Gay billionaire Peter Thiel says Donald Trump called him a “scumbag” for refusing to donate

Gay conservative billionaire Peter Thiel has said that he won’t donate to the 2024 campaign of former president Donald Trump — even though he gave $1.25 million to Trump in 2016 — because Trump’s former presidency “was crazier than I thought.”

“There are a lot of things I got wrong,” Thiel said of his past support of Trump in a recent interview with The Atlantic. “It was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought. They couldn’t get the most basic pieces of the government to work. So that was – I think that part was maybe worse than even my low expectations.”

Related:

Reviews say Peter Thiel’s conservative dating app for straight people is failing to attract women

“I tried switching my preference to men,” one reveiwer wrote, “and loads of handsome men came up. I hope the developers fix this.”

Thiel said he didn’t donate to Trump’s 2020 unsuccessful re-election campaign and that political candidates have been “pestering me like crazy,” including Trump himself.

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Trump called Thiel in April to ask for a $10 million donation, the same amount that Thiel donated to the failed U.S. Senate campaign of Blake Master of Arizona and the successful U.S. Senate campaign of Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance of Ohio. When Thiel refused to donate, Trump reportedly told him “he was very sad, very sad to hear that,” Thiel said, adding that he later heard that Trump had referred to him as a “f**king scumbag” to Masters.

A source close to Thiel told Reuters in April that Thiel thought Republicans were making a mistake by focusing on culture wars rather than U.S. technical innovation and competing with China. Thiel — who was an early investor in PayPal and Facebook — previously joined Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs in supporting candidates who promised tech deregulation, limiting the government’s oversight of companies’ data privacy policies and anti-competitive business practices.

Thiel endorsed Trump in 2016 and spoke at the Republican National Convention that same year, stating on stage, “I am proud to be gay. But most of all I am proud to be an American. I don’t pretend to agree with every plank in our party’s platform, but fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline, and nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.”

After Trump won, Thiel served on his transition team. Though Thiel is married to businessman Matt Danzeisen, with whom he has two children, online critics have pointed out that the national Republican party platform considers same-sex marriage “an assault on the foundations of our society.”