Peter Thiel whittles down his Facebook stake to just $2 million
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Billionaire Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook Inc. who once controlled 45 million shares of the social media giant, unloaded most of his remaining stake last week.
Thiel, a member of Facebook’s board of directors, sold 53,602 shares held by his firm Rivendell One for $11 million, leaving him with about $2 million of stock, according to a Friday regulatory filing.
The transactions are the latest in a series of sales in recent years that have left Thiel with just 9,948 directly held shares. He sold most of his stake in 2012.
Shares of Menlo Park, Calif.-based Facebook climbed 27% in the year through Friday, making co-founder Mark Zuckerberg the world’s fifth-richest person, with an $81-billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Thiel, 52, has a net worth of $3.4 billion, including a stake in data analytics company Palantir Technologies Inc.
Peter Thiel’s stoking of the U.S.-China trade war is either a bitter response to missing the investment opportunity or a brilliant long game that’s reaching a climax.
