Peter Thiel's Depressing May
Even as Wall Street rallied last month, Peter Thiel's hedge fund lost close to $25 million, according to leaked documents obtained by Valleywag. Maybe this is why the PayPal founder has been grumpily calling people "frauds."
Thiel's Clarium Capital was gutted during the financial meltdown last year. This year has been slightly kinder; Clarium fell just 1.7 percent January through May as the S&P 500 gained as much. Last month, Clarium fell 1.4 percent even as the S&P rallied, rising 4 percent. (See fund report below.)
No gain means no money for Clarium; the fund reportedly derives its fees only from earnings, rather than as a percentage of assets.
That might explain Thiel's sour comments at a recent Wall Street conference, where minutes (left) reveal the Facebook investor declared major research "to be fraud" and described the "tech boom of the late 1990s as fraud." Does this mean Thiel will refund the fortune he made selling PayPal, which made its name during said boom?
Thiel also apparently "discussed large-cap tech names in a pejorative manor [sic], stating that betting on established technology companies like Cisco, Microsoft and Intel is a bet on no innovation."
"He thinks we should be looking for companies that are truly innovating, of which there are only a handful."
Presumably, only Thiel knows who the truly innovative companies are. Too bad he's not been able to translate that knowledge into cash lately.