'Something Wrong With The Silicon Valley Propaganda': Peter Thiel Talks About Tech And Trump

The recent backlash against Silicon Valley giants like Alphabet Inc. GOOGL, Amazon.com Inc. AMZN, and Facebook Inc FB, is because these companies made overreaching promises and failed to deliver on them, Peter Thiel told The Nikkei Asian Review in an exclusive interview on Thursday.

Silicon Valley Overpromised And Underperformed

"[The] big Silicon Valley companies have promised a lot in terms of how much technology will change the world and will make it better," Thiel, whose data analytics company Palantir Technologies recently started operations in Japan, told The Nikkei.

"And there's a question how much of this they've delivered," he added.

Thiel noted the example of Google, which, he said, has failed to deliver on its promise of self-driving cars.

"I would say going from a horse to a car is bigger than going from a car to a self-driving car," the investor said, questioning the impact of such innovation on society.

"There was something wrong with the Silicon Valley propaganda," Thiel added on the promises made by technology giants.

According to Thiel, the silicon valley has chosen to focus on "fairly simple kinds of products" and shied away from things that are "complicated or difficult."

"There are many other dimensions of progress that have been ignored," Thiel told The Nikkei. "Supersonic airplanes, underwater cities, the Green Revolution, agriculture, new medicines."

President Trump Disrupted Status Quo

Thiel, who has been a long-term supporter of Donald Trump and pledged to support his 2020 reelection campaign, said that the President had disrupted the "status quo."

"The globalization project has not been working for the United States. And, President Trump was someone who both spoke about this, and maybe would disrupt the status quo a little bit," the PayPal Holdings Inc PYPL founder told The Nikkei.

Thiel, a board member at Facebook, has reportedly asked the company to retain its controversial stance of not censoring or fact-checking the political ads on its platform. As the Wall Street Journal noted earlier, Thiel's stance is in line with the Republican Party and Donald Trump.

Criticizing what he described as "left-wing socialist" views of Democratic presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, he said that American political institutes don't work well enough for such policies to be implemented.

"I always say that, you know, I would be fine paying more in taxes, if the government was better at spending the money," he said.

Photo Credit: Dan Taylor via Wikimedia