Peter Thiel Says Moving to Florida from Silicon Valley Is Too Expensive

(Bloomberg) — Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel said he’s reluctant to move his operations to Florida from Silicon Valley because housing prices have soared.

“If you buy a house in Miami today versus just three years ago, you’re paying four times as much for a monthly mortgage payment,” Thiel said on the podcast Honestly with Bari Weiss.

The Miami region saw its number of million-dollar ZIP codes more than double from the end of 2019 through 2022, according to a Bloomberg analysis of home values in the country’s most-expensive areas. While parts of New York and California, traditional wealth centers, still rank near the top of list of most expensive areas, values in some neighborhoods have actually declined since 2019, Zillow data show.

Thiel, a one-time adviser to former President Donald Trump, also urged Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to focus more on economic inequality and less on issues like gender identity and race.

“That kind of economic cost is probably not enough to offset all the wokeness in the world or even the taxes,” he said.

DeSantis has made a crusade against what he calls “the woke” the centerpiece of his mandate as governor. He’s widely expected to run against Trump for the GOP nomination for the presidency in 2024, with cultural issues at the core of any national campaign.

“I think DeSantis would make a terrific president. If he’s the Republican nominee, I will strongly support him in 2024,” said Thiel, who has a net worth of $8.2 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. “But I do worry that focusing on the woke issue as ground zero is not quite enough.”

Thiel is a Republican megadonor who has backed candidates who leaned into the culture wars. He urged DeSantis to focus more on economic inequality in Florida.

He previously said he has no plans to donate to candidates running for office in 2024, according to a person familiar with his thinking, citing frustration over the Republican party’s preoccupation with culture war issues.

“The focus on identity politics and the woke is probably a distraction from stagnation,” he said. “I understand why DeSantis doesn’t talk about that, but it surely is a bigger problem.”