我和你分享兩段Max Chafkin的

《The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power》裏的話，讀時我很有感觸-----

On October 3, the day that eBay was set to announce that its deal had closed, senior managers gathered in a conference room, waiting for the press release. They believed it would explain the new structure, which would have PayPal joining eBay as a wholly owned subsidiary with Peter Thiel as CEO. When it hit, the release said something else: “Peter Thiel announced today that he has resigned as PayPal’s CEO.” His replacement would be an eBay vice president who’d previously Thiel’s reasoning for negotiating his exit, he explained to a PayPal employee, had been financial. He believed that eBay—the company to which he’d sold PayPal, and one that he’d publicly praised as an ideal fit—was overvalued. He planned to hedge his eBay position, using put options—derivatives that allow investors to make money if the price of a stock falls. Put another way: He wanted to bet against his new colleagues, to “optimize for his hedge fund,” as this staffer put it. Some saw this as reasonable, if a little cold. Others saw it in starker terms. Their idealistic CEO wasn’t just giving up on PayPal; he was giving up on a value system that saw creativity and innovation as the highest ends. Anyone worth his salt in Silicon Valley knew what it meant to choose hedge funds over technology.

 

Years later in an interview, Moritz said, “At heart, Peter is a hedge fund man,” rather than an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs were expected to pour all of themselves into their companies, to risk it all—financially and even personally—in order to grow as big as possible, and, if you were being idealistic about it, to change the world for the better. That is how Musk saw it. It’s why he has nearly bankrupted himself several times in his career, and why he would tell me that he regards taking money from investors as “not cool.”