Tech billionaire Peter Thiel said he won’t have a “full-time” role in the second President-elect Trump administration, adding that he would become “depressed and crazy” if he spent his “whole life” thinking about politics.
“I’m not going to do anything on a full-time basis,” Thiel said during his Thursday appearance on “Piers Morgan Uncensored.”
“You know, one can do things like … what Elon is doing. You can’t go full-time into government if you’ve been in a type of position like I have,” he told Morgan, referring to fellow billionaire Elon Musk, who was named by Trump to lead a new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) alongside entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. “It’s just the sort of things you have to be realistic about, what you can and can’t do.”
“But is there an Elon-style role?” Morgan then asked Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and a friend of Vice President-elect JD Vance.
“It’s just not my area of comparative advantage. I think politics is very important. It’s also — I would find it deeply frustrating. I would go out of my mind if I spent all my time doing about it,” Thiel said Thursday. “So I think it’s super important. I enjoy going on your show, thinking about it every now and then. If I spent my whole life thinking about this, man, I’d be depressed and crazy.”
The Silicon Valley billionaire has had an up-and-down relationship with Trump. Thiel was one of the first tech and business leaders to support the Republican during his 2016 presidential run, giving $1.25 million in support of his successful White House bid.
Thiel spent $15 million in backing Vance’s 2022 Senate bid in Ohio. The two met at Yale Law School in 2011.
Last year, Thiel critiqued some aspects of Trump’s first term, saying his administration was “crazier” and “more dangerous” than what he expected.
“Voting for Trump was like a not very articulate scream for help,” Thiel told The Atlantic at the time. “There are a lot of things I got wrong.”
Thiel said in November 2023 that he did not plan to donate to Republican candidates during the 2024 election cycle. In June this year, he said he would not be financially backing super PACs aligned with Trump, but that he would vote for him.
