Peter Thiel is finally admitting there's a big blotch on his resumé that needs to be cleaned up. Becoming Facebook's first institutional investor was brilliant; thinking he was smart enough to predict big economic swings was incredibly dumb. Six billion dollars dumb. So Thiel will retreat into tech investing.
Assless chaps."Full-on rager" partying. A Fire Department intervention. Peter Thiel's hedge fund might have cratered, but the objectivist Republican's private life is rocking.
Peter Thiel, Facebook's first outside investor, is moving his volatile hedge fund back to California. Clarium Capital moved to New York in its boom days of fall 2008; a humble return to Silicon Valley may help break the resulting jinx.
Peter Thiel is not a clown. The PayPal co-founder and Facebook investor sees right through bubbles and rampant, ongoing Wall Street fraud, or at least says he does. So why is he running a hedge fund, again?
The S&P 500 is up slightly since the start of June, rising one percent, but we're told Peter Thiel's Clarium Capital is having a much worse time. In fact, the Pay Pal co-founder should avoid thinking about work this weekend.
The June numbers are in, and Peter Thiel's hedge fund is looking puny, having shrunk to just $1.5 billion in assets, from $7.8 billion in June 2008. Placed in an historical context, the PayPal co-founder's fund looks even worse.
Even as Wall Street rallied last month, Peter Thiel's hedge fund lost close to $25 million, according to leaked documents obtained by Valleywag. Maybe this is why the PayPal founder has been grumpily calling people "frauds."
Dear Ryan:
As I head to NBC to run its Bay Area site, I'm leaving you one Silicon Valley gossip blog, used but in good condition. A few thoughts on how to keep it that way.
It's one of many casually accepted, unchecked assumptions in Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel, the cofounder of PayPal and Facebook investor, is a billionaire, right? Leaked documents from his hedge fund, Clarium Capital, show he's not.
Clever libertarians don't just rail against government spending: They do something about it. Facebook investor Peter Thiel took $8 million from New York's pension fund — while setting himself up to avoid millions in taxes.
What a fight! In one corner, Rhodes scholar Rachel Maddow, the liberal lesbian MSNBC commentator. In the other, arch libertarian chess master Peter Thiel, the gay Facebook investor. Best of all, they've squared off before.
Peter Thiel, foremost among Silicon Valley's loopy libertarians and the first outside investor in Facebook, has written an essay declaring that the country went to hell as soon as women won the right to vote.
Peter Thiel, so-called visionary, is working CNBC hard at Davos. Why would that be the case? His hedge fund is $5 billion smaller than it was six months ago.
