Billionaire tech investor and PayPal Co-founder Peter Thiel will step down from the board of Facebook owner Meta, the company announced Monday.
Thiel, an early Facebook investor and close confidante of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, will not stand for re-election to the board at the company’s 2022 annual stockholders’ meeting. He will continue to serve on the board until the annual meeting, the company said.
Thiel has been on the Facebook board since 2005. The company has since touched $1 trillion in market cap and generated more than $117 billion in revenue in 2021. On Wednesday, Facebook issued a first-quarter forecast that badly missed estimates, sending the stock down 26% the following day, its worst drop on record.
While Thiel is lauded for investing in Zuckerberg when the entrepreneur was just a college kid with a popular website, his tenure with the company has been fraught with controversy. Thiel dumped a huge portion of his shares in the company’s 2012 IPO and more shortly thereafter, and he hasn’t shied away from investing in other start-ups that either compete with Facebook or use its data in unsanctioned ways. But hey, the dude is an investor, not Facebook fan boy. If he wants to make money other ways, let him.
