Review - Zero To One

Being Trump’s most prominent billionaire booster in 2016 makes you a massive dickhead in my book, so it’s fair to say that I do not like Peter Thiel. Politically, he’s a right-liberatarian and is well known for his willingness to screw minorities and abandon democracy in the pursuit of capitalist profit-ventures.

That said, this book is great. It’s markedly better than I expected it to be, containing sharp, no-bullshit insights into how Thiel views corporate technological entrepreneurship and corporate tech capitalism. The insights are valuable to anybody, as they reveal in part how the world actually works, which is always a good thing to understand.

He makes pretty questionable claims in places, usually by assuming that some libertarian economic dogma is the capital-T truth, but you can take them as given for the purposes of hearing Thiel’s arguments, and they’re not a big problem because as far as ‘tech billionaires’ go Thiel is probably the most honest and interesting of the lot.

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