Out billionaire Peter Thiel told The
New York Times this week that he does not believe President-elect
Donald Trump will reverse the gains of the LGBT community.
Estimated to be worth $2.8 billion,
Thiel co-founded PayPal and served as its CEO. He's the current
chairman of Palantir and serves on Facebook's board of directors. He
is among only a handful of tech entrepreneurs to embrace Trump's
campaign.
During last year's Republican National
Convention (RNC) in Cleveland, Thiel declared that he's “proud”
to be a gay Republican. “But most of all, I am proud to be an
American,” he added.
Thiel told the Times this week
that Trump is “very good on gay rights.”
“I think Trump is very good on gay
rights,” Thiel
said. “I don't think he will reverse anything. I would
obviously be concerned if I thought otherwise.”
“People know too many gay people.
There are just all these ways I think stuff has just shifted.”
“I don’t think these things will
particularly change. It’s like, even if you appointed a whole
series of conservative Supreme Court justices, I’m not sure that
Roe v. Wade would get overturned, ever. I don’t know if people even
care about the Supreme Court. You know, you’d have thought the
failure to have a vote on Merrick [Garland] would be a massive issue.
And somehow it mattered to Democrats, but it didn’t matter to the
public at large,” he added.
While Trump
has said that marriage equality is “settled law,” he's never
voiced support for same-sex marriage, and he supports
laws such as North Carolina's House Bill 2, which prohibits
transgender people from using the bathroom of their choice in many
buildings and blocks cities from enacting LGBT protections.