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Peter Thiel promoted Bitcoin after his fund sold most of its BTC holdings

Peter Thiel, with the caption “Pump & Dump.”
Creative Commons photo by Gage Skidmore.
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In his keynote at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami (which took place in early April), Peter Thiel provided an “enemies list” of the “financial gerontocracy” and “woke companies” who just didn’t “get” Bitcoin, whom he accused of holding it back from reaching 10x or even 100x gains. You can see bits of his rant in the video below:

I wonder what the crypto bro who posted this video is thinking right now.

Here’s the twist: in the month before that keynote, his fund divested itself of most of its crypto holdings. Simply put, he was pumping Bitcoin almost immediately after the VC fund he founded had sold it off. There’s no way that he didn’t know about this.

Here’s an excerpt from the Financial Times story, Peter Thiel’s fund wound down 8-year bitcoin bet before market crash:

Founders Fund sold out of the vast majority of its entire cryptocurrency portfolio by the end of March 2022 — before the digital assets market became swept up in a crisis in May last year, said one of the people close to the fund.

The fund currently has no significant exposure to cryptocurrencies, the people said. The winding-down of its crypto bet has not previously been reported. Founders Fund declined to comment.

Those 10x and 100x gains never materialized. In fact, the Great Crypto Crash of 2022 started in May, the month after Thiel’s keynote. Since then, it’s been a clown show, with the final (I hope) act so far being Sam Bankman-Fried.

My advice: stop listening to Peter Thiel and crypto bros in general.

Also worth reading

Bitcoin symbol with the caption “It can’t be that stupid; you must be explaining it wrong.”

You might want to check out this earlier article of mine: