Peter Thiel Defends His Most Contrarian Move
Yet: Supporting Trump, by David Streitfeld, 10/29/16
News of Peter Thiel’s donation in
support of Donald J. Trump’s presidential bid outraged much of Silicon
Valley.
SAN FRANCISCO — Peter Thiel likes to
take the path not taken. He has paid students to drop out of college, thinks
Silicon Valley is overrated, backed a plan to build cities on the high seas and
helped propel an electronic form of money into general use. His contrarian
approach to investing and to life has made him rich and celebrated. It took something truly conventional
— donating money to a presidential candidate — to incite demands for his
banishment.
Two weeks ago, Mr.
Thiel revealed that he was donating $1.25 million to support the election of Donald J. Trump. As these things go, it was a small gift. Dustin Moskovitz,
a founder of Facebook, is giving tens of millions to support Hillary Clinton. But
the news made Mr. Thiel a pariah in much of the tech community.
He was accused of promoting
racism and intolerance. There were
demands that Facebook drop him from its board of directors and that Silicon
Valley’s leading start-up incubator, Y Combinator, sever ties with him.
Emotions and accusations raged on Twitter.
“I was surprised by the intensity,”
Mr. Thiel said. “This is one of the few times I was involved in something that
was not a fringe effort but was mainstream. Millions of people are backing
Trump. I did not appreciate quite how polarizing the election would be in
Silicon Valley and elsewhere.”
On Monday, Mr. Thiel plans to defend
his position in a speech and then a question-and-answer session with reporters
at the National Press Club in Washington. For the entrepreneur, who secretly
funded the lawsuit
that brought down the gossip website
Gawker, it is a particularly surprising
venue.
In an interview on Friday, he
outlined his thinking. “Ideally, this will have the give-and-take of debate,”
he said. “Obviously, I’ll get some very tough questions about Trump. But I
thought the best way to advance the discussion was not to have some completely
contrived format. The future of this country depends on us engaging with the
tough questions.”
One of the things he will try to do
is underline his support for Trump the candidate while distancing himself from
the behavior of Trump the man. He believes it is possible to separate the two.
“The millions of people who vote for
Trump are not doing it because of the worst things he said or did,” Mr. Thiel
said. “That’s ridiculous. The Americans who are voting for Trump are doing it
because they judge the situation of the country to be urgent. We’re at such a
crucial point that you have to overlook personal characteristics.”
Mr. Thiel has been an important
player in Silicon Valley since the first dot-com boom, but he has recently
taken on a much more public role. He was born in Germany and came to the United
States as an infant when his father, a chemical engineer, found work here. He
was raised in Silicon Valley and went to Stanford, where he developed the views
in his first book, “The Diversity Myth,” about the multiculturalism debate on
campuses, written with the entrepreneur David O. Sacks.
In 1998, Mr. Thiel helped found the
online payments company PayPal, an immediate success. He was the first outside
investor in Facebook. Forbes estimates his net worth at $2.7 billion. Last
year, he became a part-time partner at Y Combinator, a loosely defined advisory
position.
A handful of others in Silicon
Valley have similar investing track records. Where Mr. Thiel really separates
himself from his peers is his skepticism that Silicon Valley is building a
better world for all. His investment firm, Founders Fund, used to begin its
online manifesto with the complaint, “We wanted flying cars; instead we got 140
characters,” a reference to Twitter. Now it says simply, “What happened to the
future?”
San Francisco, Manhattan and
Washington, D.C., are doing well, but the presidential campaign has laid bare
the angst of many other places. Feelings of decline are rampant. “Most of the
millennials have lower expectations than their baby boomer parents,” Mr. Thiel
said. “Where I differ from others in Silicon Valley is in thinking that you
can’t fence yourself off. If it continues, it will ultimately be bad for
everybody.”
The polls have been saying Mrs.
Clinton is likely to win. If that happens, “there will be a very big need to
push back on the sort of happy but misleading consensus about things,” Mr.
Thiel said. “There will be an important role for me and others to somehow play
in speaking truth to power.”
To an extent, that is. “It would be
a mistake and inappropriate to instantly demonize Hillary and to try and
sabotage her presidency,” he said. That would be repeating what happened in
2008, when the Republican Party did exactly that to President Obama.
That is the larger discussion Mr.
Thiel intends to be involved in. Another, more local discussion is already
underway about his
role in Silicon Valley. “By lending his image, his voice,
his influence and substantial capital to Trump, Thiel isn’t simply exercising
his legal right to vote: He is fueling and enabling racism, sexism, sexual
assault, violence and tyranny,” Arlan Hamilton of Backstage Capital, a Los
Angeles venture firm, wrote
in a blog post.
She said she turned down an
investment of $500,000 — a huge sum for a small firm like Backstage — because
of the investor’s ties to Mr. Thiel. Ms. Hamilton did not identify the investor
or respond to an email.
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of
Facebook, defended the company’s association with Mr. Thiel, emphasizing that
it did not endorse his views — and much less Mr. Trump’s — but was striving to
be inclusive toward those whose values differed from its own. Critics noted
that if diversity was such a cherished value in Silicon Valley, why wasn’t
there more of it?
Mr. Thiel said he agreed that there
was a point where views became unacceptable, but argued that he was on the
right side of the line. “The line cannot or should not be at
a point where you’re excommunicating half the country,” he said. “Some fringe
views I hope we can tolerate. Some fringe views are beyond the pale.” He said
no one at Facebook or Y Combinator had asked him to censor himself, and he did
not consider stepping down from either post.
The donation to the Trump campaign
proved much more contentious in Silicon Valley than the revelation in May that
Mr. Thiel had secretly funded a lawsuit to kill Gawker, which revealed in 2007
that he was gay. Many in Silicon Valley were sympathetic to Mr. Thiel’s
actions. When Gawker.com was shut down in
August, Mr. Thiel said he had one final thought: “Good riddance.”
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