Prominent investor and tech innovator Peter Thiel has said that he underinvested in Bitcoin and should have bought more. The billionaire gave these comments during a recent interview with Bloomberg. Bitcoin recently went above its previous all-time high of $64.5k to go as high as $67k yesterday.
Peter Thiel is not your average investor/innovator in Silicon Valley. He co-founded PayPal back in 1998, one of the largest payment companies in the world right now with a turnover of hundreds of billions of Dollars. He was also the first angel investor in Facebook itself with $500,000 that got him a whopping 45 million shares. However, he sold most of them back in 2012 for around $1 billion, suspecting that was a good time to cash out. However, his 10.5% are now worth $121 billion that would have made him one of the richest men alive today. However he still owns a small stake in the social media giant till date and is still a part of the company’s board of directors due to his historical connection with the company.
In the recent interview with Bloomberg, the Paypal co-founder stated that he might have underinvested in Bitcoin. He said:
“You’re supposed to just buy Bitcoin…., I feel like I’ve been underinvested in it.”
Thiel also stated that he felt the cryptocurrency’s roaring success meant that the central banks were in a precarious situation and they were having unprecedented troubles in recent memory, possibly leading to a bankruptcy even though central banks are designed to never go bankrupt due to their role as a big fat money printer. Thiel also touched on a variety of topics including the ever-expanding use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). According to him, AI is a very dangerous undertaking by mankind and he believes that a low-tech AI especially in surveillance is going to destroy the world as we know it.
Ironically, all of his famous investments and former companies are now neck-deep in AI progress. Many of them have developed programs that are quite questionable especially when it comes to online Ethics. Facebook especially has been in trouble multiple times over the last few years as data hack after data hack revealed users’ information and got leaked online, including sensitive information. AI and now Internet of Things (IoT) had a big role to play in it. He also described the crypto sector as a nemesis of AI and a force of decentralization that normally improves our lives.
Image by Miloslav Hamřík from Pixabay
Don’t worry, we hate spam too
one weekly digest, just the important stuff.
