Silicon Valley billionaire venture apitalist Peter Thiel smoked Twitter in a CNBC interview on Wednesday.
The co-founder and early Facebook investor tells Squawk Box, “Twitter is hard to evaluate. They have a lot of potential. It’s a horribly mismanaged company–probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there. But it’s such a solid franchise it may even work with all that.”
On a positive note, well, if that, Thiel tells CNBC as a chief executive he wouldn’t push for the removal of Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. He says, “I’m not sure they could do that much better. The CEO can’t really change things that much in these companies. You’d have to fire everybody and start over.”
He tells Squawk Box the tone of the Twitter brand and the culture is hard to change, saying, “One of the paradoxes is when you have a business model as good as Twitter–where you have 140 characters, no one can copy it, no one can compete–you can be screwing a lot of other stuff”.
In a final, parting shot Thiel suggested the company brass was vastly under-performing, saying, “Maybe some people come in at 10:30 and leave at 5 p.m.”
Ouch. Check out the interview and story on CNBC here.