For Trump’s Republicans
Longtime investor Thiel leaves Facebook
2/8/2022 4:06 am
When Mark Zuckerberg founded the startup Facebook in the summer of 2004, Peter Thiel was the first investor. The German-born tech billionaire has been on the company’s board of directors since 2005. Because of his political views, the Trump supporter is increasingly controversial on the board. Now he is announcing his retirement.
Investor Peter Thiel is resigning from the board of directors of Facebook parent company Meta. Meta announced that Thiel, who has been on the board since 2005, will no longer run. It is expected that he will leave the board after the shareholders’ meeting in May. According to US media reports, the investor wants to focus on its support of the campaigns of Republican pro-Trump candidates in the US midterm elections scheduled for November.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said he was “deeply grateful for everything he (Thiel) has done for our company – he believed in us when no one else believed, and he taught me a lot about the business, the economy and taught the world”. Thiel was the first investor to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Facebook.
Thiel again said: “It was a privilege to work with one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time”. The investor had sold most of the Facebook shares at a large profit since his early entry.
The German-born billionaire Thiel founded his wealth with the online payment service provider PayPal, founded in 1998. Since then, he has invested in the rental platform Airbnb and the space company SpaceX from Tesla founder Elon Musk. He is also the largest shareholder of the data analysis company Palantir, whose customers include the US secret services.
However, Thiel has increasingly distanced himself from the mostly democratic founders in Silicon Valley. In 2016, he endorsed future Republican US President Donald Trump. He donated $1.25 million to his campaign and became the first openly gay speaker to speak at a Republican convention.
Thiel’s departure comes at a difficult time for Meta. The company’s share price was after disappointing quarterly results collapsed last week – Within hours, around 200 billion dollars in market value were destroyed. Meta is also struggling with scandals about data protection and the suspected adverse effects of its business model on society worldwide.