Musk’s ‘PayPal Mafia’ friend Peter Thiel steps away from Facebook – with insight from The Wall Street Journal
During the late 1990s and right through the noughties, I hosted a quarterly supper club and annual gathering of South African CEOs (and their partners) in what we called The Ibandla. It was an invitation-only club with strict Chatham House rules. As a result, our A-Type Personality members usually defaulted to brutal frankness. Among the most hotly contested topics during these off-the-record engagements was whether business leaders should be more closely involved in politics. It's a global debate. One back in the news today after Silicon Valley icon Peter Thiel said he will now focus on supporting Trump-Agenda candidates – and cut a 16 year relationship with Facebook. At the Ibandla, one group argued for complete isolation, pointing to the lashing even moderately critical business executives received from notoriously thin-skinned Thabo Mbeki. The other side argued that without the trust built during such engagements, business and government would never be able to work together in the national interest. The debate is likely to gather fresh momentum in the wake of Thiel's very public decision in an already fractured US political landscape (see below). Ditto locally, through the growing popularity of entrepreneur-turned-politician Herman Mashaba's creation ActionSA. – Alec Hogg
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