In a leaked memo, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg defended his Trump-loving board member and early investor Peter Thiel—in the name of intellectual diversity.
A photo of Zuckerberg’s internal message leaked to Hacker News on Wednesday:
Openly gay, anti-college libertarian Thiel’s unpopularity in the Valley is nothing new. He’s known for an inconvenient, incisive contrarianism. Thiel’s $10 million contribution to Hulk Hogan’s suit against Gawker, which bankrupted the gossip site that had outed him years earlier, earned him the enmity of journalists. And his RNC speech was remarkable for the raucous cheers responding to his line “I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican.” It seems his latest offense, however—a $1.25 million donation to the Trump campaign first reported by the New York Times—has sent Palo Alto in search of a safe space.
The reputationally challenged Ellen Pao, who spun a high-profile wrongful termination suit into an advocacy group, has threatened to sever ties with start-up incubator Y Combinator unless CEO Sam Altman fired Thiel from the board. He refused. With the Clinton campaign in its fear-based final sprint, and Thiel prepping for a big Trump-stump in D.C. next week, the “leading public intellectual” has become a pariah.
Zuckerberg’s sticking up for his early investor suggests anti-Thiel fervor in the predominantly center-left Valley had become an unwelcome distraction on Facebook’s Menlo Park campus. Mere months ago, Facebook employees came under fire from conservatives for allegedly censoring right-of-center items from “trending news.”
Facebook’s founder might also have heard something he liked in Purdue president Mitch Daniels’ Sun Valley address on campus illiberalism and troubling challenges to open discourse and intellectual freedom. Facebook can’t be that different from a college in the grip of culture wars, after all.
