Its so big that it could take with it whole global market.
There is no safe asset you can turn into in such a case, digital money would literally mean nothing when whole financial system collapses.
Investors will be sad, but businesses that still do useful work will still have revenue. Why would they be worthless?
A global crash of financial systems is unlikely because it’s cause too much pain for everyone. It unfortunately means we plebs are likely the ones paying to bail it out.
Basically he could just be trying to protect the value of his dollars by putting them into a very stable company that also has exposure to the upside of AI.
How the dollar erodes, and its effect on other currencies will be unpredictable. Corporations raising prices to offset their rise in costs, is predictable. It’s just a matter of finding those corporations and industries which can do so without losing more sales.
I’d assume the urge to “cash up” here is driven by the idea of trying to sell the top, and buy the resulting bottom. I highly doubt Thiel thinks AI isn’t worth today’s market cap or several multiples of it, in the long term, and that any “bubble burst” will likely be a generational buying opportunity.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/peter-thiel-backed-startup-secures-...
?
They don't sell it, but they could if Nvidia started charging too much, and some of these are going into Meta datacenters instead of Nvidia.
Intel makes the Arc. It's probably the least viable competitor in that list, but the fundamentals are there, so some about of focus and investment could result in a viable competitor.
The newsworthy aspect to this is that the AI hype cycle is saying that right now, today, Nvidia is cheap. If AI is going to capture the entire economy, but it relies on Nvidia hardware, the current valuation is pennies on the dollar of what it will be one day.
Except, you know, that's all a lie. And Thiel peddled it for a while, and is friends with Musk, and connected to many others in the hype cycle besides, and now he's showing his hand that he knows its a lie.
@190/share this is $102 million
Also: > Vistra Energy, another 19% chunk, was wiped out as well.
> Moreover, the fund’s turnover hovered over 80%, leaving just three holdings: Tesla, Microsoft, and Apple.
Some would argue that tesla is a bigger bubble.
> his personal net worth is an eye-popping $16.3 billion as of 2025.
> That’s why Thiel rotated into Microsoft and Apple, tech giants with more diversified revenue streams, cloud scale, devices, and software.
These are supposed to be a hedge against a presumed AI bubble? Seems half hearted at best
Personally I agree it’s too small of a move, but different people have different beliefs and different tolerance for risk.
Given the fiscal dominance we’re in now that pretty much guarantees higher rates of inflation in the future, I think there’s much better places to place your money if you want to diversify. At least cash equivalents would be better
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.
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[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...
> 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.
Strange definition of “early backer of Nvidia”.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Vision_Fund [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia
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% )
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.
…and has been known to cause bank runs
Judge him based on his investing skill here
Timing the market is a lot easier for industry insiders and politicians, however.
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.
I would expect a return to the mean
Thiel has said so.
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.
This is exactly the same level as insane as thinking the Antichrist actually does walk among us today.
Not everything is some great 4d chess conspiracy; sometimes people just believe completely irrational stuff.
So if the whale is dumping, maybe smaller investors will dump too. Maybe we should too.
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?
But I’m an atheist so I don’t care about it.
The concern is less about what others announce as a belief, more about future access to essentials.
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.
In this case surely there will be an AI correction before Thiel runs out of money.
(starting point for the lazy https://authoritarian-stack.info )
I think this says less about Nvidia than people think. What interests me is what he will put in to? What kind of investment is he targetting?
Pet sitting service for after the uplift to heaven has a low ROI. I don't think his eschatology informs his money sense.
https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-0...
But again we never know his real positions.
Burry’s critique was actually refreshingly novel compared to the “it’s a bubble lmao” type of comments I normally see.
Can anyone expand on the validity of his “hardware depreciation” thesis?
I’ve always understood typical corporate hardware cycle to be ~3 years. I don’t run it that hot, but my 3080 is still running strong with no signs of performance issues (except the fact that 10GB is not much vram these days). Plus doesn’t everyone just buy the new generation every single year?
It could be insider knowledge that Intel/AMD/other has made a huge step forward and has reduced Nvidia's moat (unlikely considering his public support for Nvidia's hardware, but possible).
It could be that the AI bubble is popping.
It could be that he wants to "lock in" the gains that Nvidia has made; having that much capital in one company tied to a pretty volatile sector is risky.
Maybe he thinks that the beneficiaries of AI will be B2B companies like Microsoft with connections to most major businesses.
Maybe it's a changing view on how much compute will be needed to fuel AI developments moving forward.
And this is just the list I could thing of off the top of my head. There are plenty of other reasons this move could be happening. Absent an inside line on Thiel, anything else is speculation.
One of the funds that Meta were working with to finance their spending on AI, Blue Owl, had to stop redemptions on of their private credit funds merging it with another one of their bigger funds, leaving holders facing a 20% haircut. There also seem to be emerging liquidity issues with banks. The money for the AI gravy train might be running out.
FrankWilhoit•3h ago
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Finance is the gun. Politics is to know when to pull the trigger!
amelius•51m ago