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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   22624 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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$12 million is ~0.048% of Peter Thiel's net worth. According to Google's incredibly shitty search AI, that's equivalent to a $9,000 purchase for the median American. Sounds pretty reasonable for a timeshare.

The average home price in Argentina is apparently $130,000.

Point is its a high enough number that people will note it and be curious about the buyer.

Same reason people care about Gabe Newell's Yacht even though its "only" like 5% of his net worth.

Also I really have to object to scaling a purchase by a .0001% outlier to the purchasing power of an average American.

The average American will never even achieve a net worth of 12 million over their entire lifetimes (sans hyperinflation) Especially if you account for the fact that guys like Thiel drag that average up.

The median is even worse.

Sure, but the point is, it's an announcement he's rich and wants a house in Argentina. It's not an announcement of anything to do with his future lifestyle or political beliefs except for what "people familiar with his thinking" say. I guess he could have used a bunch of shell companies, but there are many many possible reasons beyond the ones we're speculating. Maybe he has a big business deal coming in Argentina and wants to make Milei happy, who knows.

I think you mean a $96 purchase for the median American.

Yes, I am bad at counting.

I agree, the median US net worth is not 19 million dollars, after all.

(It also matches intuition -- 0.05% is an amount you can spend every day for almost six years before going bankrupt. Literally the kind of money you can spend on a whim without thinking too much about it. If the average American tells their spouse they dropped 9k$ on a whim (e.g. on a life-sized dinosaur model, or a fancy gaming rig, or a high end vacation), I think it is likely that their spouse would go wtf instead of treating it like Tuesday.)

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