Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund Generated More Than $1 Billion By Offloading An 8-Year-Old Bitcoin Bet Just Before Markets Soured

William of England
By William of England 2 Min Read

While cryptocurrencies were once a major holding, as of March 2022 the firm had generated $1.8 billion from the sale of the vast majority of its cryptocurrency holdings, the Financial Times reported, citing a person close to the bottom. According to the FT, two-thirds of his cryptocurrency investment consisted of Bitcoin.

The selloff was timely and protected the company from the Bitcoin price crash later that year, which would have taken it to around $15,599 last Novemberits lowest price in two years.

But in April at the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Thiel made no mention of his fund’s massive crypto sell-off. Also, he hasn’t wavered in his support for Bitcoin. During a speechhe said, “We are at the end of the fiat regime,” and added that Bitcoin has been undervalued but “has all the potential to replace gold.”

Founders Fund declined to comment to Reuters.

The price of almost everyone cryptocurrencies have plummeted last year, when the industry suffered from the bankruptcies of some of its most high-profile companies, including cryptocurrency hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and cryptocurrency exchange FTX. The collapse of FTX and the criminal charges brought against former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried in particular caused damage to several other companies and have it has attracted outsized attention from regulators.

San Francisco-based Founders Fund first bought Bitcoin in 2014, when it traded for less than $1,000, and grew its holdings over the next eight years. Thiel was also one of the first well-known investors to invest in Bitcoin.

In part, due to its Bitcoin sell-off, along with exits from longtime companies such as Airbnb and Palantir, the data analytics group Thiel cofounded, Founders Fund returned about $13 billion to investors between 2020 and the end of last year, according to the FT. The company has more than $11 billion under management.

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