Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel dinged the Trump administration for having “not very smart” officials who are hindering the GOP’s chances in future elections, warning that they could be paving the way for a democratic socialist takeover.
Thiel, who has close ties to the White House, also went into the harmful effects of AI doomerism as he shared his views on President Trump’s staffing issues.
“The first administration brought in all these people who couldn’t agree, and it was just all this internal fighting,” Thiel said in a podcast shared Saturday.
“The second administration I think had all these — they overcorrected for the mistake of the first term with all these loyalty tests,” he continued. “You got sort of, you know, an administration staffed by not very smart, but very loyal people. And so, there are all sorts of ways it can be criticized.”
The comments to Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner marked an unusual rebuke from Thiel, a leading Silicon Valley investor who famously took Vice President JD Vance under his wing before the protégé entered politics.
Thiel, who last week received the “Axel Springer Award 2026” in Berlin, appeared to be referencing job interview questions that civil servants described as a “loyalty test” — which a judge blocked earlier this month.
Thiel, and a strong supporter of Trump’s 2016 White House run, qualified his criticism a bit.
“My fast answer is, you should ask me in 10 years or so, and we’ll see in 10 years how it all works out,” said the co-founder of Palantir, PayPal and the Founders Fund.
Still, he sounded sour on short-term prospects for the US, saying Democrats will triumph in the November midterms — and the far-left branch of the party may even take the White House in 2028.
“I would put the odds at roughly 50% that a democratic socialist wins the presidency in 2028,” he said,
“When 70% of millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed,” Thiel added. “If you proletarianize young people with student debt and unaffordable housing, don’t be surprised when they end up turning to socialism.”
Asked for comment on Thiel’s remarks, White House spokesman Davis Ingle told The Post: “No one can dispute the fact that President Trump has created one of the most robust coalitions in political history with the MAGA movement, and the president understands how to communicate with them.
“President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress,” he added, pointing to tax cuts Trump signed into law, his prescription drug program and tough border policy, among other policies.
On AI, Thiel pushed back against the recent wave of doomerism and calls from the likes of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei to slow down development of the tech.
If leaders do so, “the cure might well be far worse than the disease,” Thiel opined.
“The realistic outcome of global calls to pause is empty international summits where the West slows itself down while authoritarian rivals accelerate,” he added.
“That is why issuing moral regulatory statements or encyclicals on AI is strategically equivalent to giving a gift to the Chinese Communist Party. The Communist Party of China is not going to listen to the Pope.”
He also warned that international calls for an AI slowdown raise the prospect of a “one-world government.”
“In theory, you could slow it down if you had genuine deep cooperation across the whole world. But I think that would require one-world government with real teeth,” Thiel said. “And the sort of classical-liberal part of me thinks that’s almost frying pan into fire. It’s a cure that’s worse than the disease.”
AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI have jointly called for stiffer US regulation of the tech and a coordinated slowdown on development amid rising public fears that AI could run amok and pose existential risks to humanity.
Critics have slammed the AI giants’ calls for slowdowns as self-serving and meant only to stop competitors from developing rival systems.
Thiel panned the alternative to continuing to develop AI at a rapid pace.
“There’s a picture that people implicitly have that the alternative to AI, let’s say a zero growth world where there’s no progress at all, will somehow be this peaceful social democratic society, and I don’t think that’s true,” he said.
The Post has sought comment from the White House.
