Peter Thiel, never one to keep a low profile, made his most recent set of waves with reports that he is prepared to decamp from Silicon Valley to more benign haunts in Los Angeles along with several of his companies. His rationale, according to a piece in the Wall Street Journal, is that the Valley is now a politically intolerant culture, left-leaning in the extreme and to the exclusion of any contrarian viewpoints; any culture so unable to consider alternative viewpoints, the thinking continues, will stifle innovation. Thiel also is among the voices warning that the Valley is unprepared for a coming tsunami of regulations from Washington, which will undermine its ability to lead tech’s next wave.

Over the past decade, Thiel has proven to be a news magnet. He gets attention in the tech world much as Donald Trump gets attention in the political realm. Thiel speaks without a filter, often makes outrageous comments, and takes positions at odds with the elite—most notably his full-throated endorsement of Trump and a keynote at the Republican National Convention, when most of the technorati were card-carrying NeverTrumpers.

In this case, though, Thiel’s criticisms are themselves newsworthy. He may be an imperfect messenger, but his message had best be heard.

The size and scale of technology companies now surpasses that of most of the industrial, energy, and finance companies that dominated the American economy during the 20th century. The Valley’s close-knit groups of funders, founders, CEOs, and listed companies seem to think they can remain both insular and dominant without either government or social backlash. That was always far-fetched, and is now utterly absurd. It’s one thing for renegades to reinvent the operating system for society. But once those renegades become the rulers, the rest of society will—and should—demand a greater say in how these technologies and services shape our lives and consume our time, energy, and money.

Once upon a time—and in Valley-land, there is a once-upon-a-time—the tech ecosystem represented not just a small group of companies and funders, but also a relatively small slice of the nation’s economy. The early years of Apple, HP, and Intel may be looked at fondly and mythologized. But as recently as 1985, there was only one Valley company in the top 100 of the Fortune 500 list: Hewlett-Packard at No. 60. Xerox, based elsewhere but with a strong research presence in Palo Alto, was No. 38. IBM, based in New York, was then the largest tech company in the world. It clocked in at No. 6, and its rigid corporate culture and focus on selling to other corporations were seen as the antithesis to the Valley’s startup, countercultural vibe.

Even with the internet boom of the 1990s, the ethos of the Valley could rightly claim to be separate, new, and different, propagated by a band of misfits and upstarts, libertarian and utopian. Companies such as HP were more corporate and traditional, but the predominant meme was not just liberal and left, but dismissive of government, avid about a future where technology liberated all, and seemingly bemused by the vast wealth that these new products and services generated.

Today, however, some of those companies are more dominant than even the robber barons of old. At his apex, the oil billionaire J. Paul Getty was the richest man in the world, worth about $11 billion, adjusted for inflation. Today, there are 53 tech billionaires in California alone, and 78 in the United States; Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates (both of course in Seattle), and Mark Zuckerberg each have fortunes in excess of $50 billion. Peter Thiel has an estimated $2.5 billion.