Silicon Valley billianaire Thiel reportedly to move business to Los Angeles

Source: Xinhua| 2018-02-16 04:15:53|Editor: yan
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LOS ANGELES, Feb. 15 (Xinhua) -- U.S. conservative billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel was reported to move himself and his investment firms from Bay Area close to San Francisco to Los Angeles, both in the western coast of the country.

The local City News Service reported Thursday that Thiel, whose net worth is 2.5 billion U.S dollars by Forbes estimates, planned to permanently move himself to a 7,000-square foot (650 square meters) home overlooking the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, a house he purchased six years ago.

He will relocate his personal funds Thiel Capital and the Thiel Foundation with about 50 staffs to new Los Angeles headquarters in the next few month, the report said, adding that the 50-year-old billionaire also discussed resigning from Facebook board.

But one of his firms, the venture capital firm Founders Fund, will remain in San Francisco, the report said.

Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal Inc. and an early investor in Facebook, is one of the few big names in Silicon Valley to back Donald Trump during the presidential election in 2016. He made a 1.25-million U.S. dollars donation to help Trump and delivered a keynote speech at the Republican National Convention.

More recently, Thiel has showed disappoints to Bay Area tech industry, accusing Silicon Valley of becoming increasingly intolerant of conservative political views.

"Silicon Valley is a one-party state," he said in January during an appearance at Stanford University.

Southern California is a decidedly liberalism-leaning state, with nearly 52 percent of voters in L.A. County were registered as Democrats, according to 2017 statistics from the California Secretary of State's office.

However, in San Francisco, Democrats represented nearly 58 percent of registered voters, while Republicans accounted for only seven percent.

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