Thiel says DeSantis ‘would make a terrific president’

Billionaire tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), who is rumored to be a possible 2024 candidate for the White House but hasn’t yet launched an official bid, would “make a terrific president.” 

“I think DeSantis would make a terrific president if he’s the Republican nominee. I will strongly support him in 2024,” Thiel said during an interview on the podcast “Honestly with Bari Weiss.” 

DeSantis has indicated he’d make a decision about whether to get in the 2024 race at the end of Florida’s legislative session, which is set to close later this week. On a visit to Japan earlier this month, he sidestepped a question about 2024 polling, saying, “I’m not a candidate.”

But Thiel’s support for the Florida governor was couched with hesitation about DeSantis’s culture war stances in the state. 

“But I do worry that focusing on the woke issue as ground zero is not quite enough,” he said. 

Last month, Reuters reported, citing sources close to the mega donor, that Thiel wasn’t planning to donate to any political candidate in 2024 — reportedly due to discontent with the GOP’s focus on controversial cultural topics. 

“The focus on identity politics, on the woke religion, you know, is probably a distraction from stagnation. It’s a distraction from economics. It’s a distraction from the way in which the younger generation in the U.S. is probably gonna have a hard time having [as] good [a] standard of living as their parents,” Thiel told Weiss.

The billionaire businessman said he’d considered moving some offices from California to Florida, but said rising real estate prices and interest rates have made it “a tough thing to do at this point.”

“And that kind of an economic cost is probably not enough to offset all the wokeness in the world or even the taxes. And so it’s a really hard problem to solve, like, what do you do about these runaway rents, these runaway housing costs? That’s a super hard problem solve. I have no idea how to solve that. I understand why DeSantis doesn’t talk about that. But it surely is a bigger problem.”