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Okay so I read Valleywag every now and then and find it quite entertaining in a very gossipy way - amusing comments / slander on the latest web-celebs. This is mostly harmless fun.

What does bother me however is when they go out of their way to (attempt to) poke fun, albeit completely innaccurately at people who are actually leaders in their field. In this case, Peter Thiel.

Some background information:

Thiel was one of the original co-founders of Paypal. He took it public and eventually sold the company to eBay for $1.5 billion. He runs an uber-successful global macro hedge fund called Clarium Capital, a technology venture capital fund - The Founders Fund, and is an investor in Facebook and many more very successful web2.0 companies such as LinkedIn, Slide, Friendster etc etc. The list goes on. In short the guy is a fricking genius!

So Valleywag thought it would be fun to point out that a 13% loss last month in Thiel's $7 billion fund, Clarium, was more or less equivilent to the supposed $1 billion (5%) personal investment that he has in Facebook. They then go to question why Michael Arrington failed to mention anything about the loss when he interviewed Thiel at the recent TC50 conference in San Fransisco.

"The loss comes after a stunning track record of the firm's biggest monthly loss, beating an 11 percent drop in March 2004. Strangely, this topic went uncovered in TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington's interview of Thiel on Monday."

michael arrington interviews peter thiel

Arrington is not an idiot. Even if he knew about the Clarium loss, I'm sure he would know that questioning Thiel over this would simply make him look stupid and ignorant.

I suppose what annoys me is the fact that Valleywag seem to think that they have the right to criticise successful people just because they're successful. It seems like jealousy to me. In this particular case I believe their criticisms actually made them look pretty stupid because they're entering a territory (global macro hedge funds) that they clearly don't have a clue about. They even went as far as to mention that this 13% loss is greater then the fund's previous biggest loss (11% in march-2004).

"The loss comes after a stunning track record of the firm's biggest monthly loss, beating an 11 percent drop in March 2004."

They fail to mention however that the fund's performance before and indeed since then has been absolutely phenomenal. They also fail to mention that this type of fund is inheritly high risk. It makes big returns but is also susceptible to making big losses. This is simply the nature of the game and investors are well aware of this when they invest.

Anyway I suppose the point is: Don't criticise people about things you don't understand! Jeez!

/RANT

Comments

written on 11-Sep-2008

redhead says:

wow... you really feel storngly about this...
I expect Mr Thiel has had much harder and more serious criticim in his life, and will not pay any attention to the wags...
written on 11-Sep-2008

rogerkondrat [http://www.techwinter.com] says:

Cool article and a fair point. Mostly likely their motivation was to embarrass Mister TC himeself as the two sites hate each other.

Why don't you try publishing on TechWinter in the future?
written on 11-Sep-2008

cristian.saracco says:

This is probably more than stupid.... Simple math:

- You invest 100
- Dring a year you obtain returns of 300%... it means, now you have 400
- Last month you loss 20% (more than the 13%)... it means that now you have 320...

So, ROI only grew 220%...

Yes, it's jealousy multiplied by 220%...

As the Brazilian magazine "Veja" said in its slogan (in the 90's)... "A inVeja e uma merda" (jealousy is a shit)
written on 19-Sep-2008

SianMeades [http://www.poppycockney.com/] says:

this is hugely typical of all of Gawker's network. They have a 'we're so cool so we can bitch about everything' attitude. There's no one else to rival them so for the most part, they get away with it.

Even if someone did disagree, you'd never know without posts like this - all of Gawker's comments are moderated so they never post the mean ones... totally goes against the ethics of blogging... really makes Siany angry....

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tumble-log » Valleywag getting out of their depth when it comes to serious business

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