Peter Thiel, via his Founders Fund, has apparently made an sizable bet on the rising value of Bitcoin. According to a report in WSJ, Thiel gambled on BTC some time ago buying up to $20 million worth of the cryptocurrency. That investment has since grown to “hundreds of millions of dollars.” The report calls it a “Moonshot” but in reality a $20 million gamble for the billionaire is more like pocket change. In this case, Thiel has gotten lucky. And why not?
The price of Bitcoin has been on a roller coaster ride rising from less than a thousand dollars at the beginning of 2017 to about $20,000 at one point several weeks back. Each bullish rise has been met with a retrenchment – only to scale higher. Bitcoin has become a legitimate investment as futures now trade on both the CBOE and CME. ETFs are rushing to be set up to provide more retail access.
Thiel, an iconoclastic Silicon Valley entrepreneur, made his money as a cofounder of Fintech senior citizen PayPal. Founders Fund has investments totaling around $3 billion. The Founders Fund portfolio boasts a good number of prominent tech names like Stripe, Facebook, Lyft, Affirm, Airbnb and more. The Founders Fund manifesto states their intent to earn outstanding returns for their investors. They have certainly done that with their Bitcoin purchase.