No problem thiel and musk part of the clique known as pay pal Mafia Wow, edzo. That's something I've never read. Good info there. Thanks.
"PayPal Mafia" is a term used to indicate a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded and developed additional technology companies[1] such as Tesla Motors, LinkedIn, Palantir Technologies, SpaceX, YouTube, Yelp, and Yammer.[2] Most of the members attended Stanford University or University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign at some point in their studies. Six members, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Luke Nosek, Ken Howery, and Keith Rabois, have become billionaires.
Bagster
Lesser Oracle
Not directly related to Q; Back ground history, Technology connections, University of Illinois.
One of the Bell Lab researchers who developed the Transistor, John Bardeen, taught physics at the U.I. Champaign, probably 15 years before the Paypal Mafia's time. (He received 2 Nobel prizes when they meant something.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bardeen
“Bardeen was also an important adviser to Xerox Corporation. Though quiet by nature, he took the uncharacteristic step of urging Xerox executives to keep their California research center, Xerox PARC, afloat when the parent company was suspicious that its research center would amount to little.”
Xerox PARC researchers were responsible for the invention the first mouse, and if I remember correctly, the Graphical User Interface (GUEy). S Jobs and S Wozniak saw them on a visit to Xerox PARC, and used the ideas on their first personal computer.
***William Shockley and Walter Brattain were the other researchers at Bell Labs in NJ. Shockley took most of the credit for the development of the transistor.
That is what happened in the 2 generations before the rise of the Paypal Mafia.