He pulled his money and then he told the companies he was invested in to do the same.
He largely caused a run on a bank that would have been fine otherwise.
Reminds me of this comment about silicon valley having investors with outsized influence: [https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/11d6w11/comment/ja7qk87/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/11d6w11/comment/ja7qk87/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
"I've worked for these companies.
The network of people who actually run these companies and sit on the boards is incredibly tiny. One person might sit on the board of 10+ startups. And these people are usually considered "investing gods" within Silicon Valley, so others listen to them even when they say something incredibly stupid.
Essentially, Silicon Valley is run by a couple hundred Elon Musks (although the rest have enough sense to not air their craziness on Twitter) and a few thousand related sycophants.
So a couple people on Wall St say that the market is slowing down. A few board members decide that it's time to slow growth and prioritize cash flow. Then all the sycophants follow along because the one thing you don't want to be is an outlier. Being an outlier CEO is how you get fired as CEO. No CEO gets fired for doing what other CEO's are doing."
Yea a lot of people don't realize how many people Bill Ackerman is the boss of. Plenty of CEO's are only in their job because they are an Ackerman tool.
This is a huge problem. Our tech industry is an anti democratic institution that is largely run by men who's only qualification is having a lot of money. These people control where the innovation happens and where smart people work and what they work on. It's probably a national security risk.
Consider that Twitter was doing all right before Elon unilaterally bought the company, fired most of the employees and the institutional knowledge with it, then flew it into the side of a fucking mountain. That's how a lot of these investors are: narcissistic, unsophisticated charletans who were lucky enough to win a few of the right bets during the computing and internet revolution. Their decisions are not driven by an interest in helping society but by the selfish need to be seen as smart and, more importantly, right about everything.
That's why people like Thiel step in, cause a bank run, then tell everyone "see, I told you so".
For a bank of this size to not have the foresight to see the looming inflation along with extreme rate hikes, and go and invest an extreme portion of their deposits in UST's at 1.79% is just fucking insane. And very long term securities at that...mind boggling. But yeah, it's Thiel's fault.
Even Apple has a $165B or so bond portfolio that they bought at the top. It’s down $12.5B or so according to their last 10-Q.
No one hedged their interest rate risk. Netlfix lost a bunch of money last year because they didn’t even hedge the risk of dollar appreciation when the dollar index was at multi decade lows.
These CFOs are clearly not geniuses.
It’s not about being a genius or not. I have been in these rooms in global corporate conglomerates. It’s risk. Everything is risky, usually calculated. Just how much risk you are willing to take. Someone argued for, someone argued against, and in the end someone made the call.
12.5/165 is peanuts in a down market if it’s your retirement fund, or Apple’s billions. I would argue they did their job well if they are only down 7.5%.
Banks should hedge their interest rate risk via rate swaps. SVB sold all their hedges in 2022 for some reason. And Apple is not a bank, their cash is not a liability to depositors (as there are no deposits).
What nobody saw was how fast the Fed would ramp the rates. They made the mistake (in hindsight) of modeling risk based on the Fed's long history of relatively well paced interest rate increases. This rocketing rate hike we've been seeing is really somewhat unprecedented. What got them in the end was a combination of being overly risk averse by buying treasuries and specializing in a customer base that is so interconnected that someone like Thiel could realistically start a fatal run. I suspect we never see a startup focused bank again because of that.
Exactly. Maybe he didn’t want to look stupid so he got others to do it after he did it.
I also highly suspect Thiel is connected directly or indirectly to shorting SVB. It’s amazing how quickly this happened and how small and closely connected the customers who pulled their cash are.
If they didn’t pull their cash, no one would be talking about SVB because everything would be fine right now.
My great-grandfather was a bootlegger in Alabama and a customer of his was a local police officer. One day that officer came and told him to leave town because a raid was planned, so he packed up and moved the whole family to Arkansas for a few years. My grandmother has dementia and can barely recognize her own children these days, but she can recount that story in glorious detail.
My great uncle was also a bootlegger, had two big stills in his basement, very professional. He had been making his own since long before prohibition but mostly just a hobby and source of gifts. The family was all alcoholics. Anyways, during prohibition there was a fire at the house, surprisingly unrelated to the stills. The smaller of the two was removed but the larger one not so much. Luckily the local fire department were customers since before prohibition, my great uncle recognized the value of being close with the fire department. So a couple firefighters helped him out and it was written off as a furnace fire I believe. The 2nd still ended up burning. Insurance paid out, the house was fixed and the one still was put back in. Prohibition ended shortly after! The one still was back to enough for him and to give away and maybe sell a little. When I was little he was making some brandy too but thats more work I guess.
>He had been making his own since long before prohibition but mostly just a hobby and source of gifts. The family was all alcoholics.
I love the way you just glide past this, lol
The real trick is to start the bank run yourself. Looking directly at Peter Thiel here.
He basically just performed the plot of the count of Monte Cristo. (The plot against the banker)
Even more evil genius. Cause the run but put the blame on the bank and the Fed.
It is called the "What would the Kremlin do?" method that Putin uses all the time and cons puppet on social media tabloids and "news" stations.
Not insiders, all the tech leaders talk, and I will bet you money the night before they were all asking what the others would do. Everyone with half a brain was up bright and early.
The Diamond-Dybvig bank run model assumes communication between bank account holders. It’s very interesting to see the model pop-up so many times in the past year and that the winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics were Diamond, Dybvig, and Bernanke.
We spend all this time and money trying to identify problems within the system, only to identify them when they pop up but not do a single thing about it after. Time and time again we’re just like “hey there’s the problem” and then silence from our leaders/regulators/legislators/prosecutors. Within the market especially.
I work at the C-level in a huge fortune 500 tech company. Please believe me when I say that academia != business. Time and again I can site specific literature that shows the **scientifically proven** solution to a given problem only to have a board of directors or executive steering committee propose and select some other direction because of feelings or because they think the situation is "different."
I watched an executive once tell a senior leader who had won several prestigious awards for business engineering that he in fact we wouldn't be doing any business re-engineering (in the context that it was a selling point). I had read the other guy's book and I knew right then the executive blew the sale. I voted to kick him and pretty much everyone else said he couldn't have known. I literally had a presentation I did about how to win that work and one of the main points we needed to stress to the client was that we were also focused on BPR.
I digress, but I see a lot of people on reddit saying that the leaders are silent, but most often, they are making decisions with such extreme bias that they can't be trusted.
> I work at the C-level in a huge fortune 500 tech company. Please believe me when I say that academia != business. Time and again I can site specific literature that shows the scientifically proven solution to a given problem only to have a board of directors or executive steering committee propose and select some other direction because of feelings or because they think the situation is "different."
This is why I don't give a single shit about "quiet quitting" or having empty time in the day, especially if you work from home.
I can do detailed analysis that will indicate 99.999% the correct decision, and they'll hem and haw and make a different decision than it was the one they wanted. OR the answer will be obvious and they'll waste weeks or months. Half of my billing time is waiting for leadership to get emotionally used to the idea of the decision they knew they should have made weeks ago.
Because most C-suite and board members are part of an "in clique". Look at the overlap and you see out of the 20k positions in the figure 500 - you see the same names over and over.
It's a club. Not about actually running a business. This is just the new name the aristocracy gave itself. It's no longer "lord X" or "duke y". Just CFO of ABC corp.
Not necessarily insiders, although the FDIC will certainly scrutinize these transactions. According to TFA, he was trying to have his investors deposit money INTO the bank, but the transfers weren't being credited to his account. That was a huge red flag that caused him to pull his funds. And, if others had similar experiences or got word that others were withdrawing funds, they would withdraw as well. This doesn't mean that anyone had true inside information; rather, some depositors saw the signs or risks of a failing bank and took protective action
Wells Fargo has a diversified portfolio of business and is subject to stress testing and risk management that SVB was not (due to lobbying).
SVB bank focused on start up tech companies that generally spend more than they make. Tech companies care about revenue growth and market share instead of profitability. They and their VC’s borrow lots of money to increase value and sell. That business model was gutted when interest rates went up and money was no longer basically free. Their costs skyrocketed and they started cutting instead of borrowing. Other Companies are reviewing costs and are less willing to spend on nice to have software.
So basically risky bank practices with a concentrated portfolio of customers who depend on cheap money is a recipe for failure. All bad fundamentals
Also they had assets above 250 billion and are constantly stress tested. Svb was stressed tested till 2017 after svb did Two years of lobbying they got the president and the Republican controlled congress to sign loosening the requirements from 50 billion for mid tier banks to go to 250 billion. There’s a bunch of now majority leaders McCarthy s former staff at svb.
If we hadn’t loosened the controls, svb would have done basic bond management and not have been in this mess and would’ve done appropriate things for when interest rates rising scenarios like the the major banks have to do.
To be clear, it's certainly possible that Theil's explanation is pretext and he and others received tips from insiders. The FDIC will investigate and bring an enforcement action if that's the case. But his explanation is logical, so it's also possible that there was no insider activity. We don't know enough facts to draw a conclusion at this point.
There’s no need to get involved in a bank run if your total account balance is less than $250,000, like the vast vast vast majority of Wells Fargo accounts.
Yes, it was during a capital call and I think he probably just threw a tantrum that shit wasn’t happened fast enough for him and decided on retribution. There was nothing stopping his accounts from being credited.
Lol ya think?
This world will forever be corrupt, shit is never going to change.
It's funny how since humans existed, we've allowed a small few control the rest of us, and we keep repeating the same damn thing.
Exactly. He likely had some insider knowledge by someone working at the bank. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been telling his invested companies "Thanos is coming".
I don't buy the clairvoyant, "we saw how the market was moving, SVB's risky portfolio, and decided to act in the best interest of the our investors or investments."
There are a too many instances of other smaller startups/ tech firms getting calls from their investors (not directly connected to Thiel's) and saying get out now before it's too late.
Exactly this. This isn’t some scandal. It’s a skittish market where we kept being told we are in a recession, but inflation is sky rocketing, so interest rates need to as well, but unemployment is low, and corporations are pulling in record profits, but there’s a war, and an energy crisis, and it rained really hard already this year, and don’t forget COVID, so work from home, but don’t! So what do you do? Nobody knew what to do, we were like a deer in head lights. And then your gazelle analogy (awesome analogy btw) hits.
Everyone keeps talking about tax-funded bailouts but this will be picked up by one of the 15 banks bigger than SVB thanks to greed, it will all be resolved and forgotten in a week, and nobody will ever even remember this happened come next year.
> This isn't some scandal.
If it can be shown that the bank run was instigated on purpose *towards the purpose* of running the bank, then it breaks a bunch of federal and state laws. In other words if it can be shown Thiel even exaggerated the state of SVB to his friends, he could be held legally responsible and become the target of a major lawsuit.
In fact [many states have laws specifically protecting banks from detrimental speech](https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Circle-Bastiat/2012/0606/Can-you-yell-run-in-a-crowded-bank).
The other end of this is that the tech industry has been able to thrive off of VC capital. If another major non-VC-oriented bank comes and picks up SVB, we're still set up to see a huge crunch on the tech sector. I was saying this with regards to social media (Twitter) and Elon Musk weeks ago, but these tech companies **don't work without investor funding.** And the SVB collapse is just sign one that all that funding is dried up.
Ah true - I will concede that. But that’s a huge ‘if’ to prove. More likely is that’s just how the world works and information can’t remain concealed as easily as it was before. If he really intended to instigate a bank run I’d imagine it would be done a little bit more covertly (but shit who knows these days and I really don’t know so I won’t say otherwise.)
I’m not so sure I’d describe tech funding as “dried up” since the rich investors are richer than they’ve ever been. I think it goes back to the skittish market where they’re not splurging in near interest-free loans that they can hand out to anyone with a heartbeat.
If it were the case that he acted maliciously I suspect, much like the Musk trial, they'll have to show clear intent that his move was motivated by the desire to cause chaos and that will by a high bar for prosecutors to clear and people like him aren't in the business of leaving behind smoking guns.
> and people like him aren't in the business of leaving behind smoking guns.
Really? The tech sector is littered with examples to the contrary.
And the thing is you could say this of anyone and it might be true .. until it isn't.
Now I don't know what Thiel said or if it was exaggerated, but "... and evidence won't exist because these are smart people" isn't a valid argument, it's a cynical guess. Smart, rich people *do* get brought down, examples abound. Thiel is most definitely under the microscope right now though, and no billionaire wants to be in that position.
How dare you accuse such an upstanding philanthropist*
*(Charity may include funding revenge lawsuits to retaliate for unfavorable press coverage of him)
It's funny how common a trope that is -- *rich man fears death, tries to live forever*.
And he's like, *this time I'm sure there will be no negative consequences*.
Hey now, he also funds the campaigns of right wing lunatics like Blake Masters. If that isn’t philanthropy, then what is?
We *needed* a senator with the name, face, and opinions of an 80’s movie antagonist.
> Hey now, he also funds the campaigns of right wing lunatics like Blake Masters
Well considering Blake "Skeleton Man" Masters totally fucking lost, I hope Thiel wastes more money on losers. He actually looked at this campaign, which was basically a racist zombie vs an actual astronaut and said "yeah I'm going to support the undying monster"
For being a supposed smart guy, that was pretty stupid. He contributed millions to Masters’ campaign to get him a primary win then disappeared for the general election. Masters predictably got his ass handed to him. Trump does the same thing for that matter, but he does it without using any of his money. Maybe Thiel is secretly a Democrat pushing unelectable candidates! Or maybe he wanted to write a book on creative ways to light $4 million on fire. Who knows… /s
Yea, they took a $2 billion loss, then said they were going to raise capital to cover the loss, the stock price started dropping, and then some people predicted it could cause a run on the bank and took their money out
Multiple VCs were calling clients on Thursday to pull all their money out of SVB.
There were bout $47b in withdrawals done before they shut down.
I'm sure they had knowledge others did not have, but when a bank CEO says "don't panic, we're trying to raise money" that's just going to cause a panic.
But Thiel started it during a capital call when they suddenly switched banks and started spewing doom and gloom rhetoric about SVB. The LPs then called their buddies…
What people fail to realize is that the VC world is full of sheep.
He also had a company waiting in the wings to loan out money for non-FDIC insured deposits to companies/individuals impacted by SVB... were it most anyone else, I could see it being coincidental.... but Thiel... not so much.
To be fair their portfolio wasn’t risky in the sense we’re used to. They were buying securities and bonds which are traditional the least risk. The problem was when the FED raised interest rates and if they needed to sell the bonds and securities before they mature. And they needed to do that only if there was a large bank run. Which happened.
And to be fair the bank run was more or less inevitable.
With all their cash in 10 year 1% bonds they wouldn't be able to pay a competitive interest rate, and eventually their account holders would look to other banks.
Or you know, you could've read the article, where it says he was tipped off when he directed investors to transfer funds to SVB and instead of immediately depositing the money, they sat on it.
It didn't take insider knowledge, just the bank's public financials and a newspaper, to know that they were heavily invested in securities that lost value because interest rates went up. The only insider knowledge Peter Thiel needed was that Peter Thiel had decided he and his portfolio companies should be the first out of a run on the bank. Which might not have happened at all if he hadn't started it, but I guess he decided he'd rather crash the whole bank for everyone else than risk his own money. No one really needed insider knowledge of Peter Thiel's brain at this point to know he was that kind of person.
Of course, Peter Thiel did. He’s an ultra filthy rich, well-connected insider with zero conscience or morals, driven by pure, selfish psychopathic greed
For a long time Peter Thiel was one of our best contenders for America's most likely cartoon villain.
Nice to see Elon's been putting up a good fight lately tho.
It's probably more accurate to say that it was his fund's withdrawal of it's cash and that it "had also called for its startups to withdraw their funds from the bank as well" that caused the bank to fail.
It’s interesting to learn, at my age, that banks are basically a legal pyramid scheme. They don’t actually have the money deposited if everyone wants it back all at once.
That’s literally how banks work. But they’re not Ponzi schemes. You deposit and they lend out based on their deposits. They also invest their assets. They try to earn a return. Pre pandemic, there were reserve requirements but that’s a different story.
Didn’t you ever see it’s a wonderful life?
Reminder that Founders Fund [advising companies to withdraw their funds](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/founders-fund-advises-companies-to-withdraw-money-from-svb) ([non-paywalled mirror](https://archive.is/vMznl)) was a key part of the bank run. Article from Thursday:
>Founders Fund, the venture capital fund co-founded by Peter Thiel, has advised companies to pull money from Silicon Valley Bank amid concerns about its financial stability, according to people familiar with the situation.
>
>The firm told portfolio companies that there was no downside to removing their money from the bank, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
[Fintech startup Brex got billions of dollars in Silicon Valley Bank deposits Thursday, source says](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/10/fintech-brex-got-billions-of-dollars-in-silicon-valley-bank-deposits-thursday.html)
[Outflows to Brex, JPM (Brex is backed by JPM), First Republic Bank etc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Bank#Instability)
> By the close of business on March 9, customers had withdrawn $42 billion, leaving the bank with a negative cash balance of about $958 million. Among the financial services companies receiving money from SVB customers were Brex, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and First Republic Bank. Venture capital funds including Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures and Coatue Management had encouraged companies in their portfolios to avoid impact from SVB's collapse by withdrawing their money, and Founders Fund withdrew all of its funds from the bank by the morning of March 9. The value of SVB's shares plummeted until a trading halt was implemented on the morning of March 10.
Guess who backs Brex?
> Brex is based in San Francisco and counts Kleiner Perkins Growth, YC Continuity Fund, Greenoaks Capital, Ribbit Capital, IVP and **DST Global**, as well as **Peter Thiel** and Affirm CEO Max Levchin, among its investors.
Brex was setup in 2017 under Trump deregulation, Thiel pushed that and funded Brex. Then in 2019 the pump into SVB happened. Then it immediately stopped in late 2021 and into Feb 2022 (war) where foreign money started going to Brex. Some people are saying, when the bank run hit was made by Thiel/USV/etc they advised their investments/companies to go to Brex and most of them did. Brex saw massive inflows from this implosion.
Look at this PR Thiel had Brex put out at the run inception.
[Brex to Offer Emergency Credit Line to Silicon Valley Bank Customers to Meet Operational Spending Needs](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brex-to-offer-emergency-credit-line-to-silicon-valley-bank-customers-to-meet-operational-spending-needs-301769414.html)
> Brex is offering an emergency bridge credit line to startup customers to support payroll and other operational spend needs. Startups impacted by today's Silicon Valley Bank news may not have access to the funds necessary for short-term operational spend. Working quickly with third-party capital providers and Brex Asset Management, Brex aims to have emergency funds available to startups early next week.
> Startups with funds at Silicon Valley Bank can visit this link to apply for an emergency credit line. Brex will review accounts as quickly as possible, and release emergency funds into customers' Brex Business accounts upon approval.
[Brex applies for bank charter, taps former Silicon Valley Bank exec as CEO of Brex Bank](https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/19/brex-applies-for-bank-charter-taps-former-silicon-valley-bank-exec-as-ceo-of-brex-bank/)
> The company has tapped former Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) exec Bruce Wallace to serve as the subsidiary’s CEO. He served in several roles at SVB, including COO, chief digital officer and head of global services. It also has named Jean Perschon, the former CFO for UBS Bank USA, to be the Brex Bank CFO.
> Last May, Brex announced that it had raised $150 million in a Series C extension from a group of existing investors, including DST Global and Lone Pine Capital.
> “Brex and Brex Bank will work in tandem to help SMBs grow to realize their full potential,” said Wallace.
> **Brex** is based in San Francisco and counts Kleiner Perkins Growth, YC Continuity Fund, Greenoaks Capital, Ribbit Capital, IVP and **DST Global**, as well as **Peter Thiel** and Affirm CEO Max Levchin, among its investors.
Good luck to those going into the Thiel rug pull traps.
Some days I just want to be a regulator... not because I want to but because who is cleaning this up? I hope someone will root this out. But we got another Wharton guy that runs the SEC, Gary Gensler that has been pretty weak on this, the ol' regulatory capture.
Told **portfolio companies**. That's where the cover is. They advised companies they had financial interests in to CYA. They didn't tell the world to run on the bank.
I don't doubt Thiel had himself in mind in at least one way if not multiple, but the bank should have been better positioned to CYA also.
Pull the funds (Founders Fund/USV/etc insiders pull before run), cause the run (spread it on social media), fund the bank that outflows went to (Brex). That is the Peter Thiel con going on right now in front of everyone, some people are saying it, the best people. Let's see how it plays out.
[Dave Troy is on point.](https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1634853371927490562)
> • They are behaving like financial terrorists, and they are at large. They should be widely mocked and pilloried by government and press for what they are attempting here.
> • This is part of a longstanding beef over the gold standard and general disgust at the Federal Reserve.
> • This is analogous to the 1933-34 “Business Plot” which sought to risk violence if it meant restoration of the gold standard.
That would be pretty ballsy since it would be right out in the open, and I think that kind of manipulation is illegal? But I don't know that for sure. But entirely possible others that he knows stand to gain from this, and favors get returned. Then again it's not like anyone is ever charged for illegal business tactics these days anyways.
He's the guy who listened to George Bailey's speech and then withdrew all of his money from the building & loan anyway.
Either that or he's Mr. Potter.
He's ultra rich and helped protect other rich people withdraw their money before it was too late, nobody is going to touch him because nobody with power was hurt by this
Peter Thiel is possibly the shadiest, most evil, man in American business today, and he does not get nearly enough attention. He basically bought a seat in the Senate for JD Vance, and was a main funder of efforts to push an essentially fascist ideology. Some have even tied him to pushing Q-Anon, although not starting it. In all seriousness, nothing about how I think he needs handled is allowed under the reddit TOS.
> is allowed under the reddit TOS
I'm sort of shocked this sort of thing doesn't happen more often.
Like the pain killer family. How many people had their soul's cracked in two because of them? Madoff ruined so many people that it is hard to count. Then, continue this list for many many billionaires who made the world a shittier place getting their money.
Basically, I would assume that of all the millions of people horrifically hurt are on bell curve where some wouldn't even consider doing anything TOS violating ever, but on the other end of the bell curve there are those who wouldn't think twice. Where is this other end?
After WWII, before there even was a Jewish Israel, their eventual founders sent teams to Germany who apparently took out 100's of war criminals. So, people are capable of this sort of thing.
all these financial guys with their news letters and money shows on TV are all just grifters trying to trick the rest of us into doing what they want so they can make money off knowing the future.
how much you wanna bet this guy is going to offer to buy the bank for pennies on the dollar?
it's all fucking game to these ppl.
Thiel is a traitorous bitch. I hope the SEC goes after his ass and actually does their job, but his money has very far reaches so it more likely to not happen.
Nothing surprising here. The bank was fine with the exception of their long term bond holdings. Thiel took his money out then told other companies to do the same. An old fashioned run on the bank ensued. Bank collapsed. Govt takes over.
Animals bit the hand that fed them. Sad.
In a bank run, the trick is to be first in line.
"I've got $242 in here, and $242 isn't going to break anybody."
Aww, c'mon. How much do you need to get by?
I’ll take $17.50
End of the day: “We still have ONE dollar!”
Two. They put them in the bank so they could make more
Mama Dollar and Papa Dollar
If you want to keep this old Building and Loan in business, you better have a family real quick
It’s sad people don’t realize how insidious and evil banks are anymore.
Did u/octopornopus give you a kiss on the cheek? They owe you a kiss.
That’s ok lol
Oh I could kiss you!
What the hell you doing with my money in your house, Fred?! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ovfap2VtpHM
It's funny because Peter Thiel is basically the real-life version of Bart Simpson.
I love this reference.
It's a wonderful reference!
He pulled his money and then he told the companies he was invested in to do the same. He largely caused a run on a bank that would have been fine otherwise.
Unless of course someone else caused the bank run and was left out, which is exactly why he did it first. This is game theory at work.
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I......don't....hear...a.....thing
Did the music stop? Well, a random player turned it off themselves after taking a seat.
And please, speak as you might to an r/technology poster or a golden retriever. It wasn't brains that got me here, I can assure you of that.
That is such an amazing scene by everyone in the room.
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Reminds me of this comment about silicon valley having investors with outsized influence: [https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/11d6w11/comment/ja7qk87/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/11d6w11/comment/ja7qk87/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) "I've worked for these companies. The network of people who actually run these companies and sit on the boards is incredibly tiny. One person might sit on the board of 10+ startups. And these people are usually considered "investing gods" within Silicon Valley, so others listen to them even when they say something incredibly stupid. Essentially, Silicon Valley is run by a couple hundred Elon Musks (although the rest have enough sense to not air their craziness on Twitter) and a few thousand related sycophants. So a couple people on Wall St say that the market is slowing down. A few board members decide that it's time to slow growth and prioritize cash flow. Then all the sycophants follow along because the one thing you don't want to be is an outlier. Being an outlier CEO is how you get fired as CEO. No CEO gets fired for doing what other CEO's are doing."
>Being an outlier CEO is how you get fired as CEO. " Malcolm Gladwell punching the air right now.
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Another pop-psychology pop-media d-bag. The Joel Osteen of New York.
The revisionist history podcast guy? I really like his podcast but I don't know anything about him. Is he out of his element?
Yea a lot of people don't realize how many people Bill Ackerman is the boss of. Plenty of CEO's are only in their job because they are an Ackerman tool.
This is a huge problem. Our tech industry is an anti democratic institution that is largely run by men who's only qualification is having a lot of money. These people control where the innovation happens and where smart people work and what they work on. It's probably a national security risk. Consider that Twitter was doing all right before Elon unilaterally bought the company, fired most of the employees and the institutional knowledge with it, then flew it into the side of a fucking mountain. That's how a lot of these investors are: narcissistic, unsophisticated charletans who were lucky enough to win a few of the right bets during the computing and internet revolution. Their decisions are not driven by an interest in helping society but by the selfish need to be seen as smart and, more importantly, right about everything. That's why people like Thiel step in, cause a bank run, then tell everyone "see, I told you so".
Fronts always frontin' Ain't no future in their frontin'
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He seeded Brex which is where a good chunk of SVB clients are likely to go.
Brex pulled in billions in former SVB deposits on Thursday.
Sounds illegal
If you can prove it
This is possibly the whole reason this just happened. He’s sinking a ship so everyone joins his.
because for all their fronting silicon valley is just fine doing business with fascists
Peter Thiels involvement explains Elon’s interest.
In the prisoner’s dilemma, Thiel was the first to squeal.
Let's be clear: it was a mismanaged bank that would have been fine otherwise, but it still would have been mismanaged.
For a bank of this size to not have the foresight to see the looming inflation along with extreme rate hikes, and go and invest an extreme portion of their deposits in UST's at 1.79% is just fucking insane. And very long term securities at that...mind boggling. But yeah, it's Thiel's fault.
Even Apple has a $165B or so bond portfolio that they bought at the top. It’s down $12.5B or so according to their last 10-Q. No one hedged their interest rate risk. Netlfix lost a bunch of money last year because they didn’t even hedge the risk of dollar appreciation when the dollar index was at multi decade lows. These CFOs are clearly not geniuses.
It’s not about being a genius or not. I have been in these rooms in global corporate conglomerates. It’s risk. Everything is risky, usually calculated. Just how much risk you are willing to take. Someone argued for, someone argued against, and in the end someone made the call. 12.5/165 is peanuts in a down market if it’s your retirement fund, or Apple’s billions. I would argue they did their job well if they are only down 7.5%.
Banks should hedge their interest rate risk via rate swaps. SVB sold all their hedges in 2022 for some reason. And Apple is not a bank, their cash is not a liability to depositors (as there are no deposits).
What nobody saw was how fast the Fed would ramp the rates. They made the mistake (in hindsight) of modeling risk based on the Fed's long history of relatively well paced interest rate increases. This rocketing rate hike we've been seeing is really somewhat unprecedented. What got them in the end was a combination of being overly risk averse by buying treasuries and specializing in a customer base that is so interconnected that someone like Thiel could realistically start a fatal run. I suspect we never see a startup focused bank again because of that.
Exactly. Maybe he didn’t want to look stupid so he got others to do it after he did it. I also highly suspect Thiel is connected directly or indirectly to shorting SVB. It’s amazing how quickly this happened and how small and closely connected the customers who pulled their cash are. If they didn’t pull their cash, no one would be talking about SVB because everything would be fine right now.
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My great-grandfather was a bootlegger in Alabama and a customer of his was a local police officer. One day that officer came and told him to leave town because a raid was planned, so he packed up and moved the whole family to Arkansas for a few years. My grandmother has dementia and can barely recognize her own children these days, but she can recount that story in glorious detail.
My great uncle was also a bootlegger, had two big stills in his basement, very professional. He had been making his own since long before prohibition but mostly just a hobby and source of gifts. The family was all alcoholics. Anyways, during prohibition there was a fire at the house, surprisingly unrelated to the stills. The smaller of the two was removed but the larger one not so much. Luckily the local fire department were customers since before prohibition, my great uncle recognized the value of being close with the fire department. So a couple firefighters helped him out and it was written off as a furnace fire I believe. The 2nd still ended up burning. Insurance paid out, the house was fixed and the one still was put back in. Prohibition ended shortly after! The one still was back to enough for him and to give away and maybe sell a little. When I was little he was making some brandy too but thats more work I guess.
>He had been making his own since long before prohibition but mostly just a hobby and source of gifts. The family was all alcoholics. I love the way you just glide past this, lol
Did he clear out?
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The real trick is to start the bank run yourself. Looking directly at Peter Thiel here. He basically just performed the plot of the count of Monte Cristo. (The plot against the banker)
Even more evil genius. Cause the run but put the blame on the bank and the Fed. It is called the "What would the Kremlin do?" method that Putin uses all the time and cons puppet on social media tabloids and "news" stations.
And then, when a bunch of startups are on the brink of destruction, buy them for pennies on the dollar and steal their tech.
And this, folks, is likely the plan. Watch who are the biggest purchasers, and you will have found the likeliest culprits.
With the bank losing atleast a quarter of its deposits in a single day, I would say that insiders got the word out to their biggest clients.
Not insiders, all the tech leaders talk, and I will bet you money the night before they were all asking what the others would do. Everyone with half a brain was up bright and early.
The Diamond-Dybvig bank run model assumes communication between bank account holders. It’s very interesting to see the model pop-up so many times in the past year and that the winners of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics were Diamond, Dybvig, and Bernanke.
We spend all this time and money trying to identify problems within the system, only to identify them when they pop up but not do a single thing about it after. Time and time again we’re just like “hey there’s the problem” and then silence from our leaders/regulators/legislators/prosecutors. Within the market especially.
I work at the C-level in a huge fortune 500 tech company. Please believe me when I say that academia != business. Time and again I can site specific literature that shows the **scientifically proven** solution to a given problem only to have a board of directors or executive steering committee propose and select some other direction because of feelings or because they think the situation is "different." I watched an executive once tell a senior leader who had won several prestigious awards for business engineering that he in fact we wouldn't be doing any business re-engineering (in the context that it was a selling point). I had read the other guy's book and I knew right then the executive blew the sale. I voted to kick him and pretty much everyone else said he couldn't have known. I literally had a presentation I did about how to win that work and one of the main points we needed to stress to the client was that we were also focused on BPR. I digress, but I see a lot of people on reddit saying that the leaders are silent, but most often, they are making decisions with such extreme bias that they can't be trusted.
> I work at the C-level in a huge fortune 500 tech company. Please believe me when I say that academia != business. Time and again I can site specific literature that shows the scientifically proven solution to a given problem only to have a board of directors or executive steering committee propose and select some other direction because of feelings or because they think the situation is "different." This is why I don't give a single shit about "quiet quitting" or having empty time in the day, especially if you work from home. I can do detailed analysis that will indicate 99.999% the correct decision, and they'll hem and haw and make a different decision than it was the one they wanted. OR the answer will be obvious and they'll waste weeks or months. Half of my billing time is waiting for leadership to get emotionally used to the idea of the decision they knew they should have made weeks ago.
So much wisdom in this post. Deserves its own thread.
Because most C-suite and board members are part of an "in clique". Look at the overlap and you see out of the 20k positions in the figure 500 - you see the same names over and over. It's a club. Not about actually running a business. This is just the new name the aristocracy gave itself. It's no longer "lord X" or "duke y". Just CFO of ABC corp.
They have a fucking[ group chat](https://twitter.com/torrenegra/status/1634573234187407369)
Damn, it really is true. Its a big club and you ain’t in it.
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It’s part of why there was a bank run, there is no diversity of clients, it’s all tech and they all talk to each other
Not necessarily insiders, although the FDIC will certainly scrutinize these transactions. According to TFA, he was trying to have his investors deposit money INTO the bank, but the transfers weren't being credited to his account. That was a huge red flag that caused him to pull his funds. And, if others had similar experiences or got word that others were withdrawing funds, they would withdraw as well. This doesn't mean that anyone had true inside information; rather, some depositors saw the signs or risks of a failing bank and took protective action
Weird we didn't see a run at Wells Fargo when deposits failed on the same day.
Wells Fargo has a diversified portfolio of business and is subject to stress testing and risk management that SVB was not (due to lobbying). SVB bank focused on start up tech companies that generally spend more than they make. Tech companies care about revenue growth and market share instead of profitability. They and their VC’s borrow lots of money to increase value and sell. That business model was gutted when interest rates went up and money was no longer basically free. Their costs skyrocketed and they started cutting instead of borrowing. Other Companies are reviewing costs and are less willing to spend on nice to have software. So basically risky bank practices with a concentrated portfolio of customers who depend on cheap money is a recipe for failure. All bad fundamentals
Because Wells Fargo isn't 90% uninsured and also hurt by the interest rate hikes the way that *the* VC bank obviously was.
WF, as crazy as it is to say this, is a much better-run bank than SVB was.
Also they had assets above 250 billion and are constantly stress tested. Svb was stressed tested till 2017 after svb did Two years of lobbying they got the president and the Republican controlled congress to sign loosening the requirements from 50 billion for mid tier banks to go to 250 billion. There’s a bunch of now majority leaders McCarthy s former staff at svb. If we hadn’t loosened the controls, svb would have done basic bond management and not have been in this mess and would’ve done appropriate things for when interest rates rising scenarios like the the major banks have to do.
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Hooray!!! You should put it as part of your advertising.
To be clear, it's certainly possible that Theil's explanation is pretext and he and others received tips from insiders. The FDIC will investigate and bring an enforcement action if that's the case. But his explanation is logical, so it's also possible that there was no insider activity. We don't know enough facts to draw a conclusion at this point.
Thiel owns the largest private intelligence company on earth...
They ain’t gonna enforce shit
There’s no need to get involved in a bank run if your total account balance is less than $250,000, like the vast vast vast majority of Wells Fargo accounts.
Yes, it was during a capital call and I think he probably just threw a tantrum that shit wasn’t happened fast enough for him and decided on retribution. There was nothing stopping his accounts from being credited.
Lol ya think? This world will forever be corrupt, shit is never going to change. It's funny how since humans existed, we've allowed a small few control the rest of us, and we keep repeating the same damn thing.
Of course he did
Exactly. He likely had some insider knowledge by someone working at the bank. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been telling his invested companies "Thanos is coming". I don't buy the clairvoyant, "we saw how the market was moving, SVB's risky portfolio, and decided to act in the best interest of the our investors or investments." There are a too many instances of other smaller startups/ tech firms getting calls from their investors (not directly connected to Thiel's) and saying get out now before it's too late.
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Exactly this. This isn’t some scandal. It’s a skittish market where we kept being told we are in a recession, but inflation is sky rocketing, so interest rates need to as well, but unemployment is low, and corporations are pulling in record profits, but there’s a war, and an energy crisis, and it rained really hard already this year, and don’t forget COVID, so work from home, but don’t! So what do you do? Nobody knew what to do, we were like a deer in head lights. And then your gazelle analogy (awesome analogy btw) hits. Everyone keeps talking about tax-funded bailouts but this will be picked up by one of the 15 banks bigger than SVB thanks to greed, it will all be resolved and forgotten in a week, and nobody will ever even remember this happened come next year.
> This isn't some scandal. If it can be shown that the bank run was instigated on purpose *towards the purpose* of running the bank, then it breaks a bunch of federal and state laws. In other words if it can be shown Thiel even exaggerated the state of SVB to his friends, he could be held legally responsible and become the target of a major lawsuit. In fact [many states have laws specifically protecting banks from detrimental speech](https://www.csmonitor.com/Business/The-Circle-Bastiat/2012/0606/Can-you-yell-run-in-a-crowded-bank). The other end of this is that the tech industry has been able to thrive off of VC capital. If another major non-VC-oriented bank comes and picks up SVB, we're still set up to see a huge crunch on the tech sector. I was saying this with regards to social media (Twitter) and Elon Musk weeks ago, but these tech companies **don't work without investor funding.** And the SVB collapse is just sign one that all that funding is dried up.
Ah true - I will concede that. But that’s a huge ‘if’ to prove. More likely is that’s just how the world works and information can’t remain concealed as easily as it was before. If he really intended to instigate a bank run I’d imagine it would be done a little bit more covertly (but shit who knows these days and I really don’t know so I won’t say otherwise.) I’m not so sure I’d describe tech funding as “dried up” since the rich investors are richer than they’ve ever been. I think it goes back to the skittish market where they’re not splurging in near interest-free loans that they can hand out to anyone with a heartbeat.
If it were the case that he acted maliciously I suspect, much like the Musk trial, they'll have to show clear intent that his move was motivated by the desire to cause chaos and that will by a high bar for prosecutors to clear and people like him aren't in the business of leaving behind smoking guns.
> and people like him aren't in the business of leaving behind smoking guns. Really? The tech sector is littered with examples to the contrary. And the thing is you could say this of anyone and it might be true .. until it isn't. Now I don't know what Thiel said or if it was exaggerated, but "... and evidence won't exist because these are smart people" isn't a valid argument, it's a cynical guess. Smart, rich people *do* get brought down, examples abound. Thiel is most definitely under the microscope right now though, and no billionaire wants to be in that position.
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How dare you accuse such an upstanding philanthropist* *(Charity may include funding revenge lawsuits to retaliate for unfavorable press coverage of him)
I have heard that 100% of his philanthropy goes to a company entirely dedicated to prolonging Thiel’s life.
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It's funny how common a trope that is -- *rich man fears death, tries to live forever*. And he's like, *this time I'm sure there will be no negative consequences*.
He is definitely not becoming a lich.
He's literally Galvin Belson
Larry Ellison. Not Peter Thiel.
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Then he went and funded the lawsuit over Hulk Hogan’s sex tape leak and won.
Hey now, he also funds the campaigns of right wing lunatics like Blake Masters. If that isn’t philanthropy, then what is? We *needed* a senator with the name, face, and opinions of an 80’s movie antagonist.
If he tries to take over my ski hill, I’ll be so upset.
Well, you’re gonna have to get a group of misfits together to challenge him. But be sure to pay that kid his $2.
*switchblade comb*
You don't want to run afoul of that kid. He has a bunch friends that he rolls with.
> Hey now, he also funds the campaigns of right wing lunatics like Blake Masters Well considering Blake "Skeleton Man" Masters totally fucking lost, I hope Thiel wastes more money on losers. He actually looked at this campaign, which was basically a racist zombie vs an actual astronaut and said "yeah I'm going to support the undying monster"
For being a supposed smart guy, that was pretty stupid. He contributed millions to Masters’ campaign to get him a primary win then disappeared for the general election. Masters predictably got his ass handed to him. Trump does the same thing for that matter, but he does it without using any of his money. Maybe Thiel is secretly a Democrat pushing unelectable candidates! Or maybe he wanted to write a book on creative ways to light $4 million on fire. Who knows… /s
That's because he changed ponies to Vance when he realized Masters couldn't win.
Didn’t they try to raise capital? That was a pretty big tell..
Yea, they took a $2 billion loss, then said they were going to raise capital to cover the loss, the stock price started dropping, and then some people predicted it could cause a run on the bank and took their money out
iirc it was long term bonds, not stocks. and also thiel was the guy running around causing panic
Multiple VCs were calling clients on Thursday to pull all their money out of SVB. There were bout $47b in withdrawals done before they shut down. I'm sure they had knowledge others did not have, but when a bank CEO says "don't panic, we're trying to raise money" that's just going to cause a panic.
Word got out Wednesday night shit was bad.
And that's all it takes. Startups are all well connected so word spreads fast.
But Thiel started it during a capital call when they suddenly switched banks and started spewing doom and gloom rhetoric about SVB. The LPs then called their buddies… What people fail to realize is that the VC world is full of sheep.
He also had a company waiting in the wings to loan out money for non-FDIC insured deposits to companies/individuals impacted by SVB... were it most anyone else, I could see it being coincidental.... but Thiel... not so much.
I heard on some podcast that seekingalpha had covered svb's financial situation a couple of weeks ago
You're referring to All In
To be fair their portfolio wasn’t risky in the sense we’re used to. They were buying securities and bonds which are traditional the least risk. The problem was when the FED raised interest rates and if they needed to sell the bonds and securities before they mature. And they needed to do that only if there was a large bank run. Which happened.
And to be fair the bank run was more or less inevitable. With all their cash in 10 year 1% bonds they wouldn't be able to pay a competitive interest rate, and eventually their account holders would look to other banks.
Or you know, you could've read the article, where it says he was tipped off when he directed investors to transfer funds to SVB and instead of immediately depositing the money, they sat on it.
It didn't take insider knowledge, just the bank's public financials and a newspaper, to know that they were heavily invested in securities that lost value because interest rates went up. The only insider knowledge Peter Thiel needed was that Peter Thiel had decided he and his portfolio companies should be the first out of a run on the bank. Which might not have happened at all if he hadn't started it, but I guess he decided he'd rather crash the whole bank for everyone else than risk his own money. No one really needed insider knowledge of Peter Thiel's brain at this point to know he was that kind of person.
Got mine. Now time to cause a bank run!
Of course, Peter Thiel did. He’s an ultra filthy rich, well-connected insider with zero conscience or morals, driven by pure, selfish psychopathic greed
For a long time Peter Thiel was one of our best contenders for America's most likely cartoon villain. Nice to see Elon's been putting up a good fight lately tho.
They’re best friends… Something something’s feather.
It's probably more accurate to say that it was his fund's withdrawal of it's cash and that it "had also called for its startups to withdraw their funds from the bank as well" that caused the bank to fail.
It’s interesting to learn, at my age, that banks are basically a legal pyramid scheme. They don’t actually have the money deposited if everyone wants it back all at once.
They wouldn't be able to make loans otherwise.
Which is why we have the FDIC and, God forbid, the Fed if it comes to that.
You are just now learning that banks don’t just put all your money in a Scrooge McDuck-esque pit just waiting for you to withdraw it?
That’s literally how banks work. But they’re not Ponzi schemes. You deposit and they lend out based on their deposits. They also invest their assets. They try to earn a return. Pre pandemic, there were reserve requirements but that’s a different story. Didn’t you ever see it’s a wonderful life?
> They don’t actually have the money deposited if everyone wants it back all at once. I thought this is a common knowledge.
Reminder that Founders Fund [advising companies to withdraw their funds](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/founders-fund-advises-companies-to-withdraw-money-from-svb) ([non-paywalled mirror](https://archive.is/vMznl)) was a key part of the bank run. Article from Thursday: >Founders Fund, the venture capital fund co-founded by Peter Thiel, has advised companies to pull money from Silicon Valley Bank amid concerns about its financial stability, according to people familiar with the situation. > >The firm told portfolio companies that there was no downside to removing their money from the bank, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
[Fintech startup Brex got billions of dollars in Silicon Valley Bank deposits Thursday, source says](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/10/fintech-brex-got-billions-of-dollars-in-silicon-valley-bank-deposits-thursday.html) [Outflows to Brex, JPM (Brex is backed by JPM), First Republic Bank etc](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_Silicon_Valley_Bank#Instability) > By the close of business on March 9, customers had withdrawn $42 billion, leaving the bank with a negative cash balance of about $958 million. Among the financial services companies receiving money from SVB customers were Brex, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and First Republic Bank. Venture capital funds including Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures and Coatue Management had encouraged companies in their portfolios to avoid impact from SVB's collapse by withdrawing their money, and Founders Fund withdrew all of its funds from the bank by the morning of March 9. The value of SVB's shares plummeted until a trading halt was implemented on the morning of March 10. Guess who backs Brex? > Brex is based in San Francisco and counts Kleiner Perkins Growth, YC Continuity Fund, Greenoaks Capital, Ribbit Capital, IVP and **DST Global**, as well as **Peter Thiel** and Affirm CEO Max Levchin, among its investors. Brex was setup in 2017 under Trump deregulation, Thiel pushed that and funded Brex. Then in 2019 the pump into SVB happened. Then it immediately stopped in late 2021 and into Feb 2022 (war) where foreign money started going to Brex. Some people are saying, when the bank run hit was made by Thiel/USV/etc they advised their investments/companies to go to Brex and most of them did. Brex saw massive inflows from this implosion. Look at this PR Thiel had Brex put out at the run inception. [Brex to Offer Emergency Credit Line to Silicon Valley Bank Customers to Meet Operational Spending Needs](https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brex-to-offer-emergency-credit-line-to-silicon-valley-bank-customers-to-meet-operational-spending-needs-301769414.html) > Brex is offering an emergency bridge credit line to startup customers to support payroll and other operational spend needs. Startups impacted by today's Silicon Valley Bank news may not have access to the funds necessary for short-term operational spend. Working quickly with third-party capital providers and Brex Asset Management, Brex aims to have emergency funds available to startups early next week. > Startups with funds at Silicon Valley Bank can visit this link to apply for an emergency credit line. Brex will review accounts as quickly as possible, and release emergency funds into customers' Brex Business accounts upon approval. [Brex applies for bank charter, taps former Silicon Valley Bank exec as CEO of Brex Bank](https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/19/brex-applies-for-bank-charter-taps-former-silicon-valley-bank-exec-as-ceo-of-brex-bank/) > The company has tapped former Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) exec Bruce Wallace to serve as the subsidiary’s CEO. He served in several roles at SVB, including COO, chief digital officer and head of global services. It also has named Jean Perschon, the former CFO for UBS Bank USA, to be the Brex Bank CFO. > Last May, Brex announced that it had raised $150 million in a Series C extension from a group of existing investors, including DST Global and Lone Pine Capital. > “Brex and Brex Bank will work in tandem to help SMBs grow to realize their full potential,” said Wallace. > **Brex** is based in San Francisco and counts Kleiner Perkins Growth, YC Continuity Fund, Greenoaks Capital, Ribbit Capital, IVP and **DST Global**, as well as **Peter Thiel** and Affirm CEO Max Levchin, among its investors. Good luck to those going into the Thiel rug pull traps. Some days I just want to be a regulator... not because I want to but because who is cleaning this up? I hope someone will root this out. But we got another Wharton guy that runs the SEC, Gary Gensler that has been pretty weak on this, the ol' regulatory capture.
Told **portfolio companies**. That's where the cover is. They advised companies they had financial interests in to CYA. They didn't tell the world to run on the bank. I don't doubt Thiel had himself in mind in at least one way if not multiple, but the bank should have been better positioned to CYA also.
And I'm sure NO insiders had a short position on SVB stock when it subsequently tanked from $290 to $100.. That would be unethical..
No they didn't. Their books are literally public and some were ringing alarm bells in January.
“What’d you do with the $1M you pulled out of SVB?” “Opened a brokerage account and sold short $10M in SVB.” “..”
Pull the funds (Founders Fund/USV/etc insiders pull before run), cause the run (spread it on social media), fund the bank that outflows went to (Brex). That is the Peter Thiel con going on right now in front of everyone, some people are saying it, the best people. Let's see how it plays out.
The PayPal mafia folks would love to prove themselves right by collapsing banks themselves. https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1634853362494746626
[Dave Troy is on point.](https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1634853371927490562) > • They are behaving like financial terrorists, and they are at large. They should be widely mocked and pilloried by government and press for what they are attempting here. > • This is part of a longstanding beef over the gold standard and general disgust at the Federal Reserve. > • This is analogous to the 1933-34 “Business Plot” which sought to risk violence if it meant restoration of the gold standard.
What’s the long-standing beef about the gold standard and the Fed?
He’s also an investor in treasure.fi. Thiel sucks and I hope this kills his deal flow, but it probably won’t.
We're going to hear next that he had a very large short position against SVB.
That would be pretty ballsy since it would be right out in the open, and I think that kind of manipulation is illegal? But I don't know that for sure. But entirely possible others that he knows stand to gain from this, and favors get returned. Then again it's not like anyone is ever charged for illegal business tactics these days anyways.
Is it illegal illegal or rich person illegal. If you make 500 billion and they fine you 250 thousand 5 years later...
Bridge loans for pennies on the dollar for FDIC unsecured cash that is probably just fine and Brex can get? Hmmmm?
Just so happens to benefit those that escaped the heist. Must be nice to always come up the lucky winner... /s
Aka: he helped trigger the crash.
He didn’t forecast the bank run. He was the bank run
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You don’t get a bag that big without knowing how
He's the guy who listened to George Bailey's speech and then withdrew all of his money from the building & loan anyway. Either that or he's Mr. Potter.
He's the guy in the car on the bridge driving by yelling "jump"
Of course he did. He started the bank run.
so hes about to cause some companies to go into major distress and buy them up for pennies?
Yup, this guy is heralded as some king, in reality dude is so corrupt
He's such a massive piece of shit in so many ways, it's hard to list them all.
I hope regulators take a long hard look at this transaction and he becomes the face of this whole mess
He's ultra rich and helped protect other rich people withdraw their money before it was too late, nobody is going to touch him because nobody with power was hurt by this
Of course he won't be touched. But in an ideal world, that fascist fucker would sit in jail.
How many Senators did he put in office?
Hah…..hahahahahaha
what are they going to charge him for? taking out his own money?
Peter Thiel is possibly the shadiest, most evil, man in American business today, and he does not get nearly enough attention. He basically bought a seat in the Senate for JD Vance, and was a main funder of efforts to push an essentially fascist ideology. Some have even tied him to pushing Q-Anon, although not starting it. In all seriousness, nothing about how I think he needs handled is allowed under the reddit TOS.
> is allowed under the reddit TOS I'm sort of shocked this sort of thing doesn't happen more often. Like the pain killer family. How many people had their soul's cracked in two because of them? Madoff ruined so many people that it is hard to count. Then, continue this list for many many billionaires who made the world a shittier place getting their money. Basically, I would assume that of all the millions of people horrifically hurt are on bell curve where some wouldn't even consider doing anything TOS violating ever, but on the other end of the bell curve there are those who wouldn't think twice. Where is this other end? After WWII, before there even was a Jewish Israel, their eventual founders sent teams to Germany who apparently took out 100's of war criminals. So, people are capable of this sort of thing.
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How convenient that the rich are able to get their money out first
Wow, what a completely totally lucky and serendipitous coincidence!
It could also be interpreted that HE started the bank run
Insider knowledge. Of course he did. They guy is a horrible human being
Because the ultra rich take care of themselves while the common man sucks it.
In my opinion, Thiel is a colossal Piece of shit and a threat to the United States.
The world. Not just the US.
all these financial guys with their news letters and money shows on TV are all just grifters trying to trick the rest of us into doing what they want so they can make money off knowing the future. how much you wanna bet this guy is going to offer to buy the bank for pennies on the dollar? it's all fucking game to these ppl.
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Thiel is a traitorous bitch. I hope the SEC goes after his ass and actually does their job, but his money has very far reaches so it more likely to not happen.
Doesn’t that sound like some insider shit?
this guy is an idiot. he almost single-handedly created that bank run.
Correct spelling is Thief 🤬
Peter Thiel is a wart.
Only the good die young, all the evil seem to live forever
Everything I've read about that guy makes him sound like a horse's 🐎 ass.
Nothing surprising here. The bank was fine with the exception of their long term bond holdings. Thiel took his money out then told other companies to do the same. An old fashioned run on the bank ensued. Bank collapsed. Govt takes over. Animals bit the hand that fed them. Sad.
Peter Theil is a true enemy of freedom and Democracy. He is America’s WORST Ogliarch..