PayPal co-founder and Palantir chairman Peter Thiel said in a CNBC interview on Wednesday that Twitter executives probably smoke marijuana at work.

"Twitter is hard to evaluate. They have a lot of potential. It's a horribly mismanaged company - probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there," the Silicon Valley venture capitalist said when asked if he was optimistic about Twitter.

"But it's such a solid franchise it may even work with all that," he segued.

Thiel, an early Facebook investor, suggested he wouldn't change anything about the social networking site's leadership, which is helmed by CEO Dick Costolo.

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

He went on to surmise about the situation he believes Twitter is in.

"One of the paradoxes of it 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 up a lot of other stuff," Thiel said.  "But I feel like it's vastly underperforming its potential," he continued.

He also speculated about the company's culture and the work ethics of its employees.

"The management can be B+. Maybe some people come in at 10:30 and leave at 5 pm," he said.

Thiel did not provide evidence for his claims to substantiate his opinions, but Forbes notes that Twitter shares are down 20% in 2014. The company, it says, has had difficulty increasing its users at a similar rate as Facebook.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo  made light of Thiel's comments, tweeting the company's former vice president Jason Goldman: "working my way through a giant bag of Doritos. I'll catch up with you later."

The 2013 book "Hatching Twitter" mentions that Twitter once held a party for rapper Snoop Dogg, according to a report by Buzzfeed. The rapper was said to have brought out "a large blunt" at some point and "in a matter of minutes, the cafeteria had become the stage for an impromptu Snoop Dogg concert."

Twitter executives were reportedly in an off-site meeting at the time and a company lawyer had to pull the plug on the party because guests and employees alike had gotten high. Costolo was "furious" when he found out about the smoking and said it was "time for Twitter to grow up."