Peter Thiel is one of the most successful investors and entrepreneurs alive today.
His venture capital firm “Founder’s Fund” owned >10% of Facebook at one point and he has invested in big startup names including LinkedIn, Space X, AirBnb and Stripe. He co-founded PayPal and Palantir.
In this video, clarifies his belief that Bitcoin is undervalued as a reserve form of money and uses the “Gold/Bitcoin” analogy.
His logic is that there is around $70 billion of Bitcoin in the world and around $9 trillion of gold… It is difficult to mine gold, but more difficult to mine Bitcoin. As such, if Bitcoin becomes the “cyber equivalent” of gold, he believes it is underestimated in terms of value.
It was revealed last week that Founder’s Fund had invested “millions” in Bitcoin as a bet on its long term value.
He’s a remarkably strange guy… However, a person who isn’t afraid to buck the norm is extremely rare.
Indeed, he notes in his book “Zero to One”1 that “…brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
He also likes asking potential employees a difficult contrarian question:
What important truth do very few people agree with you on?
Thiel was a libertarian, but openly supported Trump, when no one else in Silicon Valley would.