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One summer morning in 2019, MP Matt Gaetz was having breakfast at the Los Angeles mansion of billionaire investor Peter Thiel, who would become one of the Republican Party’s leading donors. At the time, Thiel was locked in a future debate over whether or not to leave the Facebook board. Aware of Thiel’s love for Shakespeare, Gaetz (R-Fla.) Amusingly christened him Hamlet.
Like many Republicans, Gaetz saw the social media giant as increasingly monopolistic and dangerous. He and another guest, businessman and former right-wing provocateur Chuck Johnson, encouraged Thiel to leave the company. But Thiel backed away and told the couple he was hoping to change it from the inside, according to two people familiar with the conversation.
Last month, Thiel finally gave up on social media. formally dissolving one of the most powerful associations in Silicon Valley history. As Facebook’s first external investor, longest-serving board member and close advisor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg since he launched the company as a Harvard sophomore in 2004, Thiel has helped change the direction of the company’s products. of which billions serve.
Thiel’s ambition to serve as an architect of the American right had grown increasingly at odds with his position on the board of one of the movement’s main enemies, a political change that fitted with his own growing alienation. of Silicon Valley.
Peter Thiel will leave the Facebook board to focus on the mid-2022 sessions
Reports at the time said Thiel left the Facebook board to focus on politics, including a list of 2022 congressional candidates lined up with former President Donald Trump.
But interviews with members of his inner circle indicate that his departure took years, driven by a growing philosophical rift between Thiel and Facebook, as conservatives felt uncomfortable with the tech industry’s desire to control speech in line. Thiel, according to his relatives, lost the desire to serve as a Facebook advocate as his political aspirations matured.
This story is based on interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with Thiel’s thought, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe private conversations.
Since March 2021, Thiel has injected more than $ 20 million into 16 political campaigns, including running for the nearby Ohio Senate. Associate JD Vance won the Republican nomination last month, in part by attacking Big Tech and social media censorship. Thiel has also donated at least $ 13.5 million to acolyte Blake Masters, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Arizona who serves as president of Thiel’s personal foundation and has positioned himself as an opponent of Big Tech.
New reports show that Thiel has focused on transforming American culture and funding its cultural wars through what its partners call “anti-awakening” business ventures, including a right-wing film festival, a gay dating for conservatives founded by a former ally of the Trump administration and a company, Strive Asset Management, that “will push CEOs away from environmental, social and political causes,” said Vivek Ramaswamy, co-founder of the company, such as the oil companies, “which are committed to reducing production to meet environmental goals.”
There are more such investments, people said, though Thiel himself is unsure of the end of the game.
“Peter deeply believes that there is a great opportunity to create a parallel economy,” said Ramaswamy, a former biotechnology CEO and author of “Woke, Inc .: Inside America’s Social Justice Scam.”
“Serving Americans who are not affected by American companies today would be the backbone of the next generation of major companies, and almost no one is seriously looking for that opportunity,” he said.
The radicalization of JD Vance
Thiel’s growing political influence reflects that of another Silicon Valley billionaire, Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed libertarian who marries. opinions are increasingly right-wing to its 94 million followers on Twitter, as it finalizes its agreement to buy the social network. The men are not close — Thiel ousted Musk when they both ran PayPal — but they have aligned themselves more politically, often echoing the rhetoric of others, criticizing “socially responsible” investment and expressing his concern for control of Big Tech speech.
They share a common friend of the PayPal era, David Sacks, who has examined people interested in political opportunities with both billionaires, according to one of the people. Thiel is excited about Musk using Twitter, said two associates.
Thiel and Musk may herald the rise of a new generation of tech billionaires, pushing their deep pockets and ideologies different from the companies that made a fortune building a new version of the American right. It is a powerful group that has the potential to unite a growing generation of political leaders, transforming both the GOP and Silicon Valley.
During Trump’s presidency, new reports show that Thiel’s relationship with Facebook became increasingly strained, plagued by conflicts that made him feel that the company was acting against his values, according to four people. In a 2021 talk with former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Thiel criticized Facebook for supporting “awakened politics” and “displacing” President Trump’s account.
“Since at least 2018, he has been very concerned about Facebook. He was uncomfortable with how they were using their monopolistic power,” said another acquaintance with his thoughts. “But he was reluctant to leave because he felt he could do more, affect change more, from within.”
In 2022, Thiel was convinced: his change would be made from the outside.
Thiel turned down interview requests. Facebook referred The Post to Zuckerberg’s public comments about Thiel’s departure from the board. “Peter has been a valuable member of our board and I am deeply grateful for everything he has done for our business, from believing in us when few others would, to teaching me so many lessons about business, economics and the world”. Zuckerberg said in a press release.
Thiel has always been an atypical one between the staff and the board of Facebook, largely liberal. A self-proclaimed libertarian homosexual and a German immigrant who came to the United States as a child, he earned his initial fortune in Silicon Valley by co-founding the PayPal payment processor in 1998. He invested $ 500,000 in Facebook in 2004. when Zuckerberg still he was a student at Harvard.
He was also an early participant and enthusiast of cultural wars. As a graduate student at Stanford University, he founded the right-wing newspaper on the Stanford Review campus, which published articles calling liberal professors secret and blatant Marxists. against the inclusion of non-white authors in the school curriculum, according to journalist Max Chafkin, author of Thiel’s biography, “The Contrarian.”
However, Thiel was long considered the most influential member of Facebook’s board, giving Zuckerberg opinions that went against other top-level directors, said three of the people.
“Mark heard it,” one of the people said. “Mark appreciated the opposite impulse. Peter defended a diversity of opinion on the platform and Mark defended a diversity of opinion on the board.
And that of Thiel influence can be heard throughout the company. In his best-selling 2014 book, “Zero to One,” he argued that companies should strive to make such a unique product a monopoly, while entrepreneurs consolidate power to run their businesses as monarchies. . Zuckerberg seemed to heed these lessons, several people said, from the structure of Facebook’s board, which gives the CEO most of the voting and final control, to his aggressive efforts to buy or copy competitors. nascent, a strategy that has led to accusations. that the company is a monopoly. (Facebook denies these allegations.)
For years, Thiel acted as a bridge builder with the Conservatives, especially in the spring of 2016, after tech site Gizmodo reported that a small group of employees were intentionally blocking the right-wing media from trending topics, a feature which is used to show popular news about the world. platform. That summer, Thiel helped counter liberal prejudice charges through a closed-door meeting between Zuckerberg and prominent conservative politicians and editors, including Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson.
Some Facebook executives thought Thiel was outdoing himself to help his future political allies. Those tensions would explode later that summer, when Thiel donated $ 1.25 million to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and spoke in support of the Republican national convention.
The move put the investor on a collision course with members of Facebook’s Democratic board and the Liberal employee base. Following Thiel’s convention speech, he received an email from a board member, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, who called the decision a “catastrophically bad trial.” Hastings declined to comment.
Feeling attacked, Thiel shared the email with Johnson, who later leaked it to the New York Times, according to two of the people. Thiel’s leak caused a fracture and a sense of betrayal within the board, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Thiel’s support for Trump, along with comments from a book co-authored with David Sacks that “a charge of multicultural rape may indicate nothing more than a late lament” and that some charges of rape are “seductions that are then lament “- he shouted. within Facebook during election season, but Zuckerberg continued to defend his advisor. (Thiel apologized for the comments.)
“We can’t create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half of the country because they support a …