Eccentric billionaire angel investor Peter Thiel who was used as the basis for the eccentric billionaire investor character Peter Gregory on HBO's Silicon Valley appeared on CNBC to talk about how he feels about Twitter. The host asks if Thiel is as "long-term bullish" on Twitter as he is on Facebook, and Thiel responds pretty candidly. "They have a lot of potential," he says. "It's a horribly mismanaged company. Probably a lot of pot smoking going on over there."
As Valleywag notes, this should be taken with a grain of salt since it comes "straight from the mouth of an eccentric man who only started using Twitter this month and holds sizable investments in Twitter's direct competitors." Also, if you want more reasons to discredit him, he has plans to build a floating island in the middle of the Pacific on which to found a new utopian society (just as depicted on the HBO show, only the real one is not under construction yet), and he's a gay man who's given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the anti-gay-marriage Ted Cruz.
Also, I'm pretty sure "there's a lot of pot-smoking going on over there" sums up most of the tech world, Facebook included. But I have no evidence to back that up apart from living in San Francisco for 14 years.
The soundbite is below.
Update: Here's the official response from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.
@goldman working my way through a giant bag of Doritos. I'll catch up with you later.
— dick costolo (@dickc) September 17, 2014
