Zuckerberg backs Thiel
Defends his $1.25M gift to Trump,
Mark Zuckerberg defended Facebook board member Peter Thiel’s $1.25 million donation to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in an internal Facebook post to employees of the giant social network.
“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,” Zuckerberg wrote. “There are many reasons a person might support Trump that do not involve racism, sexism, xenophobia, or accepting sexual assault.”
A screenshot of the memo was posted to Hacker News, a comment board on Y Combinator, on Tuesday and was published by the tech website Boing Boing. Facebook confirmed the authenticity of the Zuckerberg post but declined to comment on it.
Thiel could not be immediately reached for comment.
Thiel, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist who served as a delegate and convention speaker for Trump, is a vocal supporter of the Republican candidate at a time when Silicon Valley is wrestling with a stark lack of diversity in its workforce. At Facebook, nearly seven in 10 employees around the globe are men; African Americans and Hispanics comprise a tiny fraction of the workforce.
“We care deeply about diversity,” Zuckerberg wrote in the post. “That’s easy to do when it means standing up for ideas you agree with. It’s a lot harder when it means standing up for the rights of people with different viewpoints to say what they care about. That’s even more important.”
Sam Altman, head of Silicon Valley’s most famous start-up incubator, also said he would not cut ties with Thiel.
In a series of tweets Sunday night, Altman expressed his opposition to Trump as “an unacceptable threat to America” and his support for Thiel, who is a part-time partner at Y Combinator. Altman said he would not “start purging people for support- ing the wrong political candidate.”
As a result, Project Include, a high-profile Silicon Valley diversity initiative co-founded by Ellen Pao, said it was cutting ties with Y Combinator despite work the incubator has done to advance di- versity and inclusion.
Thiel made billions by cofounding PayPal. At this summer’s Republican National Convention, Thiel was the lone tech billionaire to take the podium, where he spoke about being a gay conservative.