Mark Thiel is an entrepreneur turned Silicon Valley venture capitalist and Wall Street Hedge Fund manager. He cofounded Paypal (which he sold and made heaps of money) , then started the Venture Capital firm which most famously funded a startup called Facebook . Thiel negotiated an 8% share in Facebook from that, which is worth a bit, though he complains that the actor who played his character in "The Social Network" made him look older. His hedge fund managed billions of dollars, his net worth soared into the nine figure range (at least until the 2008 crash); Thiel was the epitome of the American Dream, a self-made billionaire, a Libertarian who distrusts government and thinks taxes are counter productive.
JR is an "art star", an artist whose works will sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He is fr om France. born of immigrant parents in the suburbs now famous for the recent riots. JR's anti-establishment roots stem back to his graffiti-tagging adolescence, though it is now expressed through a combination of photography and audacity. He rose to fame in 2008, when he travelled to a hillside slum (favela) in Rio de Janeiro, and pasted giant photographs of its residents' "eyes" on the sides of the shacks. These eyes look down on the rest of the city, both rich and poor, proclaiming the existence of these people who had been ignored for so long. JR has since gone to similar guerrilla art projects in other desolate neighbourhoods of Sudan, Cambodia, and India. He is a recent winner of the TED award, a $100,000 prize designed to help the recipient achieve "one wish that can change the world".
Both Thiel and JR share a worldview that is suspicious of authority, of the "elites" that run the world (or at least plunder the vast majority of its resources); however, this worldview is expressed in opposite ways. Thiel's libertarian beliefs stems from a contrarian streak which leads him to oppose the common wisdom, or in at least one case, common sense. His hedge fund was especially devastated by the 2008 financial crash, as he refused to pull out the stock market as it crumbled. Thiel stubbornly refused to believe what everyone else couldn't help but see, and continued to invest. And then he finally changed course , too late, shorting his positions just as the tepid recovery took hold. Thiel's reputation as a "golden boy of finance" inevitably suffered as a result, yet his model of the world didn't change. If anything, his contrariness has multiplied. He funded the Thiel awards, a series of $100,000 grants to would-be entrepreneurs under 20 years of age - in his view, the educational institutions of the U.S. work to stifle technological creativity. He has poured investment money to increasingly utopian projects, such as research into robotics, nanotechnology, and lifespan extension. Of course, Thiel's version of utopia revolves around automation, luxury and living forever. A fantastic dream for the rich, but even he's not sure how it will relate to the 'common man'. In fact, he knows it will lead to fewer jobs, fewer opportunities - simply a more dire version of the present - except for the elite he supposedly despises...
JR's anti-authoritarian inclinations are more populist in nature. His art is a means to bring culture to the world, especially the developing parts of it, to give a voice to people who are too often ignored. And he doesn't seem to be doing for the money or the fame. He strictly avoids any hint of corporate sponsorship and directs the media to interview the subjects of his art, not himself. JR has donated the $100,000 TED award to a charity, and is selling pieces of his own art to fund his next project, "Inside Out", an ambitious venture where he asks people to send him their photographs. He will then return a poster ready for pasting. It is an project that does not revolve around JR's art or ego, that seeks to involve the entire world (or at least a part of the world that would be interested).
And so, we have these portraits of two persons who seek to "change the world". As JR mentions in his TED talk, business (and money) change the world all the time - but not always for the better.
I'll end with a provocative quote from the New Yorker article on Thiel: "The libertarian worship of individual freedom and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up."
