(San Francisco) Investor Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, largest shareholder of Palantir and outspoken supporter of Donald Trump, will leave Meta’s board of directors, when he had been one of the very first to participate in the financing of Facebook.
Posted at 6:10 p.m.
The social media giant, renamed Meta in the fall, announced on Monday that Peter Thiel, who has been on the board since 2005, will not stand again this year.
According to US media, the investor wants to focus on supporting the campaign of pro-Trump Republican candidates in the US midterm elections, scheduled for next November.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and boss of Meta, said he was “deeply grateful for everything he has done for our company – he believed in us when no one else believed and he taught me a lot on business, on the economy and on the world”.
Billionaire Peter Thiel built his wealth through online payments company PayPal, founded in 1998. He has invested in Airbnb, Affirm, Stripe and SpaceX, among others.
In 2016, he supported Donald Trump, a rare affiliation in the very Democratic region of San Francisco. He gives her $1.25 million and becomes the first openly gay speaker to speak at a Republican convention.
If he remained on the board of directors of Facebook for 17 years, Peter Thiel sold most of his shares in the Californian group, according to Forbes.
“It has been a privilege to work with one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time,” said Mr. Thiel, quoted in the Meta press release.
“Mark Zuckerberg’s intelligence, energy and awareness are immense. His talents will serve Meta well as he leads the company into a new era.”
A comment that does not necessarily fit with the opinions expressed by the businessman, who left for Los Angeles in 2018.
He co-founded Palantir, a specialist in large-scale data analysis, whose software is used in particular by the American intelligence services.
“We share less and less the values of the technology sector”, asserted in September 2020 the co-founder of Palantir Alexander Karp, in the letter presenting his company to the American Stock Exchange.
He fired a few blows against his neighbors Facebook and Google: “We have always refused opportunities to sell or collect data. […] “Others have built their business model doing just that.”
Meta and his boss are going through a reputational crisis that began with the personal data privacy scandals in 2016 and saw a major new twist last fall, with leaked internal documents leaked by a whistleblower .