בלוג לשיווק באינטרנט, ייעוץ שיווקי, וורדפרס וחיים באינטרנט *

He co-founded PayPal at age 31 and sold it to eBay four years later for $1.5 billion.
At 33 he became the first investor in Facebook.
At 42, his current age, he runs a San Francisco venture capital firm and a hedge fund, Clarium Capital.

But things haven't been easy-come-easy-go lately. As bailouts and government stimulus policies revived financial markets, this staunch libertarian bet against the rally, using his best rationalism and faith in man-kind. He lost.

As investors started pulling their money out of his fund, Clarium shrank from $7 billion in assets to about $1.5 billion. Disillusioned by the current state of the economy and its future, Thiel wasn't worrying; he was pouring money into fantastic futuristic projects as a VC and philanthropist: private space flight, ocean colonies for human habitation, indefinite life extension.

Behind both his economic skepticism and his radical utopianism – if you can call it that – is a unifying conviction. That is to revive yesterday's dreams of tomorrow, today:

"I spend a lot of my time thinking about the future. I run a hedge fund and a venture capital fund, and a lot of that is just trying to learn what’s going on in the world, trying to understand the world better."

On the fall and recovery of the stock market:

"People take it for granted that their retirement funds can earn 8.5 percent a year. That’s what their financial planners tell them. And sure, you look back over the past 100 years, the stock market has generally gone up 6 to 8 percent a year. But in a larger historical perspective, that kind of growth is exceptional. If you had done the equivalent of investing in the stock market from, say, 1000 to 1100 AD, you would not have made 8 percent a year. During the fall of the Roman Empire, you’d have been lucky to get zero. We’ve been living in a unique period of accelerating technological progress. We’ve gone from horses to cars to planes to rockets to computers to the Internet in a very short time. It’s not automatic that that continues."

If the expected economic growth does not happen?

"If it doesn’t happen, people will go bankrupt in retirement. There are systemic consequences, too. If we don’t have enough growth, we will see a powerful shift away from capitalism. There are good things and bad things about capitalism, but inequality becomes completely intolerable to society when everything’s static"

Final frontiers?

"I think we have to make those things happen. We should be looking at technologies that might lead to really big breakthroughs. As a starting point, let’s just go back to the science fiction novels of the 1950s and ’60s and try to run the past 40 years again"

On Line:

"Obviously we’ve done well online. But how much more progress is there going to be? How many big new Internet companies are there? In the ’90s we had Netscape, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon. In the past eight years there have been only two: Google and Facebook…The Internet may be culturally important, just as the automobile was culturally more important in the ’50s than the ’20s, as we got suburbia and built the Interstate Highway System. But the last successful car company started in the US was Jeep in 1941."