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Comment by iammjm | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

well, fittingly, there’s the devil horns effect

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…

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.

"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.

> I expect continued economic performance from a guy who went from nothing to... $25B

I would expect a return to the 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.

Crunchbase lists a few hundred of his investments: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/peter-thiel

He's also written several books. "Zero to One" is very influential: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Peter-Thiel/author/B00J0W47NA

He's been making big bucks for 30 years. That is his mean.

How can you tell he’s a Christian? I only know him by his works.

> How can you tell he’s a Christian?

Thiel has said so.

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.

> 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.

[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?

He shut down the whole fund. There was a press release about it a few days ago.

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% )

https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

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.

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.

Not a fan of Palantir or Level3 (L3?) Systems myself--talk about companies ushering in a police state!

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

No he doesn’t believe that the literal biblical Antichrist is walking amongst us. Uncharitable take

Pretty sure he said exactly that. If you think the quote is taken out of context feel free to add that here.

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.

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.

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