Peter Thiel: Silicon Valley is a ‘totalitarian place’
Billionaire investor Peter Thiel argues Silicon Valley is is a ‘totalitarian place’ where people are not allowed to have dissenting views.
Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal and was an early Facebook investor, said there are better places than Silicon Valley for technology entrepreneurs to start their businesses.
“Silicon Valley will continue producing great companies but perhaps not quite as many,” Thiel said to FOX Business’ Maria Bartiromo during an exclusive interview at the New York Economic Club.
Silicon Valley has been the motor of innovation for the past 20 years, but Thiel, who spent most of his career there, sees potential in Los Angeles.
“It’s a more diversified economy,” he said. “And I think it has much less of a sense of everyone being on top of one another thinking the same way in one place.”
As one of President Trump’s biggest supporters during the 2016 campaign, Thiel took a political position that was not popular in Silicon Valley.
“Of course I got heat and I don’t want to exaggerate the importance that I think it’s OK to be in a place where most people are liberal or most people have views different from my own,” he said. “I do think there is something different when it goes from a large majority having one way to it being almost unanimous ... because things are never unanimous.”
That said, in Thiel’s opinion, Silicon Valley has created an oppressive environment.
“When people are unanimously on one side, that tells me not that they’ve all figured out the truth but that they are in sort of a totalitarian place, that they are in a one-party state where they are not allowed to have dissenting views,” he said.