A 2020 email from Peter Thiel on why young people may turn on capitalism is circulating after Zohran Mamdani’s win

• Peter Thiel once offered a simple theory for why millennials are more supportive of socialism.
• In 2020, Thiel said student debt and the cost of housing were to blame.
• His once-private email is being shared once again after Zohran Mamdani’s victory.

Peter Thiel’s theory for why some millennials have embraced socialism is receiving renewed attention following New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s victory.

“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; we should try and understand why,” Thiel wrote in a January 2020 email to top Facebook leaders, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya posted a screenshot of the exchange as business and tech leaders began to digest Mamdani’s stunning rise as a self-described democratic socialist to lead the nation’s largest city.

“Tl;dr too much student debt and lack of affordable housing keeps young people with negative capital for too long,” Palihapitiya wrote on X. “And without a stake in the capitalist system, they will turn against it.”

Here is Peter Thiel’s email to Zuck and Andreessen in Jan-2020 predicting socialism. Tl;dr too much student debt and lack of affordable housing keeps young people with negative capital for too long. And without a stake in the capitalist system, they will turn against it. pic.twitter.com/BOKgwJ2cV0

— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) November 5, 2025

Thiel said that young Americans had grown fed up with a system that many may have felt had left them behind.

“from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it,” Thiel wrote.

Often described as a libertarian, Thiel wrote that he “would be the last person to advocate for socialism,” but it was important to understand why a large percentage of young Americans felt disconnected. Thiel spoke in support of President Donald Trump at the 2016 Republican National Convention.

Thiel distanced himself from politics after the 2022 midterms, but has recently resumed supporting Republican causes.

At the time of his message, Thiel was encouraging Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to think more about how to deploy his capital as “the spokesman for the Millennial generation.” Thiel said the social media network needed to make sure it stayed “attuned” to the rising generation.

The internal messages came to light amid an onslaught of lawsuits related to Meta’s treatment of young users’ mental health. Thirty-three states sued Meta in federal court while others, including Tennessee and the District of Columbia, filed suit in state court. Business Insider verified the authenticity of Thiel’s message, which was posted by the newsletter Internal Tech Emails.

A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Young voters continue to warm to socialism

More recent polling shows that a wide swath of younger Americans continue to hold positive views of socialism, even as the nation as a whole does not. An August Gallup poll found that 49% adults 18 to 34 had a positive view of socialism, 10 percentage points higher than adults overall.

It’s not a straight line. It’s hard to reconcile Thiel’s thesis with President Donald Trump’s significant improvement among young voters in 2024 compared to his two previous runs. Trump has routinely used the socialist label as a cudgel against his opponents, a trend he continued with Vice President Kamala Harris, whom he also called a “Marxist” and a communist. (Harris was neither of those things.)

The AP Voter Poll, which is based on a survey of more than 17,000 voters in New Jersey, Virginia, California, and New York City, found most voters under 30 supported Democrats.

Mamdani built a massive advantage with young voters, the survey found. He outperformed Former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo by 60 percentage points among voters ages 18 to 19 and by 38 points among voters ages 30 to 44.

Addressing his supporters Tuesday night, Mamdani quoted Eugene V. Debs, a 1900s American socialist leader who once ran for president while in prison.

“I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this,” Mamdani said.

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