Last year, Peter Thiel professed surprise at the fierce backlash to his support for Donald Trump. “I was surprised that it generated as much controversy as it did,” he told The New York Times, calling the push to remove him from Facebook’s board, where he is a long-standing member, “kind of crazy.” More recently, Thiel has taken steps to distance himself from the president, having reportedly grown disenchanted with the administration he once championed. Yet the image of Thiel as a cartoon villain hasn’t dissipated. And now, it seems, he has had enough.

Apparently disaffected by what he sees as the tech industry’s left-leaning politics, Thiel is moving his firms—Thiel Capital and Thiel Foundation—from San Francisco to Los Angeles, The Wall Street Journal reports. “Silicon Valley is a one-party state,” Thiel said during a debate about politics and tech at Stanford University in January. “That’s when you get in trouble politically in our society, when you’re all in one side.” Thiel himself reportedly plans to spend more time in his $11.5 million, 7,000-square-foot home overlooking Sunset Strip. Per the Journal, the move is part of a broader effort by billionaire “to reduce his direct role in the Silicon Valley tech industry that he helped to shape.”

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The relocation may be a tactical retreat. Thiel has reportedly grown wary of the growing push to regulate tech companies like Facebook, and is said to have discussed the possibility of resigning from Facebook’s board. (Mark Zuckerberg defended Thiel’s position on the board and deflected criticism of him last year, although at least one other Facebook board member, Netflix C.E.O. Reed Hastings, has not been shy about criticizing Thiel for his “catastrophically bad judgment” in supporting Trump.) Thiel has also left the boards of Asana and Zenefits, and removed himself from Sam Altman’s start-up incubator Y Combinator after criticism last year.

To some degree, Thiel’s move feels like an admission that he lost the culture war he invited by backing Trump and helping bankrupt Gawker. While Thiel has always been an outspoken libertarian—writing in favor of monopolies and advocating a return to pre-New Deal politics, it was only in the last several years that he raised his profile as a national figure. Perhaps he had hoped that his own iconoclastic philosophies were about to have their moment: “Everyone says Trump is going to change everything way too much,” he told The New York Times last year. “Well, maybe Trump is going to change everything way too little. That seems like the much more plausible risk to me.” But Silicon Valley, supposedly the promised land for fellow disruptors, never warmed to Thiel’s brand of radicalism. (“Somehow, I think Silicon Valley got even more spun up than Manhattan,” he grumbled.) Last week, SXSW, the tech festival in Austin, Texas, announced that Thiel would be bowing out of a panel where he was scheduled to discuss the Gawker controversy—a return to form, perhaps, for a once reclusive billionaire who discovered infamy to be unrewarding.