A few years back, a writer for the New York Times who is now a special correspondent for Vanity Fair went to a "salon" at billionaire (and American hero) Peter Thiel's house. The writer starved himself all day because he figured the wealthy investor would be offering tons of awesome food to the intellectuals and billionaires and CEOs and, um, journalists he had invited to chit chat. "Thiel, I assumed, would be presiding over some sort of gluttonous feast," Nick Bilton writes. "I presumed that chefs had been at work for days glazing carrots with a thyme-honey citrus sauce, preparing succulent Thomas Keller–esque chicken."
When he got there, however, he found naught but some low-quality sushi and edamame. This scarring experience—which, again, boils down to the author not being given nice food when he expected to be given nice food—explains everything about Silicon Valley, apparently:
As I hobbled back into the living room and returned to my seat, debating whether I should try to steal the last piece of toro from Mayer’s plate (she wasn’t a C.E.O. yet), I was struck by a profound epiphany about Silicon Valley: Thiel, in many ways, sums up the entire mentality of the tech industry. He doesn’t necessarily care what other people want; if Thiel is on a weird and special diet, then we should all be on a weird and special diet. If Thiel thinks that people shouldn’t go to college because it’s a waste of time, as he’s said innumerable times before—regardless of the way such a decision could affect people’s lives in the future—then we are all fools for not dropping out. (Thiel, for what it is worth, has a B.A. and law degree from Stanford.)
If Thiel thinks people who wear suits are "bad at sales and worse at tech," then you better change your sartorial choices. Go buy a hoodie; look the part. And if Thiel wants to disrupt how Washington works, he will become a delegate for Donald Trump. If he thinks that a blog called Gawker shouldn’t exist, then he will try to eradicate it.
Um, okay. Here's my "profound epiphany" about this piece: Maybe you should've eaten a burger for lunch, homeslice. You're invited for a special chat with some of the world's most interesting—or, at the very least, richest; they could all be boring dullards, I suppose—people and all you can think about is how they're not using their wealth to make your life more pleasant. If Thiel's failure to provide the expected level of hospitality is the perfect metaphor for Silicon Valley's efforts to reshape society, then maybe this essay is the perfect metaphor for the way the average moocher feels entitled to the lifestyle of his economic betters.
By all accounts, Thiel actually has a healthy respect for (real*) journalists and an interest in journalism, having given a fair amount of money to the Committee to Protect Journalists. But one could be forgiven for wondering why after reading that essay.
*Read: non Gawker.