Tech billionaire Peter Thiel says he only allows his children 1.5 hours of screen time a week

Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, said he only lets his kids have 1.5 hours of screen time each week.

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• Peter Thiel said he only lets his kids use screens for 1.5 hours a week.
• There is a growing push by US officials to regulate the use of social media among children.
• Other tech CEOs, like Evan Spiegel and Sundar Pichai, also limit their children’s screen time.

Social media for thee, but not for me. Or my kids, says Peter Thiel.

During a conversation with journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Thursday, Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and the first outside investor in Facebook, revealed that he doesn’t like his kids spending too much time in front of screens during the week.

Sorkin asked Thiel about the recent announcement from US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy that his office would push for labels on social media platforms warning about the dangers they pose to children’s health. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is also facing a lawsuit from 33 states that says Facebook and Instagram harm young people’s mental health.

Thiel said it’s “too easy” to turn Big Tech into a scapegoat for “all our problems.” Still, he said there is an “interesting critique one could make” about the fact that many social media executives limit screen time for their kids.

Thiel said he allows his own children just an hour and a half of screen time a week. Thiel’s children are young — 3 and 5 years old — so such a limit seems reasonable. But children are using the internet at increasingly younger ages, prompting concern about raising a generation of “iPad kids.”

Thiel isn’t the first tech leader to admit that they strictly limit their children’s screen time. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel said he also limits his 8-year-old’s screen time to one and a half hours a week.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai previously said he didn’t give his middle-school-aged son a cellphone and that all televisions in his home are locked with an “activation energy” that makes watching TV not easily accessible.