Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund was one of the first venture capital firms to take action and urge clients to quickly withdraw funds from Silicon Valley Bank last week. The firm had reportedly removed all of its own holdings in SVB by Thursday morning, just as panic over the bank’s solvency began to set in on social media, from which it devolved into a historic $42 billion bank run on Friday that collapsed SVB. Thiel and his firm have come under fire online for the role they played in the bank run that followed, but the billionaire investor and PayPal cofounder himself is denying he wanted it to fail. After all, Thiel says, he kept his own money invested there.
“I had $50 [million] of my own money stuck in SVB,” Thiel told Financial Times columnist Gillian Tett in an article published Thursday. As he held his own money at the bank, Thiel was a bit of an outlier as SVB mainly catered to startups and venture capital firms. The bank held $175.4 billion in total deposits when it was seized Friday, according to federal regulators. Surely Thiel would also have pulled his own $50 million if he thought SVB was going to fail?
