[flagged]
That said, scenarios like these highlight the gross imbalances in tech which is often portrayed as a relatively pure meritocracy.
Getting at least a half-day jump on everyone else is a big enough lead - not to mention the access they have.
Once the situation was known outside of the SV insider-insider circle I assure you startup founders and teams - threatened with the scenario of potentially losing their hard earned capital, potentially not being able to make payroll, and even shutting their doors were not "staying at home and watching TV". They were working a lot harder under far worse conditions than calmly being one of the first to make a phone call or send an e-mail Thursday morning.
Startup founders/teams should not be spending their time reading their 40 year old bank's quarterly financials, analyzing various short positions, or hiring resources to do so. Then there's (as always) the absurdity of making significant financial decisions for your startup based on a more-or-less random fund/personality twitter account that may have an undisclosed short position spreading FUD (or just be flat-out wrong).
Hindsight is 20/20 and even the most sophisticated actors taking short positions have failed spectacularly. For cases as dramatic as this ($200b bank failure) it's the stuff they make movies of ("The Big Short").
The fact remains that other than a few hawks this came out of nowhere last Thursday, and as the article and other sources describe not even Thiel and other sophisticated insiders were that far ahead but as we all know when it comes to a bank run those hours are precious.