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Billionaire credited Elon Musk, in part, with helping other tech leaders feel comfortable publicly supporting President-elect Donald Trump. The former PayPal CEO sat for a post-election debrief with journalist Bari Weiss on an of her "Honestly" podcast published Thursday. Thiel, who financially backed Trump in 2016 but said he was stepping away from political donations this year, said Musk's embrace of Trump was key in facilitating in the 2024 election.
"There was some degree to which it was safer for people to speak out when other ," Thiel said on the podcast. Leading up to the election, several Silicon Valley billionaires and business leaders who had previously shunned Trump or remained publicly apolitical came forward in support of the former president, including Marc Andreessen, , and , among others. The apparent industry move toward Trump in the months before the election spurred , including Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway, and Mark Cuban, to pledge their support for Vice President Kamala Harris.
And while Silicon Valley, which has long been a progressive stronghold, remained solidly Democrat in November's election, in the three counties that make up America's tech center, BI previously reported. Weiss asked Thiel if the Tesla CEO was "the critical ingredient" that allowed other business leaders to feel safe endorsing the divisive president. "I think Elon was incredibly important to it," Thiel said, later adding that Musk "obviously gave people a great deal of cover.
" Musk did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment. Musk poured into helping Trump get elected. This week, Trump announced Musk would have a role in his administration as the co-leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, alongside entrepreneur and fellow billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy.
But Thiel said had been building for years because of people doubling down on "political correctness and wokeness" inside the companies. "There's some point where it just got exhausted and a lot of the top tech founders and CEOs felt comfortable telling me this behind closed doors," Thiel said. Thiel characterized the feeling inside Silicon Valley as one of toward "corporate governance" and "how ridiculous it's gotten to manage these ideologically deranged millennial employees.
" In 2022, Musk, who Thiel said was once "left of center," described his newfound foray into conservative politics as an effort to " The business leader moved Tesla headquarters from blue state California to red Texas in 2021 and said earlier this year that he would relocate both SpaceX and X to the conservative state. "At some point, Elon shifted," Thiel said. "Part of it is this sort of intellectual straitjacket where you're not allowed to have ideas, even if you agree with them 80 percent.
It's never enough. you have to be 100 percent." Thiel suggested before the election was "incredibly dangerous" and "incredibly courageous.
" "Maybe all the rest of us can be a little bit more courageous than we otherwise were going to be," Thiel said. Read the original article on.
