Peter Thiel is retiring from Meta’s board of directors, marking the end of a chapter for one of the company’s earliest investors.
Peter Thiel has a storied history as an investor, backing some of the tech industry’s greatest success stories. He was the first outside investor in Facebook, taking a roughly 10% stake for $500,000 — a stake which brought him more than $1 billion less than a decade later.
Meta has announced that Thiel will not seek reelection at the company’s 2022 Annual Shareholder Meeting in May, bringing his 17 years on the board to an end.
“Peter has been a valuable member of our board and I’m deeply grateful for everything he has done for our company — from believing in us when few others would, to teaching me so many lessons about business, economics, and the world,” Mark Zuckerberg, Meta founder and CEO, said. “Peter is truly an original thinker who you can bring your hardest problems and get unique suggestions. He has served on our board for almost two decades, and we’ve always known that at some point he would devote his time to other interests. I’m grateful he’s served on our board for as long as he has, and I wish him the best in his journey ahead.”
Meanwhile, Bloomberg is reporting that Thiel is stepping down in an effort to distance his pro-Trump political ambitions from Meta, given that his support of Trump has caused problems for the company in the past.
