Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel will remain on Facebook's board of directors, despite facing criticism over his financing of Hulk Hogan's invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media.
At Facebook's annual shareholder meeting on Monday, all seven current board members, in addition to President and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, were reappointed. Besides Thiel, they include Cheryl Sandberg, the company's chief operating officer, venture capitalist Erskine Bowles, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, director of the Gates Foundation, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, and WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum.
The exact results of the shareholders' vote were not immediately available, but will be filed within four days, according to Securities and Exchange Commission rules. The final tally doesn't matter much in the end, however, because Zuckerberg controls more than 60 percent of the voting shares, so he ultimatley decides whether or not Thiel stays on the board, according to Recode.
The fact that Thiel was voted in for a second term on Facebook's board doesn't come as much of a surprise, since Sandberg announced last month that he would not be removed.
"Peter [Thiel] did what he did on his own. Not as a board member," Sandberg said by way of explanation at a conference in California hosted by Recode.
Thiel has been waging a "secret war" against Gawker for years. The PayPal co-founder spent about $10 million bankrolling Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker, which is just one of several suits against the gossip site Thiel said he has financially backed, according to the New York Times.
Thiel told the Times that he was standing up for the "victims" of Gawker's coverage, and called the site a "singularly terrible bully."