Talk about a backhanded compliment.

Peter Thiel, a billionaire venture capitalist and cofounder of PayPal and Palantir, was asked for his thoughts about Twitter during an interview with CNBC on Tuesday. His response was that Twitter has "a lot of potential," but the team running it seems to be too high to realize that potential.

"Twitter is hard to evaluate," Thiel said, when asked if he was bullish on Twitter. "They have a lot of potential. It's a horribly mismanaged company. The people, you know, probably a lot of pot smoking going on there. But it's such a solid franchise that maybe it works even with all of that."

Of course, Thiel may be more than a little biased here. He was the first big investor in Facebook, a competitor to Twitter, and he only just tweeted for the first time last week.

That statement prompted some quick responses from former Twitter employees and at least one early investor:

@om this undermines a whole lot of his credibility - and is quite offensive — Josh Elman (@joshelman) September 17, 2014

@goldman working my way through a giant bag of Doritos. I'll catch up with you later. — dick costolo (@dickc) September 17, 2014

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