Peter Thiel has had himself a 2016.
The billionaire tech investor made his fortune as the co-founder of PayPal and as the first outside investor in Facebook, but has been in the news this year after he sued Gawker into oblivion and announced his support for Donald Trump.
The next stop on Thiel's Unpopular Opinion Tour came in Chicago Tuesday during a talk at Roosevelt University when he called basically everyone in attendance mediocre.
"If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley," Thiel told the crowd, according to the Chicago Tribune.
That hot take somehow went unchallenged by event moderator and Roosevelt professor Stuart Warner, according to the Trib, but an audience member did manage to ask Thiel toward the end of the event, wait what?
"Who comes to Chicago if first-rate people go to New York or Silicon Valley?" the audience member asked.
"I didn't, I didn't, I didn't say that!" Thiel said, and then reportedly yammered on about it being a metaphor for globalization--or some shit.
Thiel added that he didn't know "exactly what Chicago should be doing right now," in what was perhaps his truest statement of the day.
Few people in Chicago tech, I'd imagine, are looking to Thiel for advice on what the city should be doing. They're a little busy building companies like GrubHub, ContextMedia, Uptake, SpotHero, Raise, Coyote Logistics, SMS Assist, Groupon, Braintree, Fieldglass, Jellyvision, Centro and many, many others that are part of a greater Midwest tech ecosystem that just may have more startups than Silicon Valley in 5 years.
So, Peter, thanks for stopping through Chicago. Don't let the door hit you on the way out.
