Silicon Valley billionaire and right-wing activist Peter Thiel is leaving the Meta Platforms (FB) board at the company’s next annual meeting, the company said in a statement.
Thiel was an early investor in what was then called Facebook and has served on the board since 2005.
He plans to focus on electing Republican candidates who support former president Trump’s agenda, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal reported.
Thiel is also the former CEO of PayPal which was created in a merger of Thiel’s Confinity and Elon Musk’s X.com in 2000. PayPal (PYPL) was later sold to eBay which subsequently spun it out as a separate company in 2015.
A substantial number of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs worked with Thiel at PayPal becoming known as the PayPal Mafia.
Among the companies they helped found or fund are Musk’s Tesla (TSLA), LinkedIn purchased by Microsoft (MSFT) and YouTube purchased by Alphabet (GOOGL).
Thiel is also a co-founder of Palantir (PLTR). a data analytics company that sells its software to governments for counter-terrorism and fraud investigation purposes, among others.
Thiel supported Trump in 2016 and spoke at the Republican convention, telling the delegates "Of course, every American has a unique identity...I am proud to be gay. I am proud to be a Republican. But most of all I am proud to be an American.”
In 2018 he left the Bay Area for Los Angeles. Palantir moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Colorado in 2020.
Shares of Meta fell $12.18, or 5.1% Monday. The stock has lost nearly a third of its value since reporting disappointing earnings last week, which it blamed in part on Apple's (AAPL) introduction of user-friendly privacy settings in its latest iPhone operating system.
