Silicon Valley Bank unmasks the hypocrisy of libertarian tech bros
Say what you like about Peter Thiel – but luck has generally been on the Silicon Valley venture capitalist’s side. He is, after all, a co-founder of PayPal – which he sold for $1.5bn four years after its launch. He was the first person whom a young entrepreneur named Mark Zuckerberg approached in 2004, asking for investment for his new idea, the Facebook.
He was also the man whose venture capital fund, Founder’s Fund, happened to notice payment problems when dealing with Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) last week – spurring him to withdraw all of its funds from the bank by Thursday (9 March), just as the $42bn bank run that caused the second-biggest bank failure in US history kicked off, and a day before the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) shut SVB, the country’s 16th-largest lender, down.
Other companies weren’t so quick: the crypto company Circle, for example, whose stablecoin USDC lost its dollar peg after it said on Friday (10 March) that it had $3.3bn stuck in SVB. Or the 200-odd UK start-ups that were said to be at “serious risk” from the collapse.
