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Tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has served on Facebook’s board since 2015, plans to step down, parent company Meta Platforms Inc. said on Monday.
The conservative provocateur who co-founded PayPal Holdings Inc.
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before investing heavily in then-Facebook Inc.
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will not to stand for re-election to the board at the company’s 2022 annual stockholders meeting in May.
Thiel, 54, who strongly supported Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential run, plans to pursue the former president’s political agenda during the 2022 midterm elections and doesn’t want his actions to be a “distraction” for Meta, according to a report in Fortune, citing a person close to Thiel.
Thiel, who invested $500,000 in Facebook in 2004, is co-founder and chairman of Palantir Technologies Inc.
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as well as co-founder of Founders Fund, Thiel Capital and Mithril Capital.
Meta’s 10-person board includes Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, Dropbox Inc.
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CEO Drew Houston and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
“It’s hard to separate the politics from the business conditions when analyzing Peter Thiel’s departure from Meta’s board,” Timothy Hubbard, assistant professor of management at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, said in an email message. “The expertise Peter Thiel gained at Meta might help him work to get social media messages out despite conservative bans from more established online platforms.”
