One of President Donald Trump’s wealthiest and earliest backers privately turned on one of the administration’s biggest decisions, according to a newly surfaced recording.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel told an audience at a private lecture earlier this month that the U.S. should never have launched its war with Iran, Politico reported Wednesday after obtaining audio of the Oct. 12 remarks.
“I’m skeptical of [the war], I think we should not have done it,” Thiel said. “There were a lot of mistakes that were made.”
He went further on America’s standing in the world. “Maybe we don’t have the hard power. Maybe we’re going to lose the soft power war,” Thiel said.
The comments are the bluntest Thiel has been heard offering on the conflict, and they land with the midterms less than two weeks away as Republicans fight to hold on to Congress.
Thiel was the first major tech investor to throw his support behind Trump in 2016, when he also took the stage at the Republican National Convention. He later poured money into super PACs backing now-Vice President JD Vance’s 2022 Senate bid. Politico previously reported that Vance himself had doubts about striking Iran before the war began.
Still, Thiel did not abandon the president. Across the full lecture, part of a Nashville series, he voiced deep hostility toward neoconservatives and Middle East military adventures while signaling continued support for Trump and an interest in shielding him.
He also spent much of the talk warning about the reach of the International Criminal Court, invoking Bush-era officials Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
“I read the Cheney family’s Trump derangement syndrome as an attempt to buy favor with the [International Criminal Court] and avoid prosecution. Probably too late,” Thiel said. “And I have come to suspect that the threat of an ICC arrest warrant is the sword of Damocles hanging over the Trump administration as it tries to persecute this war in Iran.”
Neither Thiel’s representatives nor the White House responded to Politico’s requests for comment.
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