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Comment by leftcenterright | Hacker News Reader

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> Peter Thiel’s fund wound down 8-year Bitcoin bet before market crash: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34444980

I recall seeing that title at the time. I wonder how their "foresight" works so effectively, "stepping in" just before an adverse incident happens. Is it superior acumen, or insider information?

It’s self interest pursuit at all costs.

It’s his and his followers core beliefs to always do everything out of self interest. Always.

You mean he's choosing his investments so as to benefit himself?

Scandalous.

I mean there are some people who believe people shouldn’t pull their money out.

I recently listened to an episode of the How I Built This podcast with one of the members of the PayPal mafia.

He mentioned that one of Peter Thiels greatest abilities is to spot and predict upcoming economic declines. Max Levchin said that Peter seemed to always know when to get in and out of markets.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-...

Why are people entertaining this? So a guy called Peter was born with an ability to time markets.. haha good for a chuckle I guess.

Some would call it luck, others would call it being in the right place at the right time, with the right engineers.

Thiel's Clarium Capital went from $8B in 2008 to $350m in 2011 due to bad bets and redemptions because of those bad bets... It then went defunct

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarium_Capital

I’ve gone back a few times in the last 2 years and watched his startup school talk on “Competition is for losers”. A lot of his theories and principals sounded brilliant at the time. As each year passes, a lot of his ideas quickly seemed silly.

For example, he compared an airline stock to Google. Google was worth more than the airline, but he believed the airline provided a much greater valued service. He asked the class to imagine life without the airline, or Google. He said he could live without Google, but not without airlines.

Fast forward to today, I would argue that Google provides the greater service. We couldn’t live without Google today, but I can think of a number of ways to travel across the country without using a plane. Greyhound, Uber, rent a car. Heck, there is even an app for cyclists to find a backyard to camp in overnight.

I recall reading in "Wanting" by Luke Burgis that he was a follower of Rene Girard. "Thiel left the corporate world and co-founded Confinity with Max Levchin in 1998. He began to use his knowledge of mimetic theory to help him manage both the business and his life. "

"When there was risk of an all-out war with Elon Musk’s rival company, X.com, Thiel merged with him to form PayPal. He knew from Girard that when two people (or two companies) take each other as mimetic models, they enter into a rivalry for which there is no end but destruction—unless they are somehow able to see beyond the rivalry."[1]

Maybe he has found a way to identify when things will self-destruct based off of mimetic theory.

[1] I did a summary of the book here : https://www.chestergrant.com/summary-wanting-by-luke-burgis

His foresightful actions are the triggers of the adverse incidents so of course the timing is perfect.

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