What would you have had him do? It doesn't seem like his other options would have been logical knowing the bank was insolvent. I guess silently take his money out and not encourage any one else, is that actually worse?
What ggm and others like him want to say (but don't because they know how stupid it sounds), is that Thiel should have told everyone what he had learned/deduced about SVB's stability ... and not taken his own money out.
I sat through a social media shitstorm over a bank run here in Australia and listening to randoms phoning me with a "hot tip I'll thank them for" was insane. Read other pieces on HN to see other people's "I dodged a bullet" posts: no.. you didn't dodge a bullet you were part of the magazine of bullets which brought it on.
Is this HN? Is this real life? These actors might collude and self-prote t each other often, but they're not a national army, theyre not some unified body. I feel like people just canNOT accept that a bunch of their peers are vultures and that by bumping elbows with them, they're complicit. But that's exactly the truth.
From the numbers I have seen, was in mild trouble but nowhere near insolvent before Thiel and those like him caused the bank run.
If me taking my point out of my account causes you problems, that sounds like a you problem. I absolutely do not freaking get this.
I'm trying to be objective here, since my dislike of his political philosophy is pretty extreme.
Wearing the loss would be stupid. His ability to survive the losses isn't really material. If he had custody of other people's money and acted to preserve it, he acted wisely to their needs too. What he did I believe hastened the end for less wise people, with less ability to weather the risk and has downstream consequences which follow a run on a bank, in terms of impact on operating business. Stripe and other payment systems suspending clearing, payroll not happening is going to cause problems at large.
He's no more "wrong" than Pelosi or her husband or many other US senators and representatives are, trading against their heightened sense of awareness of the market. If Pelosi trades on inside information she may actually be worse than Thiel in this case (my belief is she has no prior knowledge which would exceed the insider-trading limits, and is technically not in breach of law even when I think what she does is totally reprehensible and inappropriate for an elected leader)
Withdrawing one's own money from a bank is not wrong in any sense, not legally or morally. Your attempt to conflate his actions with elected officials skating around insider-trading laws (even if not technically crossing them, as you presume) is nonsensical and unfair.