Peter Thiel Is Taking His Talents to Mar-a-Lago

It was remarkably civil, as conscious uncouplings go: Peter Thiel, in announcing his departure from the board of the company formerly known as Facebook, praised his longtime friend and mentee Mark Zuckerberg as “one of the great entrepreneurs of our time.” Zuckerberg in turn called Thiel, the first outside investor in Meta Platforms Inc. and a board member since 2005, “truly an original thinker.”

That last bit is indisputable. Although Thiel and Zuckerberg are close, Thiel had hardly made a secret of his disdain for Zuckerberg’s social network. The company’s first outside investor sold the majority of his holdings almost as soon as he was able to. As I reported in my book, The Contrarian, Thiel also amplified some of the company’s loudest critics. “My generation was promised colonies on the moon,” Thiel told a gathering of Facebook employees shortly after the company went public. “Instead we got Facebook.” He funded political candidates who attacked Zuckerberg, and he invested in Clearview AI Inc., which scraped Facebook data to create its facial recognition database, in violation of its terms of service. Only days before his departure from the board, the New York Times reported that a Thiel-backed cybersecurity company, Boldend, had claimed in a client presentation that, for a time, it had possessed the ability to hack WhatsApp, the Meta-owned secure messaging platform.

That Zuckerberg, who controls Meta through a class of super-voting shares, mostly ignored this disloyalty, and that Thiel looked past his own concerns about Zuckerberg’s company, is a testament to an uneasy alliance. Thiel, as one of the most prominent early backers of President Donald Trump, helped smooth relations between Zuckerberg and an administration that was sometimes hostile to the tech industry. Meanwhile, Thiel’s board seat and his status as one of Zuckerberg’s closest advisers became his most important credential and source of power.

It’s possible that Zuckerberg simply got fed up with Thiel and suggested he resign. He’d done so before, after an email exchange between Thiel and another board member was leaked to the New York Times in 2017. (Thiel refused; Zuckerberg backed down.) It’s also possible that Meta’s recent struggles—the company’s stock price fell by 26% in a single day in early February and has since fallen further—changed Thiel’s calculus. The scrupulously Machiavellian investor may have concluded, finally, that a Meta board seat just isn’t what it used to be.

In any case, Thiel’s departure from Facebook marks the end of an era, both for the company and for the hellscape of privacy violations and misinformation it helped create. Thiel, who came to tech from activist right-wing politics, fashioned an Ayn Randian business philosophy that was reflected in his entrepreneurial endeavors (online payments company PayPal and defense contractor Palantir) and in his investment in Facebook. Thiel’s ideas—in particular, his focus on hypergrowth and creative destruction, or as the early Facebook motto put it, “Move fast and break things”—helped make Zuckerberg one of the wealthiest people in the world and cemented Thiel’s influence.

After 2016, when Thiel played a crucial role in the election of Trump, he steered Facebook toward a hands-off misinformation policy that benefited the president and the nationalistic movement that sprung up around him. Even as it became clear that Facebook’s approach was feeding QAnon adherents, vaccine skeptics, and other extremists, and even as Facebook did little to stop social media that fueled ethnic violence in Ethiopia and Myanmar, Thiel defended the company as a check on government overreach. “I will take all the QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories every day over the Ministry of Truth,” he said at a conference. As is often the case with Thiel’s barbs, the comment was well-delivered nonsense. Facebook doesn’t need an Orwellian ministry of truth—and no one is arguing that it does. It needs to do more to stop amplifying and profiting from extremism.

But Thiel’s comments never went past backhanded praise for the ideologies that led to the failed Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Now he’s supporting the far right more directly. Since announcing his departure from Meta, Thiel has indicated he’ll be focusing his attention on electing Trump-aligned candidates in November’s midterms. These include two close associates running for Senate seats: J.D. Vance in Ohio and Blake Masters in Arizona. Both are promising a Trumpist restoration and have claimed that the 2020 election results were fraudulent. They also promise hard-line immigration policies, an end to what they see as left-wing cultural hegemony, and opposition to Covid-19 mitigation mandates. (Masters has referred to masking in schools as “child abuse”; Vance has warned of the “tyranny of Dr. Fauci

Thiel, who’s spent $10 million on each race so far, has indicated a willingness to spend money on other contests as well, including that of Harriet Hageman, the Wyoming Republican challenging Liz Cheney over her decision to condemn Trump for his actions on Jan. 6. Someone such as Thiel, who styles himself as a free-thinking nationalist, might look at Cheney’s decision to break with her party and vote to impeach the former president over a failed insurrection and see a glimmer of heroism. Instead, at a Hageman fundraiser held at Thiel’s Miami home that featured a guest appearance by Donald Trump Jr., Thiel called Cheney treasonous

If nothing else, Thiel is a master provocateur. Several years ago he attracted attention by using the same slur, without evidence, to characterize Google. Liberals have responded with predictable concern and some outrage. A billionaire tech investor is now investing in candidates who are attacking the legitimacy of the world’s oldest democracy. That’s potentially disturbing, though it also could mean that Thiel is undermining his own relevance. Josh Marshall, editor of the left-leaning Talking Points Memo, joked on Twitter that Thiel had left Meta “to spend more time with fascism

No one should write off Thiel, who’s proven, again and again, to be capable of bending the worlds of business and politics to make himself rich. On the other hand, it’s worth pointing out that Thiel’s candidates, unlike his tech investments, remain marginal. In early February his Ohio super PAC released an internal poll of likely primary voters showing Vance in the high single digits. In Arizona a recent poll put Masters even lower, at only 6% among primary voters, compared with 25% for Mark Brnovich, the state’s attorney general.

Thiel and his candidates are now courting the former president, who has yet to make an endorsement in either race and could potentially vault Masters and Vance to near the top of their primary fields. But this means that Thiel’s political ambitions depend, once again, on the whims of Trump. In this light, his activism looks less like an attempt to impose some galaxy-brained ideology on the U.S. and more like a craven play to take advantage of the current populist moment. Among Thiel’s early post-Facebook ventures is an online dating site for the MAGA-set, the Right Stuff, founded by a senior Trump aide.

Beyond his activities in the partisan romance sector, Thiel’s political jockeying could help ensure that billionaire-friendly policies continue for the foreseeable future. Vance and Masters have both promised to crack down on Big Tech—no big deal for Thiel now that he’s off Meta’s board—and they’ve also argued that the government should back off on regulating crypto, a field where Thiel has been active

As for Meta: For all the company’s struggles of late, the de-Thielification process may offer it something akin to a fresh start, a chance to move on from “move fast and break things.” Facebook and its sister apps Instagram and WhatsApp together claim more than 3 billion users worldwide and still hold sway over global culture and politics. If he wanted to, Zuckerberg could acknowledge that dealing with misinformation doesn’t mean choosing between QAnon and Orwell—and he could take extremist social-media-powered movements more seriously, even in countries where no one has a big advertising budget. He could also take privacy more seriously.

Of course, there’s also the Thiel path, which involves the single-minded pursuit of market dominance. That’s worked for Zuckerberg before. But Thiel’s pivot to Florida signals that the strategy may have finally found its limit.