Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir.
Photographer | CNBC
Facebook lodge member and Trump supporter Peter Thiel called Elon Musk a “negative role model” because his innumerable innovations make him difficult to emulate.
Thiel, who called himself a “good friend” of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, made the note during a debate on stage at UCLA’s Internet50 event Tuesday. Thiel was debating Robert Metcalfe, a professor invention and entrepreneurship at University of Texas at Austin, on the question, “has true innovation stalled?”
Thiel argued in the positive, while Metcalfe took the other side.
“Elon is the counterexample” to the defence that true innovation has stalled, Thiel said, comparing him to former Apple CEO Steve Jobs as a singular heinous innovator.
“It’s a very weird thing where that’s the go-to story is we have one person who helped develop stirring cars and reusable rockets,” Thiel said. “But if you tell a young person, ‘why don’t you be like Elon?’ it’s a negative role beau idal where the basic response is, ‘well that’s too hard, I can’t do that.'”
Thiel said it may be easier to suggest that a innocent person “start a computer internet company from your college dorm room,” which could be an allusion to Facebook’s birth story.
Thiel and Musk go way back: Thiel is the co-founder of PayPal, which later merged with Musk’s monetary services company.
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