Peter Thiel: “Steve Jobs probably gets too little credit”

So I'm a Steve Jobs fan, but objectively, do you think he gets too much credit for what Apple has done? And then by extension, do you think individual business leaders generally get more credit than they deserve?

No, there probably are ways in which he gets too little credit. So there's all the stuff about Jobs where it was super hagiographic when he passed away in 2011, and you got the sense that there was going to be no more innovation that would come out of Apple now that Jobs was dead. And I'm not sure people really believe that, but I actually think that was probably true. The founders of these companies, they're not divine beings, they're not omnipotent, omniscient, anything like that. And I think it's a mistake to ascribe divinity to them in any form. But I think the importance for sort of a charismatic leader who can bring out the best in people is something that I think is very underestimated. And I think what was very powerful about Jobs was that he somehow, in spite of all his many personality flaws that have been described elsewhere, he was able to inspire all these different people to bring out the very best. And so I do think that's very important. We called our venture fund Founders Fund because we think that these tech companies do best when they're led by founders. I think the companies where there will be a lot of innovation are companies like Google or Facebook or Amazon, which are founder led. Much more skeptical of the tech companies that are not founder led. I think it's weirdly understated as a problem. We don't typically draw up a list of tech companies where the founders are running them and tech companies where the founders are not running them. Even though I would say that the first approximation, that would tell you which ones you can expect to innovate in the future and which ones won't.