Peter Thiel will step down from the board of Facebook owner Meta

Billionaire tech investor and PayPal Co-founder Peter Thiel will step down from the board of Facebook owner Meta, the organization declared Monday. Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s longest-serving and most controversial board members, plans to step down from the organization’s board later this year.

Thiel, an early Facebook investor and close comrade of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, won’t represent re-election to the board at the organization’s 2022 annual stockholders’ meeting. He will keep on serving on the board until the annual meeting, the organization said.

Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, has served on the board of the organization, presently known as Meta (FB), starting around 2005, one year after the social network launched. He will serve as a board director until Meta’s annual shareholders meeting, so, at which point he won’t represent re-election. The organization has not yet declared a date for the meeting, which generally happens in May.

Thiel, 54, long a polarizing figure in Silicon Valley, co-founded PayPal (PYPL) and data-analytics firm Palantir Technologies, and is a partner at venture capital firm Founders Fund. Notwithstanding Facebook, he was an early backer of various other notable tech firms, including LinkedIn and (YELP).

Thiel is known for his contrarian views, including investing cash to develop floating cities and encouraging youngsters to skip college. He additionally authored the New York Times bestseller “Zero to One,” in which he contends that monopolies should be the objective for entrepreneurs.

He is likewise known for funding specific controversial efforts. He was an early investor in Clearview AI, a startup that has compiled billions of photographs for facial recognition technology, and he funded a lawsuit by Terry Bollea, prominently known as Hulk Hogan, in 2016 that brought about Gawker Media going bankrupt. Thiel, who is gay, was outed by Gawker’s tech blog, Valleywag, in 2007.

As an early backer of Facebook, Thiel has come to be known as a close adviser and mentor to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Thiel has been on the Facebook board beginning around 2005. The organization has since contacted $1 trillion in market cap and produced more than $117 billion in revenue in 2021. On Wednesday, Facebook gave a first-quarter forecast that severely missed assessments, sending the stock down 26% the next day, its most terrible drop on record.

While Thiel is praised for investing in Zuckerberg when the entrepreneur was only a college kid with a famous website, his residency with the organization has been full of contention. Thiel unloaded an enormous portion of his shares in the organization’s 2012 IPO and all the more presently, and he hasn’t shied away from investing in other start-ups that either contend with Facebook or use its information in unsanctioned ways.

However, his political views have caused the best turmoil. Thiel was an active booster for Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign, even as the Republican candidate was communicating outrageous views on immigration and was confronting various allegations. Thiel talked at the Republican National Convention in July 2016 and, after Trump was elected, acted as the liaison to Silicon Valley, uniting top tech executives for a meeting at Trump Tower.

“I want to start by thanking Peter, because he saw something very early, maybe before we saw it,” Trump said at the meeting in December 2016. “And of course, he’s known for that… he’s ahead of the curve.”

Thiel put $500,000 in thefacebook.com in 2004, becoming the first huge external investor in the fast-growing social networking site that was spreading around college campuses. After a year Zuckerberg renamed the organization Facebook.

Before the Facebook investment, Thiel made his initial fortune as co-founder of PayPal. He then, at that point, moved into investing, first through a mutual funds and afterward as an investor.

Thiel began Founders Fund in 2005 with Ken Howery and Luke Nosek, who he knew from PayPal. The firm has supported organizations including payments platform Stripe, online lender Affirm and room-sharing website Airbnb.

Thiel has likewise made investments that to have apparently tangled with his interest in Facebook. For example, in 2019 he backed a start-up called Clearview AI, which scratches web profiles to make a facial acknowledgment tool that can be used by law enforcement. Facebook advised the organization to quit using its information.

Thiel is chairman and co-founder of Palantir Technologies, an investment that is procured him a fortune. The organization, which opened up to the world in 2020, sells programming that has helped the U.S. government track down terrorists.

While Thiel has been genuinely close-lipped regarding Trump as of late, he’s kept on support Republican contender for different workplaces. He put more than $10 million into a super PAC that is supporting J.D. Vance, who’s running for U.S. Senate in Ohio in 2022.

In the runup to his campaign, Vance procured almost $1 million in pay, for the most part from his Thiel-upheld capital firm and eminences from his bestselling journal “Hillbilly Elegy,” as per Vance’s financial disclosure, which was looked into by CNBC.

In the interim, Blake Masters, chief operating officer at investment firm Thiel Capital, is running for U.S. Senator in Arizona. Politico detailed in April that Thiel cut a $10 million check to a super PAC supporting Masters.

As well as financing Republican campaigns, Thiel has invested in settling scores. He stood out as truly newsworthy in 2016, when it was uncovered he had supported the high-profile legitimate body of evidence by grappler Hulk Hogan against Gawker Media. The online publication had publicly outed Thiel as gay in 2007.

In the beyond two years, Meta has added two Silicon Valley start-up founders – DropBox’s Drew Houston and, all the more as of late, DoorDash’s Tony Xu – to its board, as it tries to invest in e-commerce and virtual and augmented reality technologies.