April 14, 2026 Tech elites are enriching themselves by plundering STEM institutions—and offering researchers scraps. Peter Thiel and his ilk are starving public science.(Eva Marie Uzcategui / Getty) Silicon Valley would not exist without government-funded research. Foundational technologies, including the semiconductor and the Internet, emerged from Cold War–era military research programs. As graduate students at Stanford, Larry Paige and Sergey Brin relied on funding from the National Science F...