When someone like this does something like this, it is not an economic act. It is a signal of some kind, a move in an opaque chess game, whose players are nowhere near as smart as they think they are.
replies(7):
https://www.wsj.com/tech/peter-thiel-backed-startup-secures-...
@190/share this is $102 million
Also: > Vistra Energy, another 19% chunk, was wiped out as well.
> Moreover, the fund’s turnover hovered over 80%, leaving just three holdings: Tesla, Microsoft, and Apple.
Some would argue that tesla is a bigger bubble.
> his personal net worth is an eye-popping $16.3 billion as of 2025.
These are supposed to be a hedge against a presumed AI bubble? Seems half hearted at best
Personally I agree it’s too small of a move, but different people have different beliefs and different tolerance for risk.
Its so big that it could take with it whole global market.
There is no safe asset you can turn into in such a case, digital money would literally mean nothing when whole financial system collapses.
The people in a position to know are telling you something: This is a Bubble, and they're getting the hell out while they're ahead. You should do the same.
--
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/11/softbank-sells-its-entire-st...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-shot-michael-burrys-ai-14...
Given the fiscal dominance we’re in now that pretty much guarantees higher rates of inflation in the future, I think there’s much better places to place your money if you want to diversify. At least cash equivalents would be better
Also, Thiel seems like the sort of guy with the money and connections to pop the AI bubble whenever he believes it'd be advantageous, whether that is the product of a rational mind seems to be beside the point.
Basically he could just be trying to protect the value of his dollars by putting them into a very stable company that also has exposure to the upside of AI.
> SoftBank’s Vision Fund was an early backer of Nvidia, reportedly amassing a $4 billion stake in 2017 before selling all of its holdings in January 2019. Despite its latest sale, SoftBank’s business interests remain heavily intertwined with Nvidia’s.
Further, ″[SoftBank] made a point of saying that it wasn’t any view on NVIDIA. ... At the end of the day, they are using the money to invest in other AI related companies,” he said.
Make of that what you will, but asking "are they irrational?" needs to answer with more than just "Softbank sold all of Nvidia again."
Both of these come from the link you provided.
…and has been known to cause bank runs
Empirically, I don't think Christians do worse investments than us atheists, so rationally speaking I don't think it's much of a factor.
So if the whale is dumping, maybe smaller investors will dump too. Maybe we should too.
(starting point for the lazy https://authoritarian-stack.info )
Mentioning the antichrist would probably move him up to at least top 3. Isn't the antichrist supposed to pretend he's fighting the antichrist in modern popular Pentacostal/Charismatic eschatology?
But I’m an atheist so I don’t care about it.
I think this says less about Nvidia than people think. What interests me is what he will put in to? What kind of investment is he targetting?
Pet sitting service for after the uplift to heaven has a low ROI. I don't think his eschatology informs his money sense.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-0...
This is exactly the same level as insane as thinking the Antichrist actually does walk among us today.
Strange definition of “early backer of Nvidia”.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Vision_Fund [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia
But again we never know his real positions.
The concern is less about what others announce as a belief, more about future access to essentials.
Finance is the gun. Politics is to know when to pull the trigger!
How the dollar erodes, and its effect on other currencies will be unpredictable. Corporations raising prices to offset their rise in costs, is predictable. It’s just a matter of finding those corporations and industries which can do so without losing more sales.
I’d assume the urge to “cash up” here is driven by the idea of trying to sell the top, and buy the resulting bottom. I highly doubt Thiel thinks AI isn’t worth today’s market cap or several multiples of it, in the long term, and that any “bubble burst” will likely be a generational buying opportunity.
I wrote a few comments about my reasons throughout the years, but I never felt I had enough to make the reasoning more solid. It was a lot of guesses from a depressing old man.
Thiel sold Palantir which is ridiculously overrated ( 1740.10 pe ).
Additionally, NVIDIA is going to get some competition for AMD. Or even Broadcom ( see TPU's from Alphabet)
He bought Microsoft, which has both AMD and NVIDIA for inference.
His sales aren't about selling AI. Just some bets cashing out.
Microsoft, Amazon, ... All can't build infrastructure quickly enough and they even admit in quarterly earnings that it's a bottleneck for now.
And they all grew a lot ( 20-40% )
A global crash of financial systems is unlikely because it’s cause too much pain for everyone. It unfortunately means we plebs are likely the ones paying to bail it out.
Burry’s critique was actually refreshingly novel compared to the “it’s a bubble lmao” type of comments I normally see.
Can anyone expand on the validity of his “hardware depreciation” thesis?
I’ve always understood typical corporate hardware cycle to be ~3 years. I don’t run it that hot, but my 3080 is still running strong with no signs of performance issues (except the fact that 10GB is not much vram these days). Plus doesn’t everyone (big corps) just buy the new generation every single year?
It could be insider knowledge that Intel/AMD/other has made a huge step forward and has reduced Nvidia's moat (unlikely considering his public support for Nvidia's hardware, but possible).
It could be that the AI bubble is popping.
It could be that he wants to "lock in" the gains that Nvidia has made; having that much capital in one company tied to a pretty volatile sector is risky.
Maybe he thinks that the beneficiaries of AI will be B2B companies like Microsoft with connections to most major businesses.
Maybe it's a changing view on how much compute will be needed to fuel AI developments moving forward.
And this is just the list I could thing of off the top of my head. There are plenty of other reasons this move could be happening. Absent an inside line on Thiel, anything else is speculation.
The newsworthy aspect to this is that the AI hype cycle is saying that right now, today, Nvidia is cheap. If AI is going to capture the entire economy, but it relies on Nvidia hardware, the current valuation is pennies on the dollar of what it will be one day.
Except, you know, that's all a lie. And Thiel peddled it for a while, and is friends with Musk, and connected to many others in the hype cycle besides, and now he's showing his hand that he knows its a lie.
One of the funds that Meta were working with to finance their spending on AI, Blue Owl, had to stop redemptions on of their private credit funds merging it with another one of their bigger funds, leaving holders facing a 20% haircut. There also seem to be emerging liquidity issues with banks. The money for the AI gravy train might be running out.
Hm, why not? Like obviously it would be hard to do a study because you can't just control by wealth. But if you control by the level of education and stop at that I'm almost certain christians would lose.
They don't sell it, but they could if Nvidia started charging too much, and some of these are going into Meta datacenters instead of Nvidia.
Intel makes the Arc. It's probably the least viable competitor in that list, but the fundamentals are there, so some about of focus and investment could result in a viable competitor.
He's demonstrated the former 16B times, now he's demonstrating the latter.
The big downside risk I see for Nvidia is a garage startup inventing a more efficient AI algo.... that only needs 20W to run.
It's a shame that no more bankers went to jail after 2008, although I find the situation was much more complicated than here.
++ Microsoft
This sounds a lot like what SoftBank did : sold Nvidia, then invested (will invest?) in OpenAI. I guess the AI market's hit a point where hardware demand is pretty stable, and software demand is where all the juice is now?
- Is deeply unscientific, coming across as a highfalutin paranoid QAnon; and
- Has zero self-awareness
That said, he has plenty of money and connections, so moves like these are likely well justified.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/al...
AliBaba succeeded in reducing GPU usage by 82%. On top of the improvements made by models like Deepseek, it looks like AI will be much more efficient than initially thought. As a result, there should be much less demand for GPUs compared to the ridiculous demand that was being pitched.
Note that Softbank also sold all its Nvidia shares.
That watched, imho Thiel is interested in the post-Straussian tension between "thinking in the open" (ideal science) and "focussed value creation" (which is best done behind closed doors)
AI as driven by premium mediocre Millennials combines the worst of both: lazy group-think promoted by stochastic parrots, expensive hardware weaponized by people who didn't earn that privilege
Capitalism or communism is a false dichotomy. You'd want any given pre-Jedi to access the Force, build their own lightsabers (in a cave), but not turn to the dark side.
GitHub serves Midichlorians. NVDA serves the Federation (and is one of the deadly sins to boot)
If AI matures into the next big thing, it risks wiping them out of their dominant positions if they don't spend to keep pace.
If it doesn't, then they just blew a bunch of money but are still dominant players, with an existential threat in the rearview.
Given the relative risks, they'd be foolish not to pump some of their cash flow into AI for a few years until the pace settles.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/business/dealbook/softban...
This is way off base. Altman is basically a mentee of his, like Zuckerberg. They go way back, and they've both publicly praised each other quite recently. They're very close friends.
To be concrete, he'd never consciously engage in the kind of circular financing or rentseeking that Altman/Zuck would be open to.
(also he has enough social aptitude not to take Altman on in public.)
And yet, it is the most open societies that do best at value creation. It's almost as if the degree of cooperation and coordination between the individuals is more important to success than the insights of any one individual, even if they are as smart as Mr Theil believes himself to be.
Peter Thiel is an interesting character mostly due to how bizarre he can be, a billionaire who is entranced in Christian mythology, afraid of death, using his power in capital to try to mold the world to his fractured mind. In a parallel world where he isn't rich he would be the town crazy spouting about the Anti-Christ at main square in some German village.
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/iab8r7/social_trus...
(By the scale used here US is exceptionally mid)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorov_(philosopher)
Yes making things people want is not really in their book of values. If they're about things that almost nobody wants (transhumanism, triggering the Apocalypse) it makes sense that governments might have to step in.
Counterpoint-- Thiel and Musk, if you believe them, brought the "Open" to OpenAI
>Because of AI’s surprising history, it’s hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it’ll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest. We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution.
--Musk, 2015
Which would make him hilariously unaware of the irony of the antichrist saying someone else is the antichrist.
he doesn't believe the QAnon, he is the QAnon and is pushing stuff that he knows the base will eat up
like if anyone is wearing the Mark of the Beast on their forehead it's MAGA, so get out in front of them and make sure it's pointed at the right place (e.g. Greta, et al)
The cofounder is the founder’s brother and has literally zero documented professional or academic experience.
The company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated.
The company is unwilling to evidence any of its (extremely extraordinary) claims, which have been made on a timescale that makes no sense in the context of the semiconductor industry.
The company’s research facility is, based on photographs that they’ve published, at least two orders of magnitude smaller than what would be necessary.
He's also written several books. "Zero to One" is very influential: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Peter-Thiel/author/B00J0W47NA
- Extreme pride instead of humility
- Extol strength and warrior attitude instead of kindness
- War on empathy instead of love
- Attachment to material things, money, success, again complete inversion of Jesus teachings on how to get closer to God
- On top of the personality cult, literally posts himself as the Pope
- Sell his own blasphemous bible to make a personal gain
- Leader of the most powerful country, so fitting with the idea of most mankind having been deceived into glorifying himself
Don’t take this seriously of course, my point is just that if someone wants to go with this route picking Greta instead of him is absurd.
And of course, in support of such an algorithm existing you have humans. Clearly AGI is present in human minds, and it apparently runs on about 20W of power.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/11/softbank-sells-its-entire-st...
I think we are in an insane LLM/compute bubble but I just put long trades on in Palantir and Nvidia the past few days.
Sentiment is just so one sided right now.
And I'm not even anti-AI; I genuinely believe that, as a technology, it is a major advancement that can and should be put to so many good uses. Which is emphatically not what the people in charge are doing.
It just made possible next one worse x10.
Bailing out 2008 was a mistake. All of those banks were supposed to collapse.
Next burst will be a lot worse. Reason why China, Japan, Europe are all dumping their USD reserves.
Everyone is preparing for inevitable collapse of USD.
It will be devastating for the whole world. Hard to predict how bad tho.