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Peter Thiel attributed Trump’s recent support in Silicon Valley in part to Elon Musk’s efforts.
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Thiel told journalist Bari Weiss that Musk was providing “cover” for other tech leaders to support Trump.
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Thiel also said growing frustration over “wokeness” was pushing the industry to the right.
Billionaire Peter Thiel has partially credited Elon Musk with helping other tech leaders feel comfortable publicly supporting newly elected President Donald Trump.
The former CEO of PayPal had a post-election debriefing with journalist Bari Weiss on an episode of her podcast “Honestly” published Thursday.
Thiel, who backed Trump financially in 2016 but said he was forgoing political donations this year, said Musk’s embrace of Trump was crucial in facilitating Silicon Valley’s shift to the right in the 2024 election.
“There was a degree to which it was safer for people to speak out while other people were speaking out,” Thiel said on the podcast.
In the run-up to the election, several Silicon Valley billionaires and business leaders who had previously shunned Trump or remained publicly apolitical came out in support of the former president, including Marc Andreessen, David Sacks and Shaun Maguire, among others.
The industry’s apparent swing toward Trump in the months before the election has prompted more than a hundred venture capitalists, including Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway and Mark Cuban, to express their support for Vice President Kamala Harris.
And while Silicon Valley, long a progressive stronghold, remained solidly Democratic in the November election, Trump saw a notable increase in support in the three counties that make up America’s tech hub, BI previously reported.
Weiss asked Thiel if Tesla’s CEO was “the crucial ingredient” that allowed other business leaders to feel safe supporting the divisive president.
“I think Elon was incredibly important to it,” Thiel said, later adding that Musk “obviously gave people a lot of cover.”
Musk did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
Musk has poured millions of dollars into helping Trump get elected. This week, Trump announced that Musk would take a role in his administration as co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, alongside entrepreneur and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.
But Thiel said the cultural shift in Silicon Valley has been happening for years, as people within the companies increasingly emphasize “political correctness and wokeness.”
“There’s a point where it just became exhausted and a lot of the tech industry’s top founders and CEOs felt comfortable telling me this behind closed doors,” Thiel said.
Thiel characterized the feeling in Silicon Valley as one of growing frustration with “corporate governance” and “how ridiculous it has become to manage these ideologically deranged millennial workers.”
In 2022, Musk, who Thiel once described as “left of center,” described his new foray into conservative politics as an attempt to stop the “woke mind virus.” The company executive moved Tesla’s headquarters from blue state California to red Texas in 2021 and said earlier this year he would move both SpaceX and X to the conservative state.
“At some point Elon changed,” Thiel said. “Some of it is a kind of intellectual straitjacket where you’re not allowed to have ideas, even if you agree with them 80 percent. It’s never enough. You have to be there 100 percent.”
Thiel suggested that Musk’s fierce support of Trump before the election was “incredibly dangerous” and “incredibly courageous.”
“Maybe we can all be a little braver than we would otherwise be,” Thiel said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
