Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley clueless about patriotism
Silicon Valley investor and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel slams Google's 'unprecedented' move to work on artificial intelligence technology in China.
Silicon Valley doesn't consider patriotism when making decisions, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel told "Fox & Friends" Friday morning.
Instead, the big tech companies focus primarily on what will benefit themselves, Thiel said.
“Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as sort of cosmopolitan or globalist, but I think that’s not actually what’s going on here,” he told “Fox & Friends.” “It is just sort of an insular form of parochialism. Maybe it’s borderline autistic, so it’s a complete incuriosity about the rest of the world.”
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Thiel, an early Trump supporter, has been critical of Google over its working relationship with China.
“So I think if you ask people at Google, they wouldn’t even think in terms of patriotic, unpatriotic,” Thiel continued. “They don’t think of China as a geopolitical rival. They’re just not really aware of what’s going on outside of their campus.”
Thiel, a Facebook board member, made waves last month when he accused Google of making a “seemingly treasonous decision to work with the Chinese military” while backing out of a race for a lucrative defense contract with the U.S. military. He also suggested that Chinese intelligence has likely infiltrated Google.
In an interview with Fox's Tucker Carlson Thiel challenged Google's CEO Sundar Pichai to answer some tough questions.
“I would say answer my three questions. How many foreign intelligence agencies have infiltrated Google? Have the Chinese, in particular, infiltrated? And why are you working with Communist China and not the U.S.? What is the reason you’re doing that?” Thiel told Carlson in an exclusive interview last month.
The billionaire tech venture capitalist wants the search giant to come clean when it comes to China.
Google denied working with the Chinese military, but Thiel said Monday those denials miss the point.
“The counterpoint is you’d have to just look at the constitution of the communist party of China, which says that you’re supposed to have civil-military fusion,” he said.
Google announced in 2017 it was setting up an artificial intelligence research center in Beijing, something Thiel called “unprecedented.”
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“If you look at the entire Cold War history over the last century, I don’t think there’s ever a case where a major U.S. company refused to work with the U.S. and worked with our major geopolitical rival,” Thiel told Fox News. “It’s not like this weird liberal thing. It is absolutely unprecedented.”