Peter Thiel has an unusual answer for critics who call Elon Musk evil: at least they aren’t calling him bad.
On Walter Isaacson‘s podcast “The Builders,” released Oct. 22, the PayPal Holdings Inc (NASDAQ:PYPL) and Palantir Technologies Inc (NASDAQ:PLTR) co-founder pointed to “all the demonization of people like Elon.” But to the extent such figures are described as evil, Thiel said, “they’re at least not described as bad.”
“I’m good over evil,” he said. “But evil is better than bad.”
A Familiar Charge
The "evil" label is not hypothetical. Donald Trump‘s former strategist Steve Bannon called Musk "a truly evil guy" in January 2025, and in April told Business Insider that "Elon was always evil." This January, venture capitalist Vinod Khosla accused the world’s richest person of promoting racism.
Fellow tech titans have been harsh, too. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called the Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (NASDAQ:SPCX) founder "clearly a bully" in December 2024, and Bill Gates told Isaacson, Musk’s biographer, that Musk is "super mean to so many people."
More criticism followed the episode’s release. Last week, SpaceX shareholder Ross Gerber told CNN he was "disgusted" with Musk after restrictions on SpaceX’s Starshield satellite service disrupted Ukrainian military operations, though who ordered them remains disputed. On Sunday, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov blasted a Musk post wishing that "bloodthirsty warmongers" would "burn in hell," which Kasparov read as aimed at Ukrainians.
Why Musk’s Critics Make Thiel’s Point
The logic hinges on two opposites of “good.” One is “evil,” the moral opposite. The other is “bad” in the functional sense: incompetent, something that doesn’t work.
Thiel illustrated it with cars. A Ferrari might be called “an evil car because it doesn’t get many miles to the gallon,” while the East German Trabant is a bad car that “breaks down all the time.”
In Thiel’s telling, even calling someone evil concedes that they can deliver. “The evil person gets something done,” he said.
He went further: “Bill Gates is into virtue signaling. Elon Musk is into vice signaling,” suggesting that “maybe you’re more honest if you vice signal than if you virtue signal.”
Thiel drew a similar evil-versus-bad distinction on Mathias Döpfner‘s “MD Meets” podcast, which aired Sept. 24 and drew online mockery, IBTimes UK reported. The Isaacson interview, taped Sept. 16, shows how he applies it to Musk.
‘Not a Pro-Evil Argument’
Thiel stressed that he wasn’t endorsing wrongdoing. He said Musk, Dario Amodei and OpenAI‘s Altman “very easily get demonized and scapegoated,” scoring them “far more good than bad across the board.”
Founders Vs. Bureaucrats
His real target is incompetence. When Isaacson suggested tech founders have amassed too much power with too few moral guardrails, Thiel replied: “Let’s grant all of them for the sake of argument. What is the alternative?”
His answer: “a bureaucrat with an MBA degree.” Those are “literally the only two kinds of companies we have,” he argued: a “maybe dangerous, but very inspiring leader who will do new things,” or a “boring bureaucracy.”
Apple is his case study. Thiel said the company “did nothing new after Jobs,” calling Tim Cook “the anti-Jobs.” Both approaches can work for shareholders, he conceded, but Musk and Jobs are “way better for society.”
Backing Musk When It Was Risky
The two go back to 2000, when Thiel’s Confinity merged with Musk’s X.com to form PayPal. In 2008, with SpaceX reeling from three failed launches, Thiel’s Founders Fund invested $20 million in the company. At SpaceX’s IPO price this year, Founders Fund’s stake was worth more than $50 billion, Bloomberg reported.
How much does a founder’s moral compass matter? “I rank that pretty high,” Thiel told Isaacson, adding that he dislikes backing companies that are “simply a business.”
His example: Musk’s push for Mars. “I don’t know exactly where I would rank that on sort of a moral good versus evil dimension, but it is transcendent,” Thiel said. It has “this transcendent sense of purpose. That’s what I like.”
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