Billionaire tech investor and Trumpian firebrand Peter Thiel will be stepping down from Meta's (NASDAQ: FB) board, the company formerly known as Facebook announced last Monday.
His departure ends a nearly two-decade-long relationship with the pivotal social network, whose shares plummeted by a record 26% recently in the wake of disappointing first-quarter projections.
Theil's exit is seemingly unrelated to that outcome. A source told Bloomberg that the billionaire is leaving to ensure that his political activities don't prove an unwelcome distraction.
Thiel will remain in his seat until Meta's annual shareholder meeting, where he will not stand for re-election, said the company.
After which, Thiel will devote the majority of his energies in supporting the Senate runs of pro-Trump candidates Blake Masters of Arizona and JD Vance of Ohio, according to Bloomberg.
Thiel first cut a $500,000 check for what was then Facebook back in 2005, when the budding social network was confined to college campuses.
Since then, through his role on the board and his relationship with Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, Thiel has helped shape the ethos of today's Facebook, which currently has a $1 trillion market cap and 1.93 billion daily active users.
"Peter is truly an original thinker who you can bring your hardest problems and get unique suggestions," said Zuckerberg in a statement. "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."
Theil's other interests, namely his ardent and active support for former President Donald Trump, have become a significant source of controversy for Facebook critics and employees.
Thiel helped Donald Trump ascend to the presidency in 2016 through his considerable donations and his speech at the Republican National Convention.
He then worked on Trump's transition team, nominating former Thiel Capital Chief of Staff Michael Kratsios as White House chief technology officer position, a position in which Kratsios served until last year.
Beyond that, Theil also acted as the Trump administration's informal ambassador to Silicon Valley, arranging a meeting between tech's top-brass and Trump at his eponymous tower back in 2016.
For some, Theil's close ties to Trump are made all the more concerning by the billionaire's close advisory relationship with Mark Zuckerberg. The Facebook chief defended Thiel in an October 2016 internal memo as employee complaints mounted.
"We can't create a culture that says it cares about diversity and then excludes almost half the country because they back a political candidate," said Zuckerberg in the memo. The statement more than reflects on Meta's currently ambiguous policies on content moderation.
Reportedly, Thiel helped steer Zuckerberg to make the controversial decision not to fact check political advertising in the run-up to the 2020 election, a policy some allege unduly benefited Trump.
Meanwhile, Thiel's political ambitions have hardly cooled. It's worth noting that his two favored candidates, the aforementioned Vance and Masters, have close financial ties to the tech billionaire.
Masters currently acts as chief operating officer at Thiel Capital, while Vance, according to disclosures reviewed by CNBC, earned a great deal of his $1 million income through his own Thiel-backed VC fund.
Thiel got his start as one of the co-founders of PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL), along with Elon Musk and the rest of the so-called "PayPal Mafia" that has since gone on to dominate Silicon Valley.
He has since plied his trade as a hedge fund manager and a venture capitalist, to the tune of billions. He earned $1.1 billion through the liquidation of the majority of his stake in Facebook upon the social network's IPO in 2012, although he could have earned considerably more had he sat on those shares.
Thiel is also co-founder and chairperson of Palantir Technologies (NYSE: PLTR). The company sells data solutions to government entities used primarily to track down suspected terrorists. It first went public in 2020 and currently has a market cap of $27.79 billion.