Hacker News Reader

Comment by covercash | Hacker News Reader

What is Thiel’s current stake in $FB? I’m wondering if this was a play out of the GOP playbook, accusing your opponent of the things you’re actually doing.

View on HN

Not much. This[1] Nov 22, 2017 article states he sold most of his stake shortly after the IPO and then most of the rest on Nov 20 2017. At that point he only held "220,718 Class A Facebook shares and 54,995 Class B shares".

[1]https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/22/peter-thiel-sells-majority-o...

So at $204 a share, that's about $56 million, right? If his reported net worth is correct $2.5 billion, that's around 2% of his net worth.

So, not a huge amount of Facebook nor of his net worth, but still a huge amount of money. I'm not sure how billionaires think, but I suspect to become a billionaire it's usually not "I won't sweat a loss of couple tens of millions of dollars."

Our "billionaire" president paid his son's Boy Scouts fees with charity money rather than his own. People with that kind of money are usually SUPER cheap and REALLY attached to every dollar.

I'm not sure how much a billionaire would care about a significant loss on a $56mm investment either, but it's worth pointing out that pretty close to 2% of his net worth would be in Facebook even if all he did with his money was park it in s&p 500 index funds. it's hard to have a diversified portfolio without owning at least some of one of the most valuable companies in the world.

all things being equal, I'm sure he would care at least a little about a seven or eight figure loss, but I'm not sure it would be worth the opportunity cost of neglecting his other investments.

That's $56 million in shares at $204/share.

As of May 30, 2019 he owned 63,550 Class A shares and 54,995 Class B, according to the company’s filings.

So about $24M at today’s price.

Funny you seem to think false accusations are somehow only restricted to the GOP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com