“I want to stay involved in Silicon Valley and help Mr. Trump as I can without a full-time position," Peter Thiel says. | AP Photo Peter Thiel: I won't take a job with Trump's administration

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who donated more than a million dollars to President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign and serves on his transition team, would not accept a job in the incoming administration if offered one, he told the New York Times.

“Confirm,” Thiel said in an interview published Wednesday when asked if it’s true that there is no administration job that could lure him to Washington. “I want to stay involved in Silicon Valley and help Mr. Trump as I can without a full-time position.”


While the PayPal co-founder has said he would not join the White House in an official capacity, he has played an active role in Trump’s transition process, most notably arranging a Trump Tower meeting last month between the president-elect and some of the nation’s most prominent tech executives, including Apple’s Tim Cook and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the head of SpaceX and Tesla, both attended as well despite their criticism of Trump during the campaign.

Thiel also spoke at the Republican National Convention last July, discussing during his remarks that he is gay, a first for the GOP event. The billionaire told the Times that he drew more criticism from the liberal gay community than from Christians for speaking at the RNC and that overall, “Trump is very good on gay rights.” The president-elect is unlikely to reverse any of the progress the gay community has made in recent years, Thiel said, adding that he would “obviously be concerned if I thought otherwise.”

Throughout his campaign, but especially during the Republican primary, Trump campaigned hard on his promise to ban temporarily Muslims from entering the U.S., a position he has since backed away from. Executives from multiple tech companies have preemptively said that they would not assist the Trump administration in the creation of any Muslim registry system.

Asked if the data-mining company he helped found would be willing to help the Trump administration build such a registry, Thiel told the Times: “We would not do that.”