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Netflix's CEO offered to resign from Facebook's board in 2016, citing his fellow board member Peter Thiel's support of Donald Trump:
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings — who called his fellow board member Thiel's support of Trump "catastrophically bad judgment" in an email leaked to the Times — also offered to resign over his disagreement with Thiel, according to a Wall Street Journal report published Thursday. Sources told WSJ that Facebook CEO Zuckerberg declined Hastings' offer to resign. Facebook declined to comment on the matter to Business Insider.
Now, Thiel may resign from Facebook's board instead in the midst of packing up and leaving the Bay area:
The founder of PayPal and a prominent investor in Silicon Valley, Thiel is reportedly moving his investment firms Thiel Capital and Thiel Foundation out of the Bay Area and into Los Angeles this year, according to WSJ.
In L.A., Thiel is also reportedly planning to build "a right-leaning media outlet to foster discussion and community around conservative topics." Thiel bankrolled the lawsuits that eventually forced Gawker Media into bankruptcy, and has been trying to buy Gawker's now-defunct flagship site.
Although Thiel has called Silicon Valley a "one-party state", in the 2016 Presidential election, Hillary Clinton beat President Trump 72 percent to 22 percent in Los Angeles County.
The Guardian also has an article about Thiel's involvement in New Zealand.
Also at Ars Technica, The Mercury News, LA Times, and Vanity Fair.
Related: Peter Thiel Acquires NZ Citizenship and Large Property
Everything Wrong with Peter Thiel's Doomsday Survival Plan
University Could Lose Millions From "Unethical" Research Backed by Peter Thiel
"Black Hole" of Accountability for Drug Trials Flouting FDA Oversight?
Peter Thiel Makes a Bid for Gawker.com
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday February 16 2018, @03:35PM (12 children)
So many people buy into the notion that the wealthy earned their wealth, and merit such good fortune for being smarter than the average bear. Some of the worst deluded are the rich idiots themselves. A strange finding is that the more incompetent a person actually is, the more they think they're such geniuses. Trump is of course a stellar example of that. So Thiel being an avid Trump supporter is disappointing to say the least, but not particularly surprising.
There has to be a lot of rich morons for the Republican Party and their gerrymandering, voter suppression, propaganda, and other damaging, cheating tactics to have the financial backing that it does. I've been wondering who these rich fools are. So Thiel is one of them, eh? Republicans are seriously overrepresented in the House. Several states should have sent more Democrats than Republicans to the House, yet thanks to the most severe gerrymandering pulled off in a generation, the "packing" and "cracking" down to the level of the individual house, the Republican representatives outnumber the Democratic ones by 2 to 1 or more in those states. And a guy like Thiel probably thinks that is good.
Another bad problem is the 2 party lock. Democrats are no saints either, but 3rd parties have almost no chance of winning an election. Which of the 2 parties has really embraced the plank of cleaning up Wall Street? Neither.
The rampant rule breaking, cheating and theft that goes unpunished, unchallenged, and even unmentioned is very corrosive. Mainsteam media's complicity is due in part to the huge technological change that has all but destroyed the old system of selling printed copies of newspapers and magazines, and their failure to adapt. Technology has made the dissemination of information far, far cheaper, but instead of embracing wholeheartedly this vast gift to humanity, the idiots cry that artists will starve and journalism will die, and fight the change and show no scruples in their embrace of dirty tactics, the old "the end justifies the means" fallacy, hardly pausing to realize that the end they really seek is the rolling back of technological advance to the 1980s, and that is evil. It would hurt a lot of people to give up the Internet. No print newspaper or record store full of stamped audio CDs is worth that.
That Thiel is (or was?) on the boards of new wave companies that have embraced the Internet better than most-- well, just another piece of evidence in the mountainous pile he has created that shows he's an idiot. Los Angeles may be highly Democratic, but it is also the home of Hollywood, one of the most entrenched special interests fighting the hardest to stop the Internet. I find the ongoing lovefest between Democrats and Hollywood a bit puzzling. The Democrats are all for the people, except when Hollywood feels it is against their interests, then the Democrats are all for Hollywood.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday February 16 2018, @04:32PM (2 children)
I find the ongoing lovefest between Democrats and Hollywood a bit puzzling. The Democrats are all for the people, except when Hollywood feels it is against their interests, then the Democrats are all for Hollywood.
This is just another good example of the old saying that goes something like, "politics makes for strange bedfellows". Another one is probably the example I brought up yesterday about authoritarian, Islamist Turkey being allied to the US and part of NATO.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Friday February 16 2018, @06:57PM (1 child)
The California Democrats are basically owned by Feinstein, and while she has a few good points, I normally think of her as a Republican in masquerade. And Feinstein is owned by Hollywood.
Also, about as many famous actors are "liberal" as are "conservative". So there's no problem with finding mouthpieces for either party. And Feinstein can justify many of her positions as "supporting local industries", though she's rarely that explicit. She usually either doesn't say why she's taken a position or lies about it, or even lies about what her position is. (Well, at least whoever responds to messages to her lies about what her position is. I was told she was considering her position about something after she's voted on it in committee.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @11:18PM
Wrongo. Di Fi is a pure Willie Brown Machine democrat and has been since her days on the SF Board of Supes. Her only position, like all good machine politicians, is an outstretched palm. Rumor has it her childhood hero was Chicago's Dick "Da Boss" Daley.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Friday February 16 2018, @05:15PM (4 children)
There's all that, but the reason why Thiel will burn in the lowest and hottest levels of Hell, is Palantir.
The rich don't suffer the same invasions of privacy that the poor do, and that fuckface believes he can suck up all information and create his "Eye of Horus". Evil fucker even named the technology after Sauron's (The epitome of all evil) intelligence gathering device.
The man doesn't deserve to breathe on this planet.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16 2018, @06:55PM
Met one of the founders of Palantir, he swore up and down it wasn't about creepy surveillance like the name implied.
Supposedly he got out of that group when he realized that is exactly what it was all about. Seriously, so many techies just presume things will be above board while handing the keys of the kingdom to the snakes.
(Score: 4, Informative) by HiThere on Friday February 16 2018, @07:10PM
The Palantir was not created by Sauron, but rather by the Numenorians. They are the "seven stones" that were brought "over the flowing sea" from the sunken Numenor. They were created to link communications, but they had the defect that they were subject to what I can only call as neuroses and psychosis. A traumatic even could fix them in place. And they weren't all co-equal, only one of them had the ability to communicate with all of the others at once.
So the palantir were created for "good" and perverted by Sauron for evil.
OTOH, I put good in quotes, because the "good" that they were created for was centralized governmental control. But in the context of "The Lord of the Rings" centralized governmental control by the rightful king is defined (and depicted) as good. Nobody is supposed to consider that the ancestors of the rightful king were from a race so wicked that "God" decided to sink their continent, so what will their descendants be like.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @12:36AM (1 child)
You know that recent book featuring rumors about wild Silicon Valley sex parties? Supposedly, those stories mostly were about Peter Thiel. But no journalist or writer will actually attach Thiel's name to any of those stories, not after what happened to Gawker.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @05:36AM
They could publish it anonymously. Send it to an amateur who can rewrite it to defeat stylometry. Then dump it somewhere.
Oh, they want to make a quick buck off of lurid Silicon Valley hearsay? Tough.
Rumor: Thiel is a gigantic misogynerd since he's both gay and libertarian.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 16 2018, @06:50PM
Actually, it's usually a mix of luck and skill, with sometimes one predominating and sometimes the other. In the case of Mr. Thiel I think that there was nearly an even balance, but with a bit extra on luck. Still, he didn't achieve his wealth without skill.
OTOH, his intolerance is something else, which he probably felt less free to make manifest when he was still trying to build his position.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @08:07AM (2 children)
In the 1912 presidential election, (Socialist!) Eugene Debs [google.com] got 6 percent of the popular vote.
Ross Perot got 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992.
...and with your kind of attitude, Abraham Lincoln of the nascent Republican Party[1] never would have been elected in 1860.
[1] That's right. There was a time when the Republicans were just another bunch of wannabes.
Find a party that stands for what you stand for[2] [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [smirkingchimp.com] and get involved.
[2] That's the bunch behind the World Socialist Web Site.
Very pro-family, very pro-consumer, and VERY pro-worker.
If there's not a party that's exactly what you want, you could find the one that's nearest to the mark and get inside it and make it better.
(4-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader says a dedicated 1 percent getting involved is all it takes to effect change.)
...and hey, after the Dumbocrats stabbed Bernie Sanders[3] in the back repeatedly, Jill Stein offered him the top spot on the Green Party ticket.
(You never know how the winds might shift.)
[3] Currently the most popular politician in the country.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday February 17 2018, @05:16PM (1 child)
You're preaching to the choir, brother. I'm not the one who needs convincing to shake things up. My fellow citizens are. The ones who voted for Trump as a protest vote got more and worse than they bargained for. Sure wish they'd voted differently. Maybe next time they will.
I live in a very red state. My first priority is whoever isn't even worse than the Republican. Most often that's the Democrat. But the Republicans have such a strong grip that it may as well be a one party state. It's so bad that there isn't always a Democratic opponent in every race. Not much point when it's unwinnable. I've voted for the Greens. And I've even voted for the Libertarians though I first want to know that the individual candidate isn't worse than the Republican. If there's a choice between Democrat and Green, then it's a tough call. If it seems that the Democrat has a chance of winning, that's where I'll vote. If not, I'll vote for the Green. We have a choice of 4 (!) parties if we want to vote straight ticket: Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, and Green. The Greens achieved that status a decade or 2 ago, and it's not hard to figure out why. The Republicans helped them, to split the Democratic vote.
The Pirate Party is my first choice. It's not just copyright reform, it's also their platform of transparency and cleaning up the corruption. I have yet to see a Pirate Party candidate on any ballot. Currently, the Pirate Party in the US merely endorses other parties, doesn't run their own candidates.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 17 2018, @09:53PM
Yeah. Hey, who knows?
Maybe a Soylentil has read our blurbs and has been convinced to investigate -every- name on the ballot rather than just sticking with the lesser of 2 evils among the Big 2.
...maybe even going with the "get inside" notion.
Maybe someone will find this via a search engine and be convinced.
(Yeah, a stretch.)
Take the opportunities to proselytize as they come.
You never know.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]