Billionaire Says Supporting Milo Yiannopoulos’s Campus Tours Was a Mistake

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Updated (2:40 p.m.) with a statement from Mr. Yiannopoulos.

The billionaire who was reported to have bankrolled the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos’s campus-speaking appearances denounced the firebrand in a statement on Thursday.

Robert Mercer, a hedge-fund manager and major donor to conservative causes, also announced he was leaving his position as a co-chief executive of Renaissance Technologies, Business Insider reported.

The outlet published the text of Mr. Mercer’s letter announcing the decision. In it he criticized Mr. Yiannopoulos. Mr. Mercer wrote that he had supported Mr. Yiannopoulos in the hope that his contrary views and his criticism of political correctness on college campuses would “promote the type of open debate and freedom of thought that is being throttled on many American college campuses today.”

But the effort was misplaced, Mr. Mercer said. “In my opinion, actions of and statements by Mr. Yiannopoulos have caused pain and divisiveness undermining the open and productive discourse that I had hoped to facilitate,” Mr. Mercer wrote. “I was mistaken to have supported him, and for several weeks have been in the process of severing all ties with him.”

Mr. Mercer also plans to sell his shares in the right-wing outlet Breitbart News, where Mr. Yiannopoulos had previously worked as an editor and writer, to his daughters.

In a statement addressing Mr. Mercer’s comments, Mr. Yiannopoulous said, “I am grateful for Bob’s help in getting me this far in my career. I wish him and the family all the best.”

It’s unclear what this means for Mr. Yiannopoulos and his company Milo Inc. A Vanity Fair article in October cast doubts on the company’s financial strength and asked if the Mercer family was being “taken for a ride by their favorite hate-mongering boy toy.” Alexander Macris, the company’s chief executive, said in the article that the business was not a trainwreck and that it was “executing its business plan.” Earlier this year, BuzzFeed News broke a story tying to the Mercer family to Mr. Yiannopoulos.

Mr. Yiannopoulos has been making headlines in the past month in connection to another BuzzFeed investigation, which found that the writer had sought advice from white nationalists to inform stories that would later appear in Breitbart News. (Mr. Yiannopoulos stated for that article that he wasn’t a racist, that he disavowed white nationalism and racism, and that he always had.)

Most recently, Mr. Yiannopoulos spoke at California State University at Fullerton to hundreds of students, and seven people were arrested following fights outside the event.

It was the first time he had spoken on a campus since the muted “Free Speech Week,” at the University of California at Berkeley in September. That event was supposed to feature dozens of speakers over the course of four days, but ultimately only Mr. Yiannopoulos spoke, for about 20 minutes on one day.

The university’s chancellor, Carol Christ, called the entire event a “fiction,” but Mr. Yiannopoulos’s camp pushed back against that assertion.

Since the beginning of the year, Mr. Yiannopoulos has made a name for himself touring college campuses and riling people up in the process. In most instances he spoke without incident, but in some cases violence erupted. At the University of Washington a man was shot and injured. At Berkeley in February a protest against Mr. Yiannopoulos descended into violence, and the police ultimately canceled the event.

Following that incident, President Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from Berkeley, one of the nation’s leading public research institutions.

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.