Tech Billionaire Peter Thiel Sparks Outrage with California-Saudi Arabia Comparison

Thiel’s Provocative Comparison

In a wide-rang­ing inter­view on Joe Rogan’s pop­u­lar pod­cast, tech entre­pre­neur and GOP megadonor Peter Thiel made a bold and con­tro­ver­sial com­par­i­son between the state of Cal­i­for­nia and the King­dom of Sau­di Arabia. 

The co-founder of Pay­Pal and ear­ly Face­book investor did not hold back in his cri­tique of the Gold­en State.

Peter Thiel, who was edu­cat­ed at Stan­ford and made his for­tune in Sil­i­con Val­ley, argued that Cal­i­for­ni­a’s lib­er­al cul­ture and dom­i­nant tech indus­try mir­ror the reli­gious ortho­doxy and oil wealth of Sau­di Arabia. 

He described Cal­i­for­nia as hav­ing a “crazy reli­gion” of “Wokeism,” draw­ing par­al­lels to the strict Wah­habism prac­ticed in the Mid­dle East­ern kingdom.

California’s Economic Might and Governance Challenges

While acknowl­edg­ing Cal­i­for­ni­a’s impres­sive eco­nom­ic sta­tis­tics — a GDP of around $4 tril­lion and a pop­u­la­tion of 40 mil­lion, on par with Ger­many and Japan — Peter Thiel argued that the state’s gov­er­nance and qual­i­ty of life for many res­i­dents leave much to be desired.

“It does­n’t quite hap­pen,” Peter Thiel said, refer­ring to the notion that Cal­i­for­nia should “col­lapse under its own ridiculousness.” 

He not­ed that the state’s macro­eco­nom­ic per­for­mance is strong, but it “does­n’t work from a gov­er­nance point of view, does­n’t work for a lot of the peo­ple who live there.”

Thiel likened Cal­i­for­ni­a’s reliance on its tech indus­try, which he com­pared to Sau­di Ara­bi­a’s oil wealth, as a means of fund­ing an “inef­fi­cient gov­ern­ment sec­tor” and “dis­tor­tions in the real estate market.”

Parallels to Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabism

The bil­lion­aire’s most provoca­tive com­par­i­son was between Cal­i­for­ni­a’s “Wokeism” and Sau­di Ara­bi­a’s Wah­habism, a strict inter­pre­ta­tion of Sun­ni Islam. Thiel argued that while “not that many peo­ple believe it, it dis­torts everything.”

“And then you have like, oil fields in Sau­di Ara­bia, and you have the big tech com­pa­nies in Cal­i­for­nia, and the oil pays for every­thing. And then you have a com­plete­ly bloat­ed, inef­fi­cient gov­ern­ment sec­tor,” Peter Thiel said, draw­ing stark par­al­lels between the two regions.

Peter Thiel’s com­ments, deliv­ered dur­ing his appear­ance on Joe Rogan’s pod­cast, are sure to spark debate and con­tro­ver­sy, par­tic­u­lar­ly among those who view his com­par­i­son of Cal­i­for­nia to the author­i­tar­i­an Sau­di regime as extreme or even offensive.