Yahoo Finance Jeff Bezos nails why it's wrong to boot Trump donors from your board
Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeff Bezos thinks it would be wrong to oust someone from a company board for donating to Donald Trump.
At the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit in San Francisco on Thursday, a question was raised about whether or not Bezos thought venture capitalist Peter Thiel should be removed from Facebook’s (FB) and other boards for reportedly giving $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign.
Bezos said that he thought it would be wrong to remove someone from a company board for differing political viewpoints.
“We don’t want to live in a country where you can’t associate with people who have wildly different opinions,” he said. “I want to work in a country where you can work side by side.”
He added: “It’s way too divisive to say, ‘If you have this political opinion you can’t sit on my board.”
The question about Thiel was also raised during a panel on Wednesday with three tech luminaries offering differing views. One of those panelists, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, said that he would kick off the board member.
For what it’s worth, Bezos isn’t convinced Trump has a strong chance of winning the election.
“[Peter Thiel] is a contrarian,” Bezos prefaced. “You just have to remember contrarians are usually wrong. Conventional wisdom is usually right.”
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Julia La Roche is a finance reporter at Yahoo Finance.
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