Among the many unlikely winners this year is the billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel. He Quixotically—or capriciously—funded Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the gossip site, Gawker, which had previously outed Thiel as being gay, a suit that ended in the bankruptcy of the company and the folding of the site. Then, alone among the Silicon Valley elite, Thiel backed Donald Trump in his Quixotic—or capricious—and victorious run for the presidency.
This creates a character quite confounding to right-thinking or conventional thinking people everywhere: a billionaire contrarian. Billionaires, at least after having made their billions, tend to be supporters of the status quo. Why wouldn’t they? That status quo has been good to them, and, in any disruption of it, they have the most to lose.
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