He said the company's executives smoke too much pot.
"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," said Thiel.
Early Twitter investor Bijan Sabet caught the segment and tweeted a response: "I've never met Peter but this is so nasty, silly and wrong."
Thiel is a libertarian known for contrarian views. He believes that too many entrepreneurial kids go to college. He wants to create a libertarian city state on a platform out at sea.
Given all that, former Twitter executive Jason Goldman had this to say following Thiel's CNBC hit:
Yo but how high were you when you decided to go live on an ocean platform. "No not like. It *is* Waterworld man." pic.twitter.com/rb3DHOfusQ
- Jason Goldman (@goldman) September 17, 2014
For what it's worth, Twitter had a pretty good second quarter beating Wall Street expectations for user growth and revenues.
We've emailed Thiel and asked him to clarify his comments, and will update this post if and when he writes us back.
There are a number of very successful pot-smokers in the world, from Richard Branson to Progressive Corporation's former CEO and current chairman Peter Lewis.
Here's the clip: