For better or worse, Tom Perkins has a lot of tongues wagging about him in the last few weeks. After being credited for making Silicon Valley one of the most innovative places on earth, Perkins, at 82, is going out of his way to underscore a growing problem in the area.

In a published letter that he wrote to the Wall Street Journal this past January, Perkins compared the growing unrest toward the American one percent in Silicon Valley to Nazi Germany’s anti-semitism. Ever since he made those questionable remarks plus others, he has been the talk of the town in the mainstream press.

The video above is a recent interview where Perkins is being asked to justify his comments. I was told that Danielle Steel, his wife from 1998 to 2002, was in the audience. They remained good friends after the divorce but no one knows for sure what she is thinking now.

Perkins was a founding partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers (KPCB) , a venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley. It is considered one of the “largest and most established” venture capital firms in the world. KPCB were the early financial backers for AOL, Amazon.com, Compaq, Electronic Arts, Genentech, Google, Intuit, Juniper Networks, Sun Microsystems, Symantec, Verisign, WebMD and Zynga.

Perkins hasn’t officially been with the VC company for a number of years. Reports in the press indicate that he is bringing Kleiner Perkins unwanted publicity and they are distancing themselves from him.

I wrote about this today because I believe this topic is going to take a lot of twists and turns in the months ahead. I want to hear your comments.