It goes deeper than that. All publicly traded corporations are morally obligated by the Friedman Doctrine [0] to do stuff like this. If something returns value for shareholders (and monopolies do) then a CEO must do it. This is how the whole system is supposed to work. Of course, there's no reason that capitalism must to work this way, but this is the toxic form of capitalism that we've unwittingly chosen. Thiel just gave a playbook for implementing this in the tech space.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine