Reform the broken system by leaving it behind and creating something better.
In 2011, Peter Thiel launched a controversial education program to pay college students $100,000 to drop out. To drop out and do what? Not look for a job. But to work full time on new startup businesses.
Thiel Fellows have created eleven startups valued at $1 billion or more.
The most notable Thiel fellow to date is Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain. As of this writing, Ethereum has a market capitalization of about $200 billion and has spawned an unprecedented ecosystem of decentralized software development. There are nearly 7,000 Ethereum-based projects, including some of the most innovative and promising ideas today.
Austin Russel, a 2013 Thiel fellow, took Luminar Technologies Inc. public in 2020, valuing the company at $8.5 billion, while Paul Gu helped Upstart go public at a $4.8 billion valuation. Both Russell and Gu were early Thiel fellows and co-founders of their respective companies. Dylan Field agreed to sell Figma Inc., the influential design company he co-founded, to Adobe Inc. last year for roughly $20 billion.
Concludes Bloomberg, "The results of the Thiel Fellowship demonstrate that colleges likely block or delay the success of the most promising students."
Somebody typed a prompt, and a virus came out.
Sixteen of them. Genomes written by artificial intelligence, ordered as synthetic DNA, assembled on a bench, and grown into stocks that replicated and threw off offspring. Thirteen carried mutations that match no known natural sequence. The scientific paper ran in the publication Science, and its senior author disclosed funding from the Gates Foundation.
Six years ago, on April 6, 2020, Bill Gates sat with Trevor Noah and said a vaccine was the only thing that would let us return to normal — and announced that his foundation would start building the factories before anyone had seen efficacy data. Scale during testing, he said, rather than waiting for results. A great many people heard optimism. Some of us heard a schedule.
-- Dr. Peter McCullough
"There are times when a people tolerate an evil for so long that they cease to recognize its enormity. The evil acquires procedures, professional language, political constituencies, legal protections and respectable explanations. Eventually bloodshed receives a clinical name, partiality becomes public policy, and injustice—once sufficiently regulated—begins to look almost ordinary."
-- Bill Evans
The @EU_Commission met today with Meta & TikTok on the situation in Ceuta.
"Platforms must act decisively in keeping the integrity of the digital space, in particular during crisis situations. Monitoring must increase, cooperation with fact-checkers to be strengthened."
What has social media been commanded to do? Cover up the fact that 72,000 military aged males invaded Spain over a two day period? Spin the story? Hire fact checkers who say, "Don't believe the misinformation. It was only 72 migrants." What were the orders given to social media regarding the Hungarian election of 2026? What orders are being given to the new puppet government of Hungary by the EU?