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5 years ago, Peter Teal, the billionaire venture capitalist behind PayPal and Palanteer, wrote an email to the executives of Facebook, including Mark Zuckerberg. And this email turned out to be prophetic. Back then, Teal told Zuckerberg and others to take young people's draw towards socialism seriously, saying that when 70% millennials say they're pro-socialist, we need to do better than to just dismiss them, saying they're stupid or entitled, we should try and understand why.
Now, 5 years later, in an interview with the Free Press Journal, Tio reveals exactly what he saw coming in 2020 that no one else seems to have seen. And the result of that is the victory of Zoran Mandani, the self-proclaimed Democratic socialist who is set to be New York City's next mayor. Make no mistake, Teal has no love for Mamani. He had earlier campaign for Trump. He doesn't think Mamani has any particular solutions to people's problems either, but he does recognize the issues.
In the interview, Teal says, >> "It's extremely difficult these days for young people to become homeowners. If you have extremely strict zoning laws and restrictions on building more housing, it's good for the boomers whose properties keep going up in value and terrible for the millennials. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn't be surprised if they eventually become communist. Younger generations are told that if they do the same things as the boomers did, things will work out well for them. But society has changed very drastically and it doesn't work in quite the same way. Boomers are strangely uncurious about how the world is not really working for their kids. I don't think socialism has solutions to these problems. I don't think Mamani particularly has solutions. I don't think you can socialize housing. If you just impose rent controls, then you probably have even less housing and eventually it's even more expensive. But to Mandani's credit, he at least talked about these problems. So my copout answer is always to say the first step is to talk about the problems, even if you don't know what to do about them. I don't think those ideas will ultimately work, but they're more than whatever was on offer. Cuomo did not have a plan for housing. He didn't even think it was an issue. there's been a failure of, let's say, the center left, center right establishment to even talk about them. >>
Basically, he thinks that malfunctioning capitalism is driving young people towards socialism, even if they're not really sure what socialism really ends up meaning. >> I don't know if I would say that young people are pro-socialist. I would say they are less pro- capitalist than they used to be. I think it's more just capitalism doesn't work for me or this thing called capitalism is just an excuse for people ripping you off. Capitalism is not working for a lot of people in New York City. It's not working for young people. I don't think Mandani's policies will work. But I'm not surprised he won. We're in this multi-deade political bull market where politics is becoming more intense. People are looking to politics to solve problems. There's some ways our society has changed for the better. But the gap between the expectations the boomer parents had for their kids and what those kids actually were able to do is just extraordinary. We'll see how much Mandani can do as mayor of New York. But I would say it's symptomatic of things being very unhealthy. It's symptomatic of establishment parties not tackling certain very basic problems of having broken this generational compact.
Talking about those running anti-Mani campaigns, Teal says, >> "If all you can say is that Mandani is a jihadist, communist, ridiculous young person, what that sounds like to me is that you still don't have any idea what to do about housing or student debt. If that's the best you can do, you are going to keep losing." >>
While it looks like the billionaire issued a warning in time, politicians don't seem to have seen what he did 5 years ago. What do you think about Till's views on capitalism and how it's failed young people? Let us know in the comments below.
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