Peter Thiel Responds To Twitter CEO: 'You Could Smoke A Lot Of Pot And Still Have A Great Company'

Eugene KimSep 22, 2014, 22:57 IST

ReutersBillionaire investor Peter ThielLast week, billionaire investor Peter Thiel went on CNBC and trashed Twitter, calling it a "horribly mismanaged" company with a lot of pot-smoking going on. A few hours later, Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo shrugged off the pot-smoking allegations, basically ignoring it in a single tweet.

We reached out to Thiel over the weekend to ask what he thought about Costolo's comment and Twitter's management. "I thought that (Costolo's tweet) was very funny, a very good line," Thiel told Business Insider. He added that his comment from last week was taken way out of context, and what he really meant was how great Twitter's business model actually is. "Twitter has a fantastic business model. When you get companies with that robust a monopoly, and that strong a business model, they can often get away with being quite mismanaged," he said. Thiel pointed out Twitter's current management has "got somewhat better," but that Twitter's history was "one of a lot of mismanagement." "You could smoke a lot of pot and still have a great company, if the business model is as robust as Twitter's," he added. Thiel's pot-smoking comments could be in reference to Snoop Dogg's 2011 visit to Twitter's headquarters. According to Nick Bilton's "Hatching Twitter," a book on the founding of Twitter, Snoop Dogg toured Twitter's office with a bunch of his friends, with a lot of marijuana on hand. "They ended up smoking weed and holding an impromptu dance party," Bilton wrote. Here's a video that seems to have taken place during Snoop's visit to Twitter back then:

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Peter Thiel Responds To Twitter CEO: 'You Could Smoke A Lot Of Pot And Still Have A Great Company'