Peter Thiel: The investor’s fortune

How rich is Peter Thiel?

Peter Thiel is an American investor of German origin. He has German, American and New Zealand citizenship. Peter Thiel became known in particular through the payment service PayPal, which he founded together with Elon Musk and Max Levchin. His job was the management of the company. He is co-founder and chairman of the board of directors of Palantir Technologies, president of the hedge fund Clarium Capital in New York, partner of high-risk investment firm Founders Fund and co-founder and chairman of the board of Valar Ventures. The cherished Peter Thiel’s assets are 2.85 billion euros.

This is how Peter Thiel’s fortune came about

He made his fortune through intelligent investments. Thiel was one of the first external investors for Facebook. His job is to invest risk capital in companies and to sell his shares at a profit with an exit.

Aside from PayPal, Palantir Technologies and his investment firms, Thiel also founded:

• Thiel Foundation
• Confinity
• Thiel Capital Management
• Breakout labs

His well-known holdings or investments include Deposit Solutions, a FinTech company from Hamburg. He also bets millions of euros on Bitcoin through his venture capital firm Founders Fund. The company apparently holds the cryptocurrency with a value of several hundred million US dollars. In addition, in 2015 Thiel was one of the first who have invested in the cannabis business.

Profits from investments

The list of holdings in huge. It is not always known how much money the investor received. However, the following winnings are known:

• PayPal: $ 55 million from sale on eBay
• Palantir Technologies: $ 30 million investment, increasing the value of the company to $ 2.5 billion
• Facebook: $ 500,000 with current value of about $ 3 billion

However, things did not always go according to plan. The hedge fund crashed during the financial crisis. What went from about $ 7 billion to just $ 350 million in about four years.

The man who made Facebook possible

Peter Thiel became a billionaire through Silicon Valley. With his Investment in Facebook in summer 2004 he demonstrated a feeling for future trends. At that time, Mark Zuckerberg had received about $ 500,000 from him. Facebook has long been the largest network in the world with over 845 million users. In no time at all, Facebook overtook both MySpace and the VZ networks.

However, he is now very disappointed with the Internet age. His saying: “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters” as Swipe on Twitter gained worldwide fame.

He is also disappointed in politics: “I don’t know any politician in the US who would cut the health care system in order to invest the money in biotechnological research”. However, Thiel acted as a delegate and advisor to Donald Trump. With Breakout Labs, he has had a funding program for researchers since 2011, so that the boundaries of science and technology are shaken. The aim of this funding program is to first stop the aging process and later even overcome death.

_{Image sources:
Cover picture: Luc Van Braekel / Flickr [CC BY 2.0]
Dan Taylor [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons}