Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who previously supported former President Trump, said the Trump administration was “crazier” and “more dangerous” than he expected, in a recent interview.
Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who co-founded PayPal, has been a vocal supporter and financial advocate for Trump. In an interview with The Atlantic published Thursday, Thiel said he is not giving money to the former president — or any other candidate — in the 2024 presidential campaign.
“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” he said.
Thiel told The Atlantic that he had hoped Trump’s election would force a national reckoning, that someone needed to tear things down before the country could rebuild.
“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” he said.
“It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought,” Thiel continued. “They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was — I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”
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The profile in The Atlantic outlined Thiel’s business ventures and hopes for a different society. He now runs Palantir, a secretive data analytics company.
In 2018, Thiel said Trump’s first year in office did not live up to his expectations, but Trump was “still better than Hillary Clinton or the Republican zombies.” Thiel reportedly stepped away from Trump’s campaign in the months before he lost to President Biden in 2020.
Despite his disappointment that Trump did not usher in a revolution, Thiel said he still wouldn’t call himself a “Never Trumper.”
The CEO said he doesn’t believe the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and he said the former president’s attempts to overturn the results were “not helpful.”
Thiel has a mixed record in his political career, having funded the successful Trump-backed campaign of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), but also the failed Arizona Senate run of Blake Masters.