It raises the odds I suppose, but through what mechanism would something like this even work? Like, the story would have to be:

* Peter Thiel, a man who does not speak French, discovers that a French streamer is saying mean things about Palantir. Lots of people say mean things about Palantir, since they do so many bad things, but this particular criticism is just so cutting Thiel feels he has to do something about it.

* He searches through every investment he's ever made, singling out all the French ones, and sends their executive teams an email saying that this one specific French guy sucks and they shouldn't do business with him.

* The executive team at Qonto, a profitable company with 600,000 customers and almost €500M in annual revenue, receives the message and decides that they'd like to help one of their dozens of investors with his personal revenge campaign.

It's not 100% impossible, but it's so implausible I don't think it's reasonable to believe based on a coincidence.

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turtlesdown11 a day ago | parent [-]

It's kind of wild to not consider that Peter Thiel pays a business to monitor mentions of him online. This is a very common thing in industry. Thiel is well known for being extremely thin skinned. He's also funded surveillance tech businesses. It's very unlikely Peter spends his time looking for internet references, but that someone he pays does so. From everything the public knows about him, he's absolutely someone who compiles and reviews lists of "enemies".

As for speaking French, it's trivial to translate languages.

The evidence that a company is profitable or large has zero relation to it's decisions around dropping a customer?

You've created a strawman of suppositions that are not accurate, and then casually blow away the strawman.

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SpicyLemonZest a day ago | parent [-]

It seems even more implausible that a reputation monitoring business would raise a random French streamer's criticism of Palantir to Peter Thiel's attention. How could they possibly think that's worthy of his time? Here, let me try something:

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I don't like Palantir, and I don't like Peter Thiel because of his role in creating it. It's a bad company that does bad things. I won't work for Palantir, it's shameful that anyone does work for Palantir, and the world would be much improved if Palantir went bankrupt tomorrow.

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I'll come back and admit defeat if I get booted off of Thiel-funded technology platforms in a few days, but I know and I strongly suspect you know that's not going to happen.

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J_Shelby_J a day ago | parent | next [-]

Right, but if you could do it using a meaningless portion of your wealth, and it didn’t morally bother you, why not silence all criticism of you? Once you hire the people, it should run itself like any traditional PR firm.

	▲	SpicyLemonZest a day ago \| parent [-]
		Through what mechanism would a PR firm that you hired to monitor online sentiment convince a French bank to close someone's accounts for criticizing your companies? Who at the PR firm has the power to reach decisionmakers at the bank, and what would they say?

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turtlesdown11 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>It seems even more implausible that a reputation monitoring business would raise a random French streamer's criticism of Palantir to Peter Thiel's attention.

It's "more implausible" to you that a company who's job it is to monitor online sentiment about a particular company would be able to identify negative sentiment? So your argument is that these online monitoring businesses do not offer a real product?

> I'll come back and admit defeat if I get booted off of Thiel-funded technology platforms in a few days, but I know and I strongly suspect you know that's not going to happen.

Could you look up what a strawman is, and stop using them in your arguments?