I think people like Peter Thiel has the insider view of the whole sector, so I would not discount this just because I don’t align with him on political stuffs.
I agree that it's very difficult to fully understand what his real positions are, and interestingly I think he clearly wants that to be the case. Peter Thiel is interested in and has actually written extensively about Straussianism which is an intellectual movement obsessed with analyzing esoteric meanings in philosophical literature.
Thiel is absolutely concerned about data mining and big picture and perceptions
he doesn't believe the QAnon, he is the QAnon and is pushing stuff that he knows the base will eat up
like if anyone is wearing the Mark of the Beast on their forehead it's MAGA, so get out in front of them and make sure it's pointed at the right place (e.g. Greta, et al)
That watched, imho Thiel is interested in the post-Straussian tension between "thinking in the open" (ideal science) and "focussed value creation" (which is best done behind closed doors)
AI as driven by premium mediocre Millennials combines the worst of both: lazy group-think promoted by stochastic parrots, expensive hardware weaponized by people who didn't earn that privilege
Capitalism or communism is a false dichotomy. You'd want any given pre-Jedi to access the Force, build their own lightsabers (in a cave), but not turn to the dark side.
GitHub serves Midichlorians. NVDA serves the Federation (and is one of the deadly sins to boot)
> "focussed value creation" (which is best done behind closed doors)
And yet, it is the most open societies that do best at value creation. It's almost as if the degree of cooperation and coordination between the individuals is more important to success than the insights of any one individual, even if they are as smart as Mr Theil believes himself to be.
It's in Thiel's nature to make moves counter to Altman's. Certainly, he does not share Masa's (or PG's) weakness for the genii of the day. (Secretly despises, actually?) They are kinda nontechnical in the same way (chess or SaaS are equally relevant to the future), but what Thiel has passion for are flexible moral abstractions, not politics (the whys rather than the whats of winning)
> It's in Thiel's nature to distance himself from Altman
This is way off base. Altman is basically a mentee of his, like Zuckerberg. They go way back, and they've both publicly praised each other quite recently. They're very close friends.
I've already edited to say "make moves counter to Altman's". You are right, but Thiel thinks about progress in a fundamentally different, I'd argue opposite, way from Zuck or Altman. More aligned with Elon or Karp. Or even some of the Chinese.
To be concrete, he'd never consciously engage in the kind of circular financing or rentseeking that Altman/Zuck would be open to.
(also he has enough social aptitude not to take Altman on in public.)
I don’t know, the biggest difference I see is Thiel and Elon are all about government/tax payer money (through contracts like Palantir or SpaceX, subsidies like Tesla, lobbying, influencing elections, or worst). In that way they align with China, as an autocracy directly financing their companies is their ideal business model. Altman and Zuck OTOH are more typical SV entrepreneurs.
There's also a difference in Thiel: an intensely heretic view of Christianity, he touts himself as a Christian while trying to make it his work of stopping the Anti-Christ (which in Christian theology is impossible since you'd be stopping the Apocalypse).
Peter Thiel is an interesting character mostly due to how bizarre he can be, a billionaire who is entranced in Christian mythology, afraid of death, using his power in capital to try to mold the world to his fractured mind. In a parallel world where he isn't rich he would be the town crazy spouting about the Anti-Christ at main square in some German village.
The CEO of ycombinator is also part of the same church thing that Thiel is, acts 17, where he gave a talk about the anti christ. Looks like many of the tech billionares are just insane christians that believe in Curtis Yarvin.
Yes making things people want is not really in their book of values. If they're about things that almost nobody wants (transhumanism, triggering the Apocalypse) it makes sense that governments might have to step in.
Counterpoint-- Thiel and Musk, if you believe them, brought the "Open" to OpenAI
>Because of AI’s surprising history, it’s hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it’ll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest.
We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution.
Diamond hands is more of a meme token punter term. Thiel is running a hedge fund and has a responsibility to get good returns for his investors. Buying underpriced stocks and selling overpriced is a normal thing to do.
Yeah everyone wants a conspiracy when the obvious signal is that he already made insane amounts of money off the stock spiking so high and he wants to diversify it on other stuff instead of continuing to gamble on a big one. Which is also what the article says he is doing.
And Nvidia has a target on its back right now. It's priced like it's the only game in town, but AMD, Google, Meta and Intel have varying degrees of competing chips for AI use.
They don't sell it, but they could if Nvidia started charging too much, and some of these are going into Meta datacenters instead of Nvidia.
Intel makes the Arc. It's probably the least viable competitor in that list, but the fundamentals are there, so some about of focus and investment could result in a viable competitor.
It doesn't take a genius to work out somebody who bought low might want to sell high.
The newsworthy aspect to this is that the AI hype cycle is saying that right now, today, Nvidia is cheap. If AI is going to capture the entire economy, but it relies on Nvidia hardware, the current valuation is pennies on the dollar of what it will be one day.
Except, you know, that's all a lie. And Thiel peddled it for a while, and is friends with Musk, and connected to many others in the hype cycle besides, and now he's showing his hand that he knows its a lie.
First it was Softbank and now its Thiel. Major sales coming from two of the ultimate tech insiders is probably a very good sell signal. Whether or not its the top is another question. Markets as we know can go higher longer than we think, Michael Burry shut down his hedge fund because he may have started shorting too soon.
One of the funds that Meta were working with to finance their spending on AI, Blue Owl, had to stop redemptions on of their private credit funds merging it with another one of their bigger funds, leaving holders facing a 20% haircut. There also seem to be emerging liquidity issues with banks. The money for the AI gravy train might be running out.
I thought I read specifically with the intention of putting it into OpenAI directly, but yes they said they wanted to “pursue other ventures in the area of AI”.
If there is a bubble then the hyperscalers with dominant market shares and big cashflows are most likely to survive if it bursts. Google, MSFT and Amazon. Oracle are on very shaky ground. Their bonds are selling at a discount to par, even though interest rates are dropping, and their debt to equity ratio is nearing 400%. AI is an existential bet for them, but not so much for the others.
This sounds a lot like what SoftBank did : sold Nvidia, then invested (will invest?) in OpenAI. I guess the AI market's hit a point where hardware demand is pretty stable, and software demand is where all the juice is now?
It'll come from the other bubble in financial markets, Private Credit. There have been quite a few bankruptcies and problems emerging there, and they're stepping up to be major funders for the AI capex boom.
The founder is a known con artist involved in such other things as solving nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam.
The cofounder is the founder’s brother and has literally zero documented professional or academic experience.
The company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated.
The company is unwilling to evidence any of its (extremely extraordinary) claims, which have been made on a timescale that makes no sense in the context of the semiconductor industry.
The company’s research facility is, based on photographs that they’ve published, at least two orders of magnitude smaller than what would be necessary.
APPL is the best bet as it doesnt have any exposure to AI. MSFT has spent a truckload of money on datacentres, if AI doesnt deliver they're going to face a huge drag on earnings because of the overinvestment.
Assuming he is correct (I think he is) and Nvidia goes down sharply, it will take AMD, Intel etc. with it. Usually the equipment makers and fabs go down with them, many times even at a higher percentage.
When someone like this does something like this, it is not an economic act. It is a signal of some kind, a move in an opaque chess game, whose players are nowhere near as smart as they think they are.
I always thought the opposite was true like whales breaking up orders for various reasons like not moving the market too much over things like portfolio adjustments, secrecy, etc?
Or maybe he just found out he suffers from some incurable disorder and now needs the money to build research centers to find a cure, because AI won't help obviously.
Warren Buffett is buying Alphabet out of neceessity - he already sold most of what he could sell and has way too much cash on hand - he just need to buy 'something' - Alphabet seems like the least overvalued big stock out there.
Berkshire is sitting on nearly $350 billion in cash. One of the ratio's that Buffet uses to measure overvaluation, Wilshire 2000 Market Cap as a % of GDP is at an all time, 220%. Its usually a good indicator of a market top. He's making a few small investments, but he's just waiting until there's more of sell off before heading back in. He's under no pressure to buy anything.
Is he required to buy stock? AFAIK he could just as well hold cash or bonds, and if he believes a bubble pop is imminent (within the next couple months), that would be a responsible move.
Not required of course. This move to finally move some of his cash horde into equities could be a result of the US governments recent announcement that they're ending their quantitative tightening policy. This likely signals a move back to a period of quantitative easing which could cause assets to continue to inflate while the value of the dollar continues to erode.
Basically he could just be trying to protect the value of his dollars by putting them into a very stable company that also has exposure to the upside of AI.
Probably a stupid question, why not buy something like CHF then, if one is concerned about eroding dollar value? Is the thesis that blue chips (if google is one) would rise faster than USD is devalued?
Stocks are going to be better at hedging against inflation than any one specific currency, because they’re able to raise prices. This is something Buffet has talked about which is mildly detailed here: https://www.investopedia.com/how-warren-buffetts-1-rule-can-...
How the dollar erodes, and its effect on other currencies will be unpredictable. Corporations raising prices to offset their rise in costs, is predictable. It’s just a matter of finding those corporations and industries which can do so without losing more sales.
I’d assume the urge to “cash up” here is driven by the idea of trying to sell the top, and buy the resulting bottom. I highly doubt Thiel thinks AI isn’t worth today’s market cap or several multiples of it, in the long term, and that any “bubble burst” will likely be a generational buying opportunity.
That sort of crash is what central banks exist to protect against. That could be something like the Fed stepping in as a buyer of last resort and picking up several trillion dollars of equity, and/or pushing rates to zero again to incentivize private capital to more or less do the same.
A global crash of financial systems is unlikely because it’s cause too much pain for everyone. It unfortunately means we plebs are likely the ones paying to bail it out.
Frankly, I would be happy if riots in the streets happen (if there is a bailout of Big Tech in the first place). What's going on recently with OpenAI publicly, and probably most of the 'AI' players not publicly, is disgusting - it's a bubble, everyone and their mother knows it, and these guys try to save their asses by asking for governement backing before the bubble even pops. Privatize gains, socialize losses...
It's a shame that no more bankers went to jail after 2008, although I find the situation was much more complicated than here.
Always also calmly analyse what is the upside left. Especially if the stock has such huge valuation like Nvidia. My guess is probably not at this point.
He is diversifying away from a pure AI play. The amount of diversification is relatively low, so he probably still believes in AI, just feels it is slightly overhyped.
Personally I agree it’s too small of a move, but different people have different beliefs and different tolerance for risk.
This could be anything, so making a sweeping generalization is premature IMO.
It could be insider knowledge that Intel/AMD/other has made a huge step forward and has reduced Nvidia's moat (unlikely considering his public support for Nvidia's hardware, but possible).
It could be that the AI bubble is popping.
It could be that he wants to "lock in" the gains that Nvidia has made; having that much capital in one company tied to a pretty volatile sector is risky.
Maybe he thinks that the beneficiaries of AI will be B2B companies like Microsoft with connections to most major businesses.
Maybe it's a changing view on how much compute will be needed to fuel AI developments moving forward.
And this is just the list I could thing of off the top of my head. There are plenty of other reasons this move could be happening. Absent an inside line on Thiel, anything else is speculation.
100% is a serious move. Taken alone, I might not think much, but given the SoftBank exit recently, Jensen’s trading activity, Gates selling so much MSFT, Buffett’s recent trading activity, Trump’s recent trading activity, and the interesting observation from Michael Burry, this does not bode well for NVDA in the short/mid term.
Burry’s critique was actually refreshingly novel compared to the “it’s a bubble lmao” type of comments I normally see.
Can anyone expand on the validity of his “hardware depreciation” thesis?
I’ve always understood typical corporate hardware cycle to be ~3 years. I don’t run it that hot, but my 3080 is still running strong with no signs of performance issues (except the fact that 10GB is not much vram these days). Plus doesn’t everyone (big corps) just buy the new generation every single year?
AliBaba succeeded in reducing GPU usage by 82%. On top of the improvements made by models like Deepseek, it looks like AI will be much more efficient than initially thought. As a result, there should be much less demand for GPUs compared to the ridiculous demand that was being pitched.
Note that Softbank also sold all its Nvidia shares.
It’s a bubble. Buy low and sell high. Right now, holding cash is the safe option. You can predict that the bubble will burst, but not when. However with the US being run by someone who is poking everything with sharp implements I think it bursts sooner.
Given the fiscal dominance we’re in now that pretty much guarantees higher rates of inflation in the future, I think there’s much better places to place your money if you want to diversify. At least cash equivalents would be better
Peter Thiel the guy that believes that the literal biblical antichrist is walking amongst us? How much rational thought can one really expect from this guy? I am not questioning AI being a good investment or not, I am questioning this dude's sanity
Startup investing and stock market investment records are probably not particularly well correlated. Certainly timing the market is difficult for everyone.
I'll admit that im not all that familiar with his business dealings, but from what i understand most of his fortune comes from paypal, facebook and plantir. That's three high risk investments that really paid off. Impressive but at the end of the day, luck probably paid a big part as its a small number of very high yield investments. Over time i would expect his luck to balance out. I'm not saying he's going to lose all his money, but i'd expect it to grow at a more normal rate over the long term. I think its unlikely he will continue striking it rich in such a dramatic fashion over the long term.
> Empirically, I don't think Christians do worse investments than us atheists, so rationally speaking I don't think it's much of a factor.
Hm, why not? Like obviously it would be hard to do a study because you can't just control by wealth. But if you control by the level of education and stop at that I'm almost certain christians would lose.
He's scarily sane. I am not joking when I say he invented the anti-christ thing as a way to entrench the billionaire class. He's basically saying the anti-christ will be somebody who want to solve the world's problems through collective action. So collective action is bad. We are in such an unbalanced world, that that is the best argument he can come up with for why we should allow such wealth inequality in society.
Yeah it's funny when you read his antichrist ramblings, it's essentially the antichrist will come in the form of a leader arguing for wealth redistribution via collective action. This is what instills sheer terror in the billionaire class.
I'm pretty sure the antichrist is that sports betting guy, Dave Portnoy? The good news is that he's low key, it's kind of a more casual antichrist this time around getting everyone addicted to gambling.
Then how about SoftBank[1]... are they irrational? Or Michael Burry[2] who shorted Nvidia and Palantir before concluding the market is once against being irrational and selling his positions and closing his hedge fund... is he irrational?
The people in a position to know are telling you something: This is a Bubble, and they're getting the hell out while they're ahead. You should do the same.
Burry was underwater on that trade though and likely did it to avoid some paperwork revealing positions. He folded because he can't time it, if he was confident he was right he wouldn't have folded and we'd have another movie about him.
Softbank sold all of Nvidia in 2019. Look how that turned out for them.
> SoftBank’s Vision Fund was an early backer of Nvidia, reportedly amassing a $4 billion stake in 2017 before selling all of its holdings in January 2019. Despite its latest sale, SoftBank’s business interests remain heavily intertwined with Nvidia’s.
Further, ″[SoftBank] made a point of saying that it wasn’t any view on NVIDIA. ... At the end of the day, they are using the money to invest in other AI related companies,” he said.
Make of that what you will, but asking "are they irrational?" needs to answer with more than just "Softbank sold all of Nvidia again."
When it comes to his Antichrist schtick I say "takes one to know one".
Also, Thiel seems like the sort of guy with the money and connections to pop the AI bubble whenever he believes it'd be advantageous, whether that is the product of a rational mind seems to be beside the point.
I used to be very into stuffs like the Revelation when I was young, but that was many years ago. I’m an atheist and I don’t need the bible to see that reality is like a slow moving train wreck.
As an atheist, i know revelations is probably about nero, and that similarities are probably due to similar economic/cultural concerns bringing similar leaders to power. Nonetheless, some of revelations is kind of uncanny.
As a rational atheist living on a shared resource in which a very small group have control over most of the assets, shouldn't it concern you if they leverage talk about an antichrist to edge out the masses even more?
The concern is less about what others announce as a belief, more about future access to essentials.
I do. The whole situation has been concerning since like 10 years ago. I believe the future, the near future, is going to be more dystopian than many of those dystopian movies.
I wrote a few comments about my reasons throughout the years, but I never felt I had enough to make the reasoning more solid. It was a lot of guesses from a depressing old man.
The best explaination is that Thiel, Softbank and Huang are selling before a risky Nvidia earnings release that could result in an indication that the AI boom is going to collapse.
The news is that a whale is dumping, not that the whale is making a rational decision. We all know the market isn't rational in the short term, merely efficient in the long term. And we all suspect (as does Thiel!) that NVDA is unsustainably priced.
So if the whale is dumping, maybe smaller investors will dump too. Maybe we should too.
It's so bizarre how a gay billionaire helping build artificial intelligence, owning a surveillance empire, and basically trying to put the mark of the beast on everyone is also yelling about the antichrist. If you were a bible-believing Christian, you'd think he was a top 5 candidate.
Mentioning the antichrist would probably move him up to at least top 3. Isn't the antichrist supposed to pretend he's fighting the antichrist in modern popular Pentacostal/Charismatic eschatology?
He maybe wouldn’t commit that it is currently, but he’d absolutely commit to the idea that the literal biblical Antichrist will exist and will walk among us, and might be already.
This is exactly the same level as insane as thinking the Antichrist actually does walk among us today.
Maybe it means something if it's insider trading, but otherwise I'm not taking advice from a man who is clearly haunted by some political obsession and willing to act against his own financial interest in pursuit of it.
Moving into Apple, given the potential risk/uncertainty in a new CEO and no real new revenue streams, is an interesting choice. I guess maybe it feels relatively safe? But even then, if there's any real downturn, they seem pretty at risk, as the 'luxury' brand.
I think people like Peter Thiel has the insider view of the whole sector, so I would not discount this just because I don’t align with him on political stuffs.
But again we never know his real positions.
I agree that it's very difficult to fully understand what his real positions are, and interestingly I think he clearly wants that to be the case. Peter Thiel is interested in and has actually written extensively about Straussianism which is an intellectual movement obsessed with analyzing esoteric meanings in philosophical literature.
Reading his recent "Greta Thunberg Is The Antichrist" stuff leads me to believe the Peter Thiel:
- Is deeply unscientific, coming across as a highfalutin paranoid QAnon; and
- Has zero self-awareness
That said, he has plenty of money and connections, so moves like these are likely well justified.
Thiel is absolutely concerned about data mining and big picture and perceptions
he doesn't believe the QAnon, he is the QAnon and is pushing stuff that he knows the base will eat up
like if anyone is wearing the Mark of the Beast on their forehead it's MAGA, so get out in front of them and make sure it's pointed at the right place (e.g. Greta, et al)
Detailed perspective from someone with insight into Thiel's thinking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6LakOrqDL4&t=1s
That watched, imho Thiel is interested in the post-Straussian tension between "thinking in the open" (ideal science) and "focussed value creation" (which is best done behind closed doors)
AI as driven by premium mediocre Millennials combines the worst of both: lazy group-think promoted by stochastic parrots, expensive hardware weaponized by people who didn't earn that privilege
Capitalism or communism is a false dichotomy. You'd want any given pre-Jedi to access the Force, build their own lightsabers (in a cave), but not turn to the dark side.
GitHub serves Midichlorians. NVDA serves the Federation (and is one of the deadly sins to boot)
> "focussed value creation" (which is best done behind closed doors)
And yet, it is the most open societies that do best at value creation. It's almost as if the degree of cooperation and coordination between the individuals is more important to success than the insights of any one individual, even if they are as smart as Mr Theil believes himself to be.
This suggests that things might not be as simple as that (it's a strong correlation, I admit)
https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/iab8r7/social_trus...
(By the scale used here US is exceptionally mid)
He could be selling NVIDIA to buy OpenAI like SoftBank just did. It might not be a bubble exist but a re-positioning.
It's in Thiel's nature to make moves counter to Altman's. Certainly, he does not share Masa's (or PG's) weakness for the genii of the day. (Secretly despises, actually?) They are kinda nontechnical in the same way (chess or SaaS are equally relevant to the future), but what Thiel has passion for are flexible moral abstractions, not politics (the whys rather than the whats of winning)
> It's in Thiel's nature to distance himself from Altman
This is way off base. Altman is basically a mentee of his, like Zuckerberg. They go way back, and they've both publicly praised each other quite recently. They're very close friends.
I've already edited to say "make moves counter to Altman's". You are right, but Thiel thinks about progress in a fundamentally different, I'd argue opposite, way from Zuck or Altman. More aligned with Elon or Karp. Or even some of the Chinese.
To be concrete, he'd never consciously engage in the kind of circular financing or rentseeking that Altman/Zuck would be open to.
(also he has enough social aptitude not to take Altman on in public.)
I don’t know, the biggest difference I see is Thiel and Elon are all about government/tax payer money (through contracts like Palantir or SpaceX, subsidies like Tesla, lobbying, influencing elections, or worst). In that way they align with China, as an autocracy directly financing their companies is their ideal business model. Altman and Zuck OTOH are more typical SV entrepreneurs.
There's also a difference in Thiel: an intensely heretic view of Christianity, he touts himself as a Christian while trying to make it his work of stopping the Anti-Christ (which in Christian theology is impossible since you'd be stopping the Apocalypse).
Peter Thiel is an interesting character mostly due to how bizarre he can be, a billionaire who is entranced in Christian mythology, afraid of death, using his power in capital to try to mold the world to his fractured mind. In a parallel world where he isn't rich he would be the town crazy spouting about the Anti-Christ at main square in some German village.
The CEO of ycombinator is also part of the same church thing that Thiel is, acts 17, where he gave a talk about the anti christ. Looks like many of the tech billionares are just insane christians that believe in Curtis Yarvin.
There was an Orthodox ascetic that argued for physical immortality (and space colonialism):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Fyodorov_(philosopher)
Yes making things people want is not really in their book of values. If they're about things that almost nobody wants (transhumanism, triggering the Apocalypse) it makes sense that governments might have to step in.
Counterpoint-- Thiel and Musk, if you believe them, brought the "Open" to OpenAI
https://archive.ph/KFxhI
>Because of AI’s surprising history, it’s hard to predict when human-level AI might come within reach. When it does, it’ll be important to have a leading research institution which can prioritize a good outcome for all over its own self-interest. We’re hoping to grow OpenAI into such an institution.
--Musk, 2015
I'd say he's wanting to lock in those gains. Diamond hands are different when you're up 100s of millions on a single stock.
Diamond hands is more of a meme token punter term. Thiel is running a hedge fund and has a responsibility to get good returns for his investors. Buying underpriced stocks and selling overpriced is a normal thing to do.
Yeah everyone wants a conspiracy when the obvious signal is that he already made insane amounts of money off the stock spiking so high and he wants to diversify it on other stuff instead of continuing to gamble on a big one. Which is also what the article says he is doing.
And Nvidia has a target on its back right now. It's priced like it's the only game in town, but AMD, Google, Meta and Intel have varying degrees of competing chips for AI use.
> Meta and Intel
?
Meta: https://ai.meta.com/blog/next-generation-meta-training-infer...
They don't sell it, but they could if Nvidia started charging too much, and some of these are going into Meta datacenters instead of Nvidia.
Intel makes the Arc. It's probably the least viable competitor in that list, but the fundamentals are there, so some about of focus and investment could result in a viable competitor.
It doesn't take a genius to work out somebody who bought low might want to sell high.
The newsworthy aspect to this is that the AI hype cycle is saying that right now, today, Nvidia is cheap. If AI is going to capture the entire economy, but it relies on Nvidia hardware, the current valuation is pennies on the dollar of what it will be one day.
Except, you know, that's all a lie. And Thiel peddled it for a while, and is friends with Musk, and connected to many others in the hype cycle besides, and now he's showing his hand that he knows its a lie.
First it was Softbank and now its Thiel. Major sales coming from two of the ultimate tech insiders is probably a very good sell signal. Whether or not its the top is another question. Markets as we know can go higher longer than we think, Michael Burry shut down his hedge fund because he may have started shorting too soon.
One of the funds that Meta were working with to finance their spending on AI, Blue Owl, had to stop redemptions on of their private credit funds merging it with another one of their bigger funds, leaving holders facing a 20% haircut. There also seem to be emerging liquidity issues with banks. The money for the AI gravy train might be running out.
didn't softbank sell only to invest more into other ai investments?
Yes, but whether they will remains to be seen. They needed a reason to sell out without it looking like they were selling out at the top.
I thought I read specifically with the intention of putting it into OpenAI directly, but yes they said they wanted to “pursue other ventures in the area of AI”.
What's interesting is that Thiel added MSFT but the Gates Foundation just reduced it by almost 2/3 and it was their biggest holding - https://hedgefollow.com/funds/Gates+Foundation+Trust
If there is a bubble then the hyperscalers with dominant market shares and big cashflows are most likely to survive if it bursts. Google, MSFT and Amazon. Oracle are on very shaky ground. Their bonds are selling at a discount to par, even though interest rates are dropping, and their debt to equity ratio is nearing 400%. AI is an existential bet for them, but not so much for the others.
It's because he knows about the Antichrist.
I think it might be a reflection that there is no more power to run more chips, so chip sales will drop.
Making $$$ & keeping them are 2 different skills.
He's demonstrated the former 16B times, now he's demonstrating the latter.
The big downside risk I see for Nvidia is a garage startup inventing a more efficient AI algo.... that only needs 20W to run.
still a more efficient algo would be better run on gigawatts of compute
Could it all be triggered by the study : Gartner Says Agentic AI Supply Exceeds Demand, Market Correction Looms ?
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-0...
interesting. For me charts and CSS are broken though, so I couldn't really see figures
-- Nvidia
++ Microsoft
This sounds a lot like what SoftBank did : sold Nvidia, then invested (will invest?) in OpenAI. I guess the AI market's hit a point where hardware demand is pretty stable, and software demand is where all the juice is now?
This is concerning for sure. Looks like we may be getting the trigger for a sell off soon.
It'll come from the other bubble in financial markets, Private Credit. There have been quite a few bankruptcies and problems emerging there, and they're stepping up to be major funders for the AI capex boom.
Having heartburn after making a $100M bet on hucksters?
https://www.wsj.com/tech/peter-thiel-backed-startup-secures-...
Have any juicy articles to back up your unsubstantiated claim?
From HN the other week https://foxchapelresearch.substack.com/p/i-think-substrate-i...
The founder is a known con artist involved in such other things as solving nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam.
The cofounder is the founder’s brother and has literally zero documented professional or academic experience.
The company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated.
The company is unwilling to evidence any of its (extremely extraordinary) claims, which have been made on a timescale that makes no sense in the context of the semiconductor industry.
The company’s research facility is, based on photographs that they’ve published, at least two orders of magnitude smaller than what would be necessary.
₍⍨₎ Yikes!
SoftBank Sells $5.8 Billion Stake in Nvidia to Pay for OpenAI Deals
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/business/dealbook/softban...
It would make sense if he used to money to buy TSMC or ASML instead.
MSFT and AAPL seem like better ways to diversify your money away from chips, while keeping it in technology.
APPL is the best bet as it doesnt have any exposure to AI. MSFT has spent a truckload of money on datacentres, if AI doesnt deliver they're going to face a huge drag on earnings because of the overinvestment.
Microsoft has the same struggle as Facebook and Google.
If AI matures into the next big thing, it risks wiping them out of their dominant positions if they don't spend to keep pace.
If it doesn't, then they just blew a bunch of money but are still dominant players, with an existential threat in the rearview.
Given the relative risks, they'd be foolish not to pump some of their cash flow into AI for a few years until the pace settles.
Assuming he is correct (I think he is) and Nvidia goes down sharply, it will take AMD, Intel etc. with it. Usually the equipment makers and fabs go down with them, many times even at a higher percentage.
> Over 537,000 shares, which represent nearly 40% of the entire portfolio
@190/share this is $102 million
Also: > Vistra Energy, another 19% chunk, was wiped out as well.
> Moreover, the fund’s turnover hovered over 80%, leaving just three holdings: Tesla, Microsoft, and Apple.
Some would argue that tesla is a bigger bubble.
> his personal net worth is an eye-popping $16.3 billion as of 2025.
So this 'portfolio' is <200M on a net worth of 16B? This is like someone worth 1M selling $600 worth of stock.
A 200M sale on a 16B net worth is like someone worth 1M selling about 12.5k of stock.
I noticed the article steered around that figure even though it would make sense to spell it out but that wouldn't bolster their gasping thesis.
Ya Im shocked he continues to hold Tesla…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia
He has said on multiple occasions to never bet against Elon (though that’s different than betting on him).
I appreciate that his actions match his words, at the very least
PayPal mafia be tight
Investor sentiment and fundamentals are distant relatives. If fear takes hold and enters a spiral, revenue growth and fundamentals go out the window.
When someone like this does something like this, it is not an economic act. It is a signal of some kind, a move in an opaque chess game, whose players are nowhere near as smart as they think they are.
I always thought the opposite was true like whales breaking up orders for various reasons like not moving the market too much over things like portfolio adjustments, secrecy, etc?
I guess his fund did obfuscate the selling, or the selloff would have been known before the legally required disclosure.
Or maybe he just found out he suffers from some incurable disorder and now needs the money to build research centers to find a cure, because AI won't help obviously.
"Someone like this" leaves a ton to the reader's imagination.
A billionaire, especially a somehow secretive one. There are thousands of "people like this" to choose from, dozens of them with some publicity.
Maybe this?
Finance is the gun. Politics is to know when to pull the trigger!
Interesting. Do you have any examples?
So not 4d chess ?
I’ve never seen so much cope in a single HN thread. Suddenly no one cares about Occam’s Razor
This crowd is heavily invested/works in tech, nobody wants to admit they are wrong or that their wealth is an illusion.
Paperwork filed after market closed on Friday... some might take it as a bad omen, but Nvidia is showing as up 1/2% after hours.
Should we all buy stock in Nvidia now? It’s not like Peter Thiel is Warren Buffet or anything. And Warren Buffett is buying Alphabet.
Warren Buffett is buying Alphabet out of neceessity - he already sold most of what he could sell and has way too much cash on hand - he just need to buy 'something' - Alphabet seems like the least overvalued big stock out there.
Berkshire is sitting on nearly $350 billion in cash. One of the ratio's that Buffet uses to measure overvaluation, Wilshire 2000 Market Cap as a % of GDP is at an all time, 220%. Its usually a good indicator of a market top. He's making a few small investments, but he's just waiting until there's more of sell off before heading back in. He's under no pressure to buy anything.
Is he required to buy stock? AFAIK he could just as well hold cash or bonds, and if he believes a bubble pop is imminent (within the next couple months), that would be a responsible move.
Not required of course. This move to finally move some of his cash horde into equities could be a result of the US governments recent announcement that they're ending their quantitative tightening policy. This likely signals a move back to a period of quantitative easing which could cause assets to continue to inflate while the value of the dollar continues to erode.
Basically he could just be trying to protect the value of his dollars by putting them into a very stable company that also has exposure to the upside of AI.
Probably a stupid question, why not buy something like CHF then, if one is concerned about eroding dollar value? Is the thesis that blue chips (if google is one) would rise faster than USD is devalued?
Stocks are going to be better at hedging against inflation than any one specific currency, because they’re able to raise prices. This is something Buffet has talked about which is mildly detailed here: https://www.investopedia.com/how-warren-buffetts-1-rule-can-...
How the dollar erodes, and its effect on other currencies will be unpredictable. Corporations raising prices to offset their rise in costs, is predictable. It’s just a matter of finding those corporations and industries which can do so without losing more sales.
I’d assume the urge to “cash up” here is driven by the idea of trying to sell the top, and buy the resulting bottom. I highly doubt Thiel thinks AI isn’t worth today’s market cap or several multiples of it, in the long term, and that any “bubble burst” will likely be a generational buying opportunity.
Whose cash or bonds? USD?
Thing is, people dont know what will happen if this bubble bursts.
Its so big that it could take with it whole global market.
There is no safe asset you can turn into in such a case, digital money would literally mean nothing when whole financial system collapses.
This doesn't track with what happened after previous bubbles.
Investors will be sad, but businesses that still do useful work will still have revenue. Why would they be worthless?
That sort of crash is what central banks exist to protect against. That could be something like the Fed stepping in as a buyer of last resort and picking up several trillion dollars of equity, and/or pushing rates to zero again to incentivize private capital to more or less do the same.
A global crash of financial systems is unlikely because it’s cause too much pain for everyone. It unfortunately means we plebs are likely the ones paying to bail it out.
I rather suspect that in the current economic climate, a trillion dollar bailout of Big Tech would very quickly translate to riots in the streets.
Frankly, I would be happy if riots in the streets happen (if there is a bailout of Big Tech in the first place). What's going on recently with OpenAI publicly, and probably most of the 'AI' players not publicly, is disgusting - it's a bubble, everyone and their mother knows it, and these guys try to save their asses by asking for governement backing before the bubble even pops. Privatize gains, socialize losses...
It's a shame that no more bankers went to jail after 2008, although I find the situation was much more complicated than here.
Always also calmly analyse what is the upside left. Especially if the stock has such huge valuation like Nvidia. My guess is probably not at this point.
Yes, you should. Every grift needs bagholders.
> That’s why Thiel rotated into Microsoft and Apple, tech giants with more diversified revenue streams, cloud scale, devices, and software.
These are supposed to be a hedge against a presumed AI bubble? Seems half hearted at best
He is diversifying away from a pure AI play. The amount of diversification is relatively low, so he probably still believes in AI, just feels it is slightly overhyped.
Personally I agree it’s too small of a move, but different people have different beliefs and different tolerance for risk.
One to zero, here we come?
This could be anything, so making a sweeping generalization is premature IMO.
It could be insider knowledge that Intel/AMD/other has made a huge step forward and has reduced Nvidia's moat (unlikely considering his public support for Nvidia's hardware, but possible).
It could be that the AI bubble is popping.
It could be that he wants to "lock in" the gains that Nvidia has made; having that much capital in one company tied to a pretty volatile sector is risky.
Maybe he thinks that the beneficiaries of AI will be B2B companies like Microsoft with connections to most major businesses.
Maybe it's a changing view on how much compute will be needed to fuel AI developments moving forward.
And this is just the list I could thing of off the top of my head. There are plenty of other reasons this move could be happening. Absent an inside line on Thiel, anything else is speculation.
100% is a serious move. Taken alone, I might not think much, but given the SoftBank exit recently, Jensen’s trading activity, Gates selling so much MSFT, Buffett’s recent trading activity, Trump’s recent trading activity, and the interesting observation from Michael Burry, this does not bode well for NVDA in the short/mid term.
Burry’s critique was actually refreshingly novel compared to the “it’s a bubble lmao” type of comments I normally see.
Can anyone expand on the validity of his “hardware depreciation” thesis?
I’ve always understood typical corporate hardware cycle to be ~3 years. I don’t run it that hot, but my 3080 is still running strong with no signs of performance issues (except the fact that 10GB is not much vram these days). Plus doesn’t everyone (big corps) just buy the new generation every single year?
The main reason is likely this:
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/al...
AliBaba succeeded in reducing GPU usage by 82%. On top of the improvements made by models like Deepseek, it looks like AI will be much more efficient than initially thought. As a result, there should be much less demand for GPUs compared to the ridiculous demand that was being pitched.
Note that Softbank also sold all its Nvidia shares.
Even if you reduce computing requirements for inference by 99.999% there is still enough demand to saturate all high end cards for decades.
I wonder if he still holds all that in his Roth IRA.
We are 1 day before the year 2000.
Perhaps looking for a new ivory back scratcher?
Palantir is looking to buy the American Red Cross, for... other reasons.
lol he is literally Bob Page from Deus Ex... taking over "fema" and all.
bob page did nothing wrong, he just wanted to be a god like everyone else
The market can stay irrational longer than even Peter Thiel can stay solvent.
Thiel is worth 25 Bn according to some sources, 16 Bn according the article.
In this case surely there will be an AI correction before Thiel runs out of money.
It’s a bubble. Buy low and sell high. Right now, holding cash is the safe option. You can predict that the bubble will burst, but not when. However with the US being run by someone who is poking everything with sharp implements I think it bursts sooner.
Cash is just another asset class, and since becoming a pure fiat it’s never been a good one: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
Given the fiscal dominance we’re in now that pretty much guarantees higher rates of inflation in the future, I think there’s much better places to place your money if you want to diversify. At least cash equivalents would be better
The parent comment is probably just talking about temporarily timing the bubble pop.
How are you so sure it is a bubble?
It's over time to burst this bubble. It's going nowhere.
Peter Thiel the guy that believes that the literal biblical antichrist is walking amongst us? How much rational thought can one really expect from this guy? I am not questioning AI being a good investment or not, I am questioning this dude's sanity
Is there an opposite to the halo effect? Stupidity in one area doesn't mean they're stupid in another
Judge him based on his investing skill here
Startup investing and stock market investment records are probably not particularly well correlated. Certainly timing the market is difficult for everyone.
> Certainly timing the market is difficult for everyone.
Timing the market is a lot easier for industry insiders and politicians, however.
Or if you own a company specifically designed to siphon up and interpret private information…
well, fittingly, there’s the devil horns effect
I expect continued economic performance from a guy who went from nothing to... $25B was the latest number I heard.
Empirically, I don't think Christians do worse investments than us atheists, so rationally speaking I don't think it's much of a factor.
> I expect continued economic performance from a guy who went from nothing to... $25B
I would expect a return to the mean
He's been making big bucks for 30 years. That is his mean.
But why? He seems to know the right people, and is, uhm, ruthless - nothing changed.
I'll admit that im not all that familiar with his business dealings, but from what i understand most of his fortune comes from paypal, facebook and plantir. That's three high risk investments that really paid off. Impressive but at the end of the day, luck probably paid a big part as its a small number of very high yield investments. Over time i would expect his luck to balance out. I'm not saying he's going to lose all his money, but i'd expect it to grow at a more normal rate over the long term. I think its unlikely he will continue striking it rich in such a dramatic fashion over the long term.
How can you tell he’s a Christian? I only know him by his works.
He wrote a long rant about Greta Thunberg being the antichrist. I think that places him more in the "insane" box than the "christian" one, but still.
The irony is killing me.
He misnomers a very special definition of antichrist that probably would include Greta (anyone who could encourage mass collectivism).
Which would make him hilariously unaware of the irony of the antichrist saying someone else is the antichrist.
> How can you tell he’s a Christian?
Thiel has said so.
> Empirically, I don't think Christians do worse investments than us atheists, so rationally speaking I don't think it's much of a factor.
Hm, why not? Like obviously it would be hard to do a study because you can't just control by wealth. But if you control by the level of education and stop at that I'm almost certain christians would lose.
"From nothing" is a fairly suspect claim, but your overall point is a good one
Rounded to the nearest $0.001B, I think it's correct.
He's scarily sane. I am not joking when I say he invented the anti-christ thing as a way to entrench the billionaire class. He's basically saying the anti-christ will be somebody who want to solve the world's problems through collective action. So collective action is bad. We are in such an unbalanced world, that that is the best argument he can come up with for why we should allow such wealth inequality in society.
Yeah it's funny when you read his antichrist ramblings, it's essentially the antichrist will come in the form of a leader arguing for wealth redistribution via collective action. This is what instills sheer terror in the billionaire class.
I'm pretty sure the antichrist is that sports betting guy, Dave Portnoy? The good news is that he's low key, it's kind of a more casual antichrist this time around getting everyone addicted to gambling.
https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Then how about SoftBank[1]... are they irrational? Or Michael Burry[2] who shorted Nvidia and Palantir before concluding the market is once against being irrational and selling his positions and closing his hedge fund... is he irrational?
The people in a position to know are telling you something: This is a Bubble, and they're getting the hell out while they're ahead. You should do the same.
--
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/11/softbank-sells-its-entire-st...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-shot-michael-burrys-ai-14...
Burry was underwater on that trade though and likely did it to avoid some paperwork revealing positions. He folded because he can't time it, if he was confident he was right he wouldn't have folded and we'd have another movie about him.
Did he close his position or just shutdown the fund?
Softbank sold all of Nvidia in 2019. Look how that turned out for them.
> SoftBank’s Vision Fund was an early backer of Nvidia, reportedly amassing a $4 billion stake in 2017 before selling all of its holdings in January 2019. Despite its latest sale, SoftBank’s business interests remain heavily intertwined with Nvidia’s.
Further, ″[SoftBank] made a point of saying that it wasn’t any view on NVIDIA. ... At the end of the day, they are using the money to invest in other AI related companies,” he said.
Make of that what you will, but asking "are they irrational?" needs to answer with more than just "Softbank sold all of Nvidia again."
Both of these come from the link you provided.
- SoftBank Vision Fund Founded 2017 [1] - Nvidia Founded 1993 [2]
Strange definition of “early backer of Nvidia”.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Vision_Fund [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia
If I going to bank with someone, I want it to be more aggressive. Hard Bank is what I'm talking about--a bank with cojones.
I don't think it's a bubble.
Thiel sold Palantir which is ridiculously overrated ( 1740.10 pe ).
Additionally, NVIDIA is going to get some competition for AMD. Or even Broadcom ( see TPU's from Alphabet)
He bought Microsoft, which has both AMD and NVIDIA for inference.
His sales aren't about selling AI. Just some bets cashing out.
Microsoft, Amazon, ... All can't build infrastructure quickly enough and they even admit in quarterly earnings that it's a bottleneck for now.
And they all grew a lot ( 20-40% )
When it comes to his Antichrist schtick I say "takes one to know one".
Also, Thiel seems like the sort of guy with the money and connections to pop the AI bubble whenever he believes it'd be advantageous, whether that is the product of a rational mind seems to be beside the point.
Every accusation is a confession.
> seems like the sort of guy with the money and connections to pop the AI bubble
…and has been known to cause bank runs
I mean if I were a Christian I wouldn’t be surprised that the anti Christ is among us. The only difficulty is to pick which one of them is.
But I’m an atheist so I don’t care about it.
If you believe in this sort of thing i think the signs are there https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-s...
I used to be very into stuffs like the Revelation when I was young, but that was many years ago. I’m an atheist and I don’t need the bible to see that reality is like a slow moving train wreck.
As an atheist, i know revelations is probably about nero, and that similarities are probably due to similar economic/cultural concerns bringing similar leaders to power. Nonetheless, some of revelations is kind of uncanny.
As a rational atheist living on a shared resource in which a very small group have control over most of the assets, shouldn't it concern you if they leverage talk about an antichrist to edge out the masses even more?
The concern is less about what others announce as a belief, more about future access to essentials.
I do. The whole situation has been concerning since like 10 years ago. I believe the future, the near future, is going to be more dystopian than many of those dystopian movies.
I wrote a few comments about my reasons throughout the years, but I never felt I had enough to make the reasoning more solid. It was a lot of guesses from a depressing old man.
Not a fan of Palantir or Level3 (L3?) Systems myself--talk about companies ushering in a police state!
The best explaination is that Thiel, Softbank and Huang are selling before a risky Nvidia earnings release that could result in an indication that the AI boom is going to collapse.
The news is that a whale is dumping, not that the whale is making a rational decision. We all know the market isn't rational in the short term, merely efficient in the long term. And we all suspect (as does Thiel!) that NVDA is unsustainably priced.
So if the whale is dumping, maybe smaller investors will dump too. Maybe we should too.
It's so bizarre how a gay billionaire helping build artificial intelligence, owning a surveillance empire, and basically trying to put the mark of the beast on everyone is also yelling about the antichrist. If you were a bible-believing Christian, you'd think he was a top 5 candidate.
Mentioning the antichrist would probably move him up to at least top 3. Isn't the antichrist supposed to pretend he's fighting the antichrist in modern popular Pentacostal/Charismatic eschatology?
No he doesn’t believe that the literal biblical Antichrist is walking amongst us. Uncharitable take
He maybe wouldn’t commit that it is currently, but he’d absolutely commit to the idea that the literal biblical Antichrist will exist and will walk among us, and might be already.
This is exactly the same level as insane as thinking the Antichrist actually does walk among us today.
Pretty sure he said exactly that. If you think the quote is taken out of context feel free to add that here.
I mean, sometimes if it look like a crazy person and quacks like a crazy person, it’s a crazy person.
Not everything is some great 4d chess conspiracy; sometimes people just believe completely irrational stuff.
Maybe it means something if it's insider trading, but otherwise I'm not taking advice from a man who is clearly haunted by some political obsession and willing to act against his own financial interest in pursuit of it.
I mean, he bought low and now he's selling when the stock is high. What else can we expect?
At this point if you don’t think AI is a bubble then I don’t know what to tell you.
Tell me why quantum mechanics stops at SU(3) in SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) symmetry group.
extremely low IQ / reddit comments ITT
Probably wants more liquidity to funnel into the pain and suffering industry
No need to guess, the article literally states where the money went:
> That’s why Thiel rotated into Microsoft and Apple, tech giants with more diversified revenue streams, cloud scale, devices, and software.
Rotated into pain and suffering indeed.
Ads on my desktop. Windows crashes that prevent me from filling my car at the tank.
Moving into Apple, given the potential risk/uncertainty in a new CEO and no real new revenue streams, is an interesting choice. I guess maybe it feels relatively safe? But even then, if there's any real downturn, they seem pretty at risk, as the 'luxury' brand.
Peter Thiel is in the epstein files.
google Peter Thiel and Rockbridge and be afraid, it makes Project2025 pale in comparison
(starting point for the lazy https://authoritarian-stack.info )
He's seen a better investment opportunity and is maximising his profit to target it.
I think this says less about Nvidia than people think. What interests me is what he will put in to? What kind of investment is he targetting?
Pet sitting service for after the uplift to heaven has a low ROI. I don't think his eschatology informs his money sense.
Microsoft and Apple? per article. Not very mind-blowing
A parking spot with good return and solidity. I don't think he's staying there at scale for long. Neither want him on the board.
this whole article is about $100 m. - isn't that basically pocket change?
Yes. I think you put this into context well.