Peter Thiel told friends Trump administration is ‘incompetent’: report

Peter Thiel, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and one of President Trump’s few public supporters in Silicon Valley, has been privately expressing doubts about the administration, according to a new BuzzFeed report.

Though he has maintained support for the president in public, Thiel reportedly told colleagues behind closed doors that he thinks the administration has been “incompetent.”

“There is a 50% chance this whole thing ends in disaster,” he said of the administration at a private gathering in January, according to two BuzzFeed sources who were present.

In a statement to BuzzFeed, Thiel did not deny that he made the remarks, but reiterated his support for Trump.

{mosads}”The night he won the election, I said President Trump would face an awesomely difficult task,” he said. “Today it’s clear that resistance to change in Washington, D.C. has been even fiercer than I anticipated. We still need change. I support President Trump in his ongoing fight to achieve it.”

Thiel was one of Trump’s most generous campaign donors, an adviser on his transition team and a key liaison to a tech industry that has largely opposed the new president.

He helped organize a meeting between Trump and Silicon Valley leaders in December. He also attended another tech summit at the White House in June, where he told the president his “administration is doing very well.”