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Don't forget about Clarium Capital - at it's peak $8b under management - but then he made a series of bad bets on hyper-inflation in the dollar and got crushed.

• sayemm 12y ago
  Yeah, with his experience I bet he has way more of an edge with private investing. Good point, several mistakes and failures throughout his tech/investing career path too, like that $100K investment in Luke Nosek's startup that failed. It goes with taking risks and playing the game, only way to learn and level-up.
• gwern 12y ago
  The article covers that: > His hedge fund did get clobbered. Thiel’s peak-oil thesis did well by Clarium until mid-2008, as the price of oil soared from about $40 a barrel in 2002 to nearly $140. During that stretch the fund swelled in value from about $10 million to more than $6 billion as stock valuations skyrocketed and new investors flocked to his door. > But by February 2009 oil prices had temporarily fallen back to almost $40 again. And though Thiel had foreseen the real estate bubble, he still underestimated it. “We didn’t fully believe our own theories about how bad things were,” he admits. > Worse, he overreacted and missed the rebound, causing Clarium to badly underperform in 2009 and 2010. Most institutional investors fled. Today Clarium—with about $200 million under management—handles just the money of Thiel, friends and family, and a few select investors.