Meta CEO Peter Thiel leaves ‘to focus on the American midterms’
Meta board member Peter Thiel has announced that he is leaving the board of Facebook’s parent company. Thiel wants to focus on influencing the American midterm elections and supporting conservative candidates, according to The New York Times.
Peter Thiel is one of Meta’s longest-serving board members and one of the most prominent conservatives on the Meta board. He is known for being an open supporter of Donald Trump as US president since 2016. The New York Times reports that he has close ties to a number of prominent Republicans and conservatives, including setting up a private dinner between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Donald Trump. Since then, according to The New York Times, Thiel has had a lot of influence on Facebook’s policies around political advertising and its policies on addressing Trump’s offensive and erroneous posts on the platform.
Thiel will retire from Meta to focus on influencing the midterm elections in November, according to The New York Times. He will spend his time supporting a number of conservative candidates who carry forward the political agenda of former President Trump. In the past year, Thiel has become one of the largest donors to the Republican party. He put $10 million into the campaigns of Senate candidates Blake Masters and JD Vance.
Venture investor Peter Thiel has been on Facebook’s board since 2005, when it was still a small start-up, and he was one of the first investors in the company. He is also one of Zuckerberg’s key counselors. Thiel made his money as a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies.