Fuss about citizenship reminiscent of Takaro Lodge Flap.
Midas Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel backed Facebook, Paypal, and Xero. But his founding of crime and insurgency systems developer Palantir currently valued at $20 billion can be considered less than helpful to floundering New Zealand law-and-order systems producer Wynyard Group.
On Wednesday, 02 November 2016 in:- Wynyard Class Action Must Identify Litigation TargetsMSC Newswire reported: “Wynyard for example walked into this kind of Silicon Valley deep-pocket storm when it found itself confronted with sometime New Zealand resident and Tolkien buff Peter Thiel’s Palantir crime product.”
Underpinning Mr Thiel’s right to New Zealand citizenship is his passion for Tolkien.
The name Palantir comes from the Lord of the Rings in which the Palantir was a magical seeing stone that let you see what was happening in lands far off.
Mr Thiel’s skill has been to see what is about to happen in the rather closer internet era once described by Bill Gates as representing the epoch of “disintermediation” in which people dealt directly with the people and services they required.
Mr Thiel’s strong and highly visible support for the election of President Donald Trump can itself be seen now quite clearly.It was based on an understanding that the new President could communicate directly with voters rather than having to deal with them via the intermediary of the established media.
Mr Thiel’s activist support for President Trump can also be viewed as triggering pique from New Zealand’s Labour Party Opposition to the bestowing upon him of New Zealand citizenship.
Otherwise Mr Thiel is a photofit personified of all New Zealand’s activist yearnings.
He supports openly all major societal alternative and libertarian thrusts, notably the right for people to live on man-made islands beyond legal jurisdictions in a concept known as “seasteading.”
He is an ardent proponent of peoples’ right to privacy and put the pervasive celebrity tittle-tattle internet site Gawker out of business by financing the legal action against the site on grounds of intrusion by showman Hulk Hogan.
He is the leader of the second generation of California innovators who sprang up in the footsteps of Bill Gates and Steven Jobs.
This set is sometimes described as the Paypal Mafia, the network of former employees and co-founders that includes SpaceX’s Eion Musk and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman.
Mr Thiel now stands identified as the jewel in the crown of the New Zealand government’s campaign to see installed here information technology disruptive-scale investors to seed development in the home-grown industry.
One of the reasons that the government is evasive about this whole daring strategy is that it also encompassed Kim Dotcom.
Like Mr Thiel who emigrated with his parents to the United States, Kim Dotcom was also born in Germany.
It is likely that the government will now informally approach Mr Thiel with a view to his outlining investments other than Xero that can be said to be in the national interest.
Mr Thiel, for example, is said to be actively engaged in life sciences, notably in the field of postponing or even eliminating death.
In some ways the fuss about Mr Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship resonates with the campaign in the 1970s against United States oilman Stockton Rush.
Mr Rush and his family moved to New Zealand to create Takaro Lodge, a hunting and fishing retreat with an emphasis on conservation and located coincidentally in the same Wanaka lakes region favoured by Mr Thiel.
However and all those years ago it became known that Takaro Lodge had been fitted in whole or part with gold plated plumbing fitments.
These gold taps now became a class warfare icon.
Bill Rowling was the first New Zealand Labour Party prime minister from a privileged background.
Newly installed he was determined to publicly demonstrate his working class credentials which now took the form of a campaign against Mr Rush and his lodge and of course his taps.
Meanwhile, out-of-pocket and patriotic New Zealand investors in the until quite recently NZX listed Wynyard Group will find themselves cherishing a singular and not unreasonable hope.
It is that Mr Thiel can be persuaded to put his shoulder to the wheel in restoring their forensic systems producer to solvency.
Mr Thiel is considered the major holder of Palantir.
Wynyard Group had its beginnings in Christchurch with the Jade organisation which in the 1970s invented one of the world’s first programming compilers, i.e. a programme that generated other programmes.
The Wynyard Group investor class action group is currently evaluating its options in regard to the now insolvent onetime NZX main board company.
On their agenda at their forthcoming meeting might now be a motion calling for a formal approach to their newly revealed fellow citizen, Peter Thiel.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Thursday 26 January 2017 ||
More reading: Wynyard Class Action Must Identify Litigation Targets
