy's version of the NBA, diverting a generation of young people from the love of knowledge for its own sake and respect for middle-class values.
I want to call bullshit on part of Weisberg's argument, here. Saying that dropouts "halt their intellectual development" is hopelessly narrow-minded. Quitting school (or never enrolling to begin with) doesn't bar anyone from learning if they like to learn. Books are cheaper than classrooms; college is prohibitively expensive for some people; and earning a degree doesn't guarantee anyone a job. Offering grants to bright students to drop out of school and focus on developing their ideas is, at least, encouraging a new form of learningâone of trial and error. If the dropouts fail, if their ideas are terrible, no one's going to bar them from enrolling again if they want. (Also, pre-assuming that these faceless young entrepreneurs are obsessed with getting rich and only secondarily interested in seeing their ideas succeed is very jaded.)
That said, given Thiel's resentment of women's right to vote and his fixation on creating a Libertarian utopia on the ocean (got your sea legs, Matt?), I can't wait to see what business proposals he chooses to fund.
