>I think we can credit this to Peter Thiel: since Thiel had first hand experience at PayPal, he probably has tremendous respect for hackers (I don't know what his personal hacking skills are, but I suspect they are good).
Peter Thiel's educational background is in philosophy and law [1]. There's been no public demonstration of hacking ability from him. I'd suspect that his respect for hackers was (if it didn't exist from earlier years through his personal relationships) grown from his partnership with Max Levichin in founding PayPal and keeping it afloat during those tumultuous years via multiple technical breakthroughs (including fraud detection, researched and developed by Levichin).
Peter Thiel's educational background is in philosophy and law [1]. There's been no public demonstration of hacking ability from him. I'd suspect that his respect for hackers was (if it didn't exist from earlier years through his personal relationships) grown from his partnership with Max Levichin in founding PayPal and keeping it afloat during those tumultuous years via multiple technical breakthroughs (including fraud detection, researched and developed by Levichin).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#College_and_law_sc...