PayPal Co-founder Peter Thiel: 'Employees at Underperforming Twitter Smoke Marijuana'

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of money transferring site PayPal, has accused the workers of Twitter of getting high.

In an open and frank interview with CNBC, Thiel, who was one of the early investors of Facebook, attacked the 140-character based social media site, claiming that its employees smoke marijuana and that it is a "horribly mismanaged company".

"Twitter is hard to evaluate. They have a lot of potential," he said.

"It's a horribly mismanaged company - probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there. But it's such a solid franchise it may even work with all that."

"One of the paradoxes is when you have a business model as good as Twitter - where you have 140 characters, no one can copy it, no one can compete - you can be screwing a lot of other stuff."

"The management can be B+. Maybe some people come in at 10:30 and leave at 5PM. It feels like it's vastly underperforming its potential."

Thiel criticised the culture of the working environment at the social media site, which is worth more than $27bn (£16.5bn), saying that it is the founders' fault, but added that it is too late to change.

"I'm not sure they could do that much better. The CEO can't really change things that much in these companies. You'd have to fire everybody and start over."