- He is remotely associated with Trump - He helped take down Gawker - ....something something something...but he backed Trump!
For the Gawker part:
Gawker outed him without his permission.
Outing a gay man is something the tabloids used to do in the darkest time period of the United States. Finding someone was gay and making that known publicly was a tool used by very, very unpleasant people to destroy careers and lives for years.
Given how Liberal the tech industry is, it is genuinely puzzling that people would rise to the defense of "Freedom of the Press" to use someone's sexual identity to try to discredit or embarrass them and destroy their career.
This is not freedom of the press, its bullying. If a media outlet did something to you personally and you had a few million dollars to spare to shut them down, you would do it too. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
So Peter Thiel helped shut down an abusive tabloid that outs gay men against their will and regresses the tech sector back to the 1970's and 80's. That doesn't seem sufficient to warrant the hatred.
Then he was associated with Trump. He dared so say things like: "Our middle class has been gutted by globalization and we are being eaten alive by China."
Bernie Sanders ran on this exact platform. Almost word-for-word, Bernie Sander's political platform economically had many things in common with what Thiel was promoting.
So that leaves one final option: The reason that people hate Thiel is because he made enemies in the Liberal press, they smeared him relentlessly and people internalized this without doing their own independent thinking or research.
I don't like that Y Combinator was expected to "Apologize" for not firing someone for holding political beliefs that align them with 42% of the United States population. I feel the tech industry is now a worse, less free place when demonization of this type has become so endemic.