Did Peter Thiel Make The Single Best Investment In History?

&#62; That's a 6,000x return on his capital in 5 years. &#62; I'll put it this way--if you made a $250 IRA contribution in 2005, it would have to be worth $1,500,000 today to match that return.<p>If you invested one penny that investment would now need to be worth $60 to match that return. Maybe it is just me, but $250 to $1.5M doesn't help me visualize a 6000x return at all. This analogy reminds me of an old Dennis Miller bit from Saturday Night Live where to illustrate the size of the national debt he takes out a dollar bill and says "it would take stack of these 3 trillion high to pay it back".

I'll point out the blindingly obvious that nobody else can bring themselves to point out - future rounds have likely reduced that original 10% to a somewhat smaller number. There is also a pretty good chance that Thiel has taken some off the table, further reducing his stake.<p>Still a great investment.

It's not the best investment in history: there are people who have won more than $100,000,000 on a single $1 lottery ticket.

I think Ram Shriram's Google investment was probably better. Here is a list of some more <a href="http://www.suite101.com/content/greatest-venture-capital-investments-ever-electricity-and-google-a257793" rel="nofollow">http://www.suite101.com/content/greatest-venture-capital-inv...</a>.<p>Also, there is some debate over the $24 the dutch bought Manhattan for from the Indians. Jury is still out on that one.

Do people really believe that if Facebook goes public that it will be worth more than Google when it went public? I want to know the details of how people (i.e. Forbes Magazine) came up with the $33B valuation.

It's not that he made one of the best investments in history.<p>It's that he has one of the best investment processes.

If I had $500K lying around in Fall '04 I would have been chasing down Mark Zuckerberg trying to get him to take it for whatever tiny piece of the company I could get.<p>Being at one of the first set of "facebook schools" it was very clear where things were headed. The amount of mindshare facebook had on campus within the first couple weeks of the semester was absolutely staggering.

Problem: Facebook is not worth $33 billion: <a href="http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33000000000" rel="nofollow">http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2585-facebook-is-not-worth-33...</a>

The keyword here is "estimated value". It is very likely that Peter Thiel did very well, but a 2-3 billion dollar return is not guaranteed.

&#62; <i>Today ... his stake is worth between $2-3 billion</i><p>That's 2-3 billion <i>Zuckerbucks</i> as some banking people call 'em :)

Time will tell. At this time... it's safe to say it wasn't the worst investment.