Peter Thiel, a gay man, played a key role in the Silicon Valley Bank collapse that happened Friday.
Thiel is a founder of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm. On Thursday the fund advised their portfolio companies to pull money from the bank. SVB is a regional bank in California catering to the tech industry.
Financial experts said SVB failed because of bad investments. On Wednesday the bank announced it had sold a lot of securities at a loss and would need to raise $2.25 billion to shore up its balance sheet. That triggered a panic among venture capital firms, including Thiel’s, who advised companies to withdraw their money from the bank. On Friday federal regulators took the company over.
Thiel is best known for being a founder of PayPal and early investor of Facebook. He’s also a prominent gay conservative who supported Trump in 2016 and earned a speaking slot at the Republican National Convention in 2016.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons.
RELATED
