Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears

https://www.thestreet.com/investing/peter-thiel-dumps-top-ai-stock-stirring-bubble-fears

by hypeatei • 8 months ago

212 186 8 months ago

When someone like this does something like this, it is not an economic act. It is a signal of some kind, a move in an opaque chess game, whose players are nowhere near as smart as they think they are.

bamboozled• 8 months ago

So not 4d chess ?

zafarrancho• 8 months ago

Interesting. Do you have any examples?

scrps• 8 months ago

I always thought the opposite was true like whales breaking up orders for various reasons like not moving the market too much over things like portfolio adjustments, secrecy, etc?

ralfd• 8 months ago

I guess his fund did obfuscate the selling, or the selloff would have been known before the legally required disclosure.

BurningFrog5• 8 months ago

"Someone like this" leaves a ton to the reader's imagination.

nine_k• 8 months ago

A billionaire, especially a somehow secretive one. There are thousands of "people like this" to choose from, dozens of them with some publicity.

afroboy• 8 months ago

Evil billionaire, really evil one.

markus_zhang5• 8 months ago

Maybe this?

Finance is the gun. Politics is to know when to pull the trigger!

amelius2• 8 months ago

Or maybe he just found out he suffers from some incurable disorder and now needs the money to build research centers to find a cure, because AI won't help obviously.

xenospn• 8 months ago

Perhaps looking for a new ivory back scratcher?

kotaKat• 8 months ago

Palantir is looking to buy the American Red Cross, for... other reasons.

spacecadet• 8 months ago

lol he is literally Bob Page from Deus Ex... taking over "fema" and all.

buybuybuy• 8 months ago

Should we all buy stock in Nvidia now? It’s not like Peter Thiel is Warren Buffet or anything. And Warren Buffett is buying Alphabet.

surgical_fire• 8 months ago

Yes, you should. Every grift needs bagholders.

TheAlchemist2• 8 months ago

Warren Buffett is buying Alphabet out of neceessity - he already sold most of what he could sell and has way too much cash on hand - he just need to buy 'something' - Alphabet seems like the least overvalued big stock out there.

scarmig• 8 months ago

Is he required to buy stock? AFAIK he could just as well hold cash or bonds, and if he believes a bubble pop is imminent (within the next couple months), that would be a responsible move.

drumhead6• 8 months ago

Berkshire is sitting on nearly $350 billion in cash. One of the ratio's that Buffet uses to measure overvaluation, Wilshire 2000 Market Cap as a % of GDP is at an all time, 220%. Its usually a good indicator of a market top. He's making a few small investments, but he's just waiting until there's more of sell off before heading back in. He's under no pressure to buy anything.

Ekaros• 8 months ago

Always also calmly analyse what is the upside left. Especially if the stock has such huge valuation like Nvidia. My guess is probably not at this point.

redwood2• 8 months ago

Having heartburn after making a $100M bet on hucksters?

https://www.wsj.com/tech/peter-thiel-backed-startup-secures-...

djmips5• 8 months ago

Have any juicy articles to back up your unsubstantiated claim?

redwood2• 8 months ago

From HN the other week https://foxchapelresearch.substack.com/p/i-think-substrate-i...

hactually• 8 months ago

I'd say he's wanting to lock in those gains. Diamond hands are different when you're up 100s of millions on a single stock.

dmix• 8 months ago

Yeah everyone wants a conspiracy when the obvious signal is that he already made insane amounts of money off the stock spiking so high and he wants to diversify it on other stuff instead of continuing to gamble on a big one. Which is also what the article says he is doing.

dehrmann2• 8 months ago

And Nvidia has a target on its back right now. It's priced like it's the only game in town, but AMD, Google, Meta and Intel have varying degrees of competing chips for AI use.

PaulRobinson• 8 months ago

It doesn't take a genius to work out somebody who bought low might want to sell high.

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.

tim333• 8 months ago

Diamond hands is more of a meme token punter term. Thiel is running a hedge fund and has a responsibility to get good returns for his investors. Buying underpriced stocks and selling overpriced is a normal thing to do.

standardUser• 8 months ago

Maybe it means something if it's insider trading, but otherwise I'm not taking advice from a man who is clearly haunted by some political obsession and willing to act against his own financial interest in pursuit of it.

toxicdevil• 8 months ago

Over 537,000 shares, which represent nearly 40% of the entire portfolio

@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.

pinkmuffinere3• 8 months ago

Ya Im shocked he continues to hold Tesla…

maratc• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal_Mafia

bookofjoe• 8 months ago

PayPal mafia be tight

seizethecheese• 8 months ago

He has said on multiple occasions to never bet against Elon (though that’s different than betting on him).

mondrian3• 8 months ago

So this 'portfolio' is <200M on a net worth of 16B? This is like someone worth 1M selling $600 worth of stock.

brador• 8 months ago

A 200M sale on a 16B net worth is like someone worth 1M selling about 12.5k of stock.

djmips5• 8 months ago

I noticed the article steered around that figure even though it would make sense to spell it out but that wouldn't bolster their gasping thesis.

awestroke• 8 months ago

Probably wants more liquidity to funnel into the pain and suffering industry

jameslk4• 8 months ago

No need to guess, the article literally states where the money went:

That’s why Thiel rotated into Microsoft and Apple, tech giants with more diversified revenue streams, cloud scale, devices, and software.

zetanor• 8 months ago

Rotated into pain and suffering indeed.

jmye• 8 months ago

Moving into Apple, given the potential risk/uncertainty in a new CEO and no real new revenue streams, is an interesting choice. I guess maybe it feels relatively safe? But even then, if there's any real downturn, they seem pretty at risk, as the 'luxury' brand.

jameslk4• 8 months ago

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

pinkmuffinere3• 8 months ago

He is diversifying away from a pure AI play. The amount of diversification is relatively low, so he probably still believes in AI, just feels it is slightly overhyped.

Personally I agree it’s too small of a move, but different people have different beliefs and different tolerance for risk.

ytrt54e• 8 months ago

Paperwork filed after market closed on Friday... some might take it as a bad omen, but Nvidia is showing as up 1/2% after hours.

adrianco• 8 months ago

It’s a bubble. Buy low and sell high. Right now, holding cash is the safe option. You can predict that the bubble will burst, but not when. However with the US being run by someone who is poking everything with sharp implements I think it bursts sooner.

jameslk4• 8 months ago

Cash is just another asset class, and since becoming a pure fiat it’s never been a good one: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL

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

mondrian3• 8 months ago

The parent comment is probably just talking about temporarily timing the bubble pop.

simianwords2• 8 months ago

How are you so sure it is a bubble?

Animats• 8 months ago

One to zero, here we come?

rvz2• 8 months ago

We are 1 day before the year 2000.

iammjm• 8 months ago

Peter Thiel the guy that believes that the literal biblical antichrist is walking amongst us? How much rational thought can one really expect from this guy? I am not questioning AI being a good investment or not, I am questioning this dude's sanity

jamesblonde2• 8 months ago

He's scarily sane. I am not joking when I say he invented the anti-christ thing as a way to entrench the billionaire class. He's basically saying the anti-christ will be somebody who want to solve the world's problems through collective action. So collective action is bad. We are in such an unbalanced world, that that is the best argument he can come up with for why we should allow such wealth inequality in society.

fullshark• 8 months ago

Yeah it's funny when you read his antichrist ramblings, it's essentially the antichrist will come in the form of a leader arguing for wealth redistribution via collective action. This is what instills sheer terror in the billionaire class.

lisbbb3• 8 months ago

I'm pretty sure the antichrist is that sports betting guy, Dave Portnoy? The good news is that he's low key, it's kind of a more casual antichrist this time around getting everyone addicted to gambling.

EarlKing2• 8 months ago

Then how about SoftBank[1]... are they irrational? Or Michael Burry[2] who shorted Nvidia and Palantir before concluding the market is once against being irrational and selling his positions and closing his hedge fund... is he irrational?

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.

[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...

thrwaway55• 8 months ago

Burry was underwater on that trade though and likely did it to avoid some paperwork revealing positions. He folded because he can't time it, if he was confident he was right he wouldn't have folded and we'd have another movie about him.

jasonlotito• 8 months ago

Softbank sold all of Nvidia in 2019. Look how that turned out for them.

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.

NicoJuicy• 8 months ago

I don't think it's a bubble.

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% )

gooseus• 8 months ago

When it comes to his Antichrist schtick I say "takes one to know one".

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.

rwmj• 8 months ago

Every accusation is a confession.

jsunderland323• 8 months ago

seems like the sort of guy with the money and connections to pop the AI bubble

…and has been known to cause bank runs

rvz2• 8 months ago

The best explaination is that Thiel, Softbank and Huang are selling before a risky Nvidia earnings release that could result in an indication that the AI boom is going to collapse.

AstroBen• 8 months ago

Is there an opposite to the halo effect? Stupidity in one area doesn't mean they're stupid in another

Judge him based on his investing skill here

trial3• 8 months ago

well, fittingly, there’s the devil horns effect

andy_ppp2• 8 months ago

Startup investing and stock market investment records are probably not particularly well correlated. Certainly timing the market is difficult for everyone.

BurningFrog5• 8 months ago

I expect continued economic performance from a guy who went from nothing to... $25B was the latest number I heard.

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.

advael• 8 months ago

"From nothing" is a fairly suspect claim, but your overall point is a good one

bawolff4• 8 months ago

I expect continued economic performance from a guy who went from nothing to... $25B

I would expect a return to the mean

gopher_space• 8 months ago

How can you tell he’s a Christian? I only know him by his works.

lostmsu3• 8 months ago

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.

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.

simianwords2• 8 months ago

No he doesn’t believe that the literal biblical Antichrist is walking amongst us. Uncharitable take

more_corn• 8 months ago

Pretty sure he said exactly that. If you think the quote is taken out of context feel free to add that here.

estearum• 8 months ago

He maybe wouldn’t commit that it is currently, but he’d absolutely commit to the idea that the literal biblical Antichrist will exist and will walk among us, and might be already.

This is exactly the same level as insane as thinking the Antichrist actually does walk among us today.

rsynnott• 8 months ago

I mean, sometimes if it look like a crazy person and quacks like a crazy person, it’s a crazy person.

Not everything is some great 4d chess conspiracy; sometimes people just believe completely irrational stuff.

ajross• 8 months ago

The news is that a whale is dumping, not that the whale is making a rational decision. We all know the market isn't rational in the short term, merely efficient in the long term. And we all suspect (as does Thiel!) that NVDA is unsustainably priced.

So if the whale is dumping, maybe smaller investors will dump too. Maybe we should too.

pessimizer• 8 months ago

It's so bizarre how a gay billionaire helping build artificial intelligence, owning a surveillance empire, and basically trying to put the mark of the beast on everyone is also yelling about the antichrist. If you were a bible-believing Christian, you'd think he was a top 5 candidate.

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?

jameslk4• 8 months ago

https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

markus_zhang5• 8 months ago

I mean if I were a Christian I wouldn’t be surprised that the anti Christ is among us. The only difficulty is to pick which one of them is.

But I’m an atheist so I don’t care about it.

defrost• 8 months ago

As a rational atheist living on a shared resource in which a very small group have control over most of the assets, shouldn't it concern you if they leverage talk about an antichrist to edge out the masses even more?

The concern is less about what others announce as a belief, more about future access to essentials.

bawolff4• 8 months ago

If you believe in this sort of thing i think the signs are there https://www.benjaminlcorey.com/could-american-evangelicals-s...

lisbbb3• 8 months ago

Not a fan of Palantir or Level3 (L3?) Systems myself--talk about companies ushering in a police state!

aestetix• 8 months ago

It's because he knows about the Antichrist.

mattas• 8 months ago

The market can stay irrational longer than even Peter Thiel can stay solvent.

sien• 8 months ago

Thiel is worth 25 Bn according to some sources, 16 Bn according the article.

In this case surely there will be an AI correction before Thiel runs out of money.

throwacct• 8 months ago

I mean, he bought low and now he's selling when the stock is high. What else can we expect?

ck2• 8 months ago

google Peter Thiel and Rockbridge and be afraid, it makes Project2025 pale in comparison

(starting point for the lazy https://authoritarian-stack.info )

adabyron• 8 months ago

What's interesting is that Thiel added MSFT but the Gates Foundation just reduced it by almost 2/3 and it was their biggest holding - https://hedgefollow.com/funds/Gates+Foundation+Trust

drumhead6• 8 months ago

If there is a bubble then the hyperscalers with dominant market shares and big cashflows are most likely to survive if it bursts. Google, MSFT and Amazon. Oracle are on very shaky ground. Their bonds are selling at a discount to par, even though interest rates are dropping, and their debt to equity ratio is nearing 400%. AI is an existential bet for them, but not so much for the others.

gnarlouse• 8 months ago

Peter Thiel is in the epstein files.

ggm3• 8 months ago

He's seen a better investment opportunity and is maximising his profit to target it.

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.

djmips5• 8 months ago

Microsoft and Apple? per article. Not very mind-blowing

ggm3• 8 months ago

A parking spot with good return and solidity. I don't think he's staying there at scale for long. Neither want him on the board.

srameshc• 8 months ago

Could it all be triggered by the study : Gartner Says Agentic AI Supply Exceeds Demand, Market Correction Looms ?

https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-10-0...

marcyb5st• 8 months ago

interesting. For me charts and CSS are broken though, so I couldn't really see figures

markus_zhang5• 8 months ago

I think people like Peter Thiel has the insider view of the whole sector, so I would not discount this just because I don’t align with him on political stuffs.

But again we never know his real positions.

mightyham• 8 months ago

I agree that it's very difficult to fully understand what his real positions are, and interestingly I think he clearly wants that to be the case. Peter Thiel is interested in and has actually written extensively about Straussianism which is an intellectual movement obsessed with analyzing esoteric meanings in philosophical literature.

kibibu2• 8 months ago

Reading his recent "Greta Thunberg Is The Antichrist" stuff leads me to believe the Peter Thiel:

- Is deeply unscientific, coming across as a highfalutin paranoid QAnon; and

- Has zero self-awareness

That said, he has plenty of money and connections, so moves like these are likely well justified.

seanmcdirmid• 8 months ago

He could be selling NVIDIA to buy OpenAI like SoftBank just did. It might not be a bubble exist but a re-positioning.

gsf_emergency_43• 8 months ago

It's in Thiel's nature to make moves counter to Altman's. Certainly, he does not share Masa's (or PG's) weakness for the genii of the day. (Secretly despises, actually?) They are kinda nontechnical in the same way (chess or SaaS are equally relevant to the future), but what Thiel has passion for are flexible moral abstractions, not politics (the whys rather than the whats of winning)

_dain_• 8 months ago

extremely low IQ / reddit comments ITT

porridgeraisin• 8 months ago

Yeah noticed it too. I wonder why

amelius2• 8 months ago

It would make sense if he used to money to buy TSMC or ASML instead.

bgwalter• 8 months ago

Assuming he is correct (I think he is) and Nvidia goes down sharply, it will take AMD, Intel etc. with it. Usually the equipment makers and fabs go down with them, many times even at a higher percentage.

andsoitis2• 8 months ago

MSFT and AAPL seem like better ways to diversify your money away from chips, while keeping it in technology.

drumhead6• 8 months ago

APPL is the best bet as it doesnt have any exposure to AI. MSFT has spent a truckload of money on datacentres, if AI doesnt deliver they're going to face a huge drag on earnings because of the overinvestment.

an0malous• 8 months ago

I’ve never seen so much cope in a single HN thread. Suddenly no one cares about Occam’s Razor

diamond559• 8 months ago

This crowd is heavily invested/works in tech, nobody wants to admit they are wrong or that their wealth is an illusion.

yalogin• 8 months ago

This is concerning for sure. Looks like we may be getting the trigger for a sell off soon.

drumhead6• 8 months ago

It'll come from the other bubble in financial markets, Private Credit. There have been quite a few bankruptcies and problems emerging there, and they're stepping up to be major funders for the AI capex boom.

mmaunder• 8 months ago

Investor sentiment and fundamentals are distant relatives. If fear takes hold and enters a spiral, revenue growth and fundamentals go out the window.

jayess• 8 months ago

I wonder if he still holds all that in his Roth IRA.

sota_pop2• 8 months ago

100% is a serious move. Taken alone, I might not think much, but given the SoftBank exit recently, Jensen’s trading activity, Gates selling so much MSFT, Buffett’s recent trading activity, Trump’s recent trading activity, and the interesting observation from Michael Burry, this does not bode well for NVDA in the short/mid term.

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 (big corps) just buy the new generation every single year?

JCM9• 8 months ago

At this point if you don’t think AI is a bubble then I don’t know what to tell you.

lostmsu3• 8 months ago

Tell me why quantum mechanics stops at SU(3) in SU(3) x SU(2) x U(1) symmetry group.

antasvara• 8 months ago

This could be anything, so making a sweeping generalization is premature IMO.

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.

drumhead6• 8 months ago

First it was Softbank and now its Thiel. Major sales coming from two of the ultimate tech insiders is probably a very good sell signal. Whether or not its the top is another question. Markets as we know can go higher longer than we think, Michael Burry shut down his hedge fund because he may have started shorting too soon.

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.

rsanek• 8 months ago

didn't softbank sell only to invest more into other ai investments?

sota_pop2• 8 months ago

I thought I read specifically with the intention of putting it into OpenAI directly, but yes they said they wanted to “pursue other ventures in the area of AI”.

drumhead6• 8 months ago

Yes, but whether they will remains to be seen. They needed a reason to sell out without it looking like they were selling out at the top.

garspin• 8 months ago

Making $$$ & keeping them are 2 different skills.

He's demonstrated the former 16B times, now he's demonstrating the latter.

The big downside risk I see for Nvidia is a garage startup inventing a more efficient AI algo.... that only needs 20W to run.

NaomiLehman• 8 months ago

still a more efficient algo would be better run on gigawatts of compute

cloverich• 8 months ago

Possibly that is how you get the world we all know and live in today ^^

spwa4• 8 months ago

Does it? There's no guarantee that algorithms receive any benefit from scale. Some don't.

And of course, in support of such an algorithm existing you have humans. Clearly AGI is present in human minds, and it apparently runs on about 20W of power.

JoeDohn• 8 months ago

-- Nvidia

++ Microsoft

This sounds a lot like what SoftBank did : sold Nvidia, then invested (will invest?) in OpenAI. I guess the AI market's hit a point where hardware demand is pretty stable, and software demand is where all the juice is now?

zrn900• 8 months ago

The main reason is likely this:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/al...

AliBaba succeeded in reducing GPU usage by 82%. On top of the improvements made by models like Deepseek, it looks like AI will be much more efficient than initially thought. As a result, there should be much less demand for GPUs compared to the ridiculous demand that was being pitched.

Note that Softbank also sold all its Nvidia shares.

nurettin2• 8 months ago

Even if you reduce computing requirements for inference by 99.999% there is still enough demand to saturate all high end cards for decades.

1vuio0pswjnm72• 8 months ago

SoftBank Sells $5.8 Billion Stake in Nvidia to Pay for OpenAI Deals

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/11/business/dealbook/softban...

coolThingsFirst• 8 months ago

It's over time to burst this bubble. It's going nowhere.

deadeye• 8 months ago

I think it might be a reflection that there is no more power to run more chips, so chip sales will drop.

iJohnDoe• 8 months ago

Or maybe, just maybe, they are just making a quick buck because this is the highest NVIDIA stock has ever been? Maybe not complicated. Just filling their pockets with money?

1vuio0pswjnm72• 8 months ago

SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/11/softbank-sells-its-entire-st...

Peter Thiel sells off all Nvidia stock, stirring bubble fears

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