President-elect Donald Trump's victory is also a win for PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, who backed the Republican candidate throughout the campaign, according to Yahoo News.
While a number of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs rejected Trump, Thiel, a Facebook board member worth an estimated $2.7 billion, actively supported him by donating $1.25 million to his campaign.
Thiel, who became the first openly gay speaker at the Republican National Convention, said he did not agree with "every plank" of the Republican Party platform, which has long been in opposition with rights and issues important to the gay community.
When reports surfaced about accusations of sexual misconduct by Trump, Thiel said it was "clearly offensive and inappropriate."
"What Trump represents isn't crazy, and it isn't going away. We are voting for Trump because we judge the leadership of our country to have failed," Thiel said at a Washington news conference in October.
Silicon Valley reacted to his support for Trump; former Reddit chief Ellen Pao severed her ties with Y Combinator, a startup incubator with which Thiel is involved.
The PayPal co-founder, like Trump, has criticized media as biased. He engaged in a legal battle with the website Gawker that publicly outed him as gay, then funded pro wrestler Hulk Hogan in his case against Gawker over the publication of a sex tape.
Hogan settled with Gawker for at least $31 million.
PayPal was Thiel's first tech startup victory. He co-founded the online payment site in 1998, and four years later it was bought by eBay. He bought an early stake in Facebook for $500,000, for about 10 percent of the startup.
The billionaire backs a charity foundation that awards scholarship to young people who exit school in order to start a business. He also funds initiatives in artificial intelligence and research into fighting the aging process. He has signed up to cryogenically preserve his body upon death, in hopes that medical advances could someday restore him to life.
Before supporting Trump, he backed former Hewlett-Packard executive Carly Fiorina, and supported former Texas Rep. Ron Paul in the previous two presidential elections, according to The Wall Street Journal.
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