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Wait a minute. Let's keep our eye on the ball. Peter Thiel founded or helped found a number of successful companies, yes. How did this advance the frontier of our understanding of the world? What original research has Thiel done to contribute to our body of scientific knowledge?
I also don't see how his winning a maths competition is relevant. You could almost certainly take the best mathematician alive today ask them a bunch of questions about cutting edge research in, say, chemistry and they would not know the answers. Raw G is no substitute for domain specific knowledge, which as best I can tell Thiel lacks regarding the fields he critiques.
Surely the obvious answer is because smart people can want to do things with their intellect other than maximize their wealth. In general, looking at history, the smartest minds have not been the richest. People like John Nash or Ronald Fisher or Srinivasa Ramanujan did not end up particularly wealthy by the standards of what were possible in their time, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to argue that richer people were smarter.
Science is totally worthless without implementation. Who cares about whether we understand the world in and of itself, what matters is real capabilities. If prayer were more useful than maths in making things happen, we would be praying rather than calculating. Thiel implements, he uses science to make things happen. Making things happen is what we care about, that's why they get the big bucks.
Not all rich people are smart but rich people who start highly successful science-based companies are reasonable sources on discussing the transformative effects of science. They've been there, they've tried transforming science into outcomes and succeeded (which is more than many scientists can say). Maybe Thiel doesn't know so much about quantum chronodynamics, though I expect he's smart enough to learn. But what he does know is what he's talking about. He's not saying 'X-rays scatter according to Thetaman's law', he's not making a technical claim but an implementation claim about cultures of organizations, human resource management, academia, innovation as a broad process.
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