In 2004, Peter Thiel became Facebook's first-ever outside investor when he acquired a 10.2% stake in the company for $500,000. It was the first outside investment in Facebook, which valued the company at $4.9 million at the time. During Facebook's IPO in May 2012, Thiel subsequently sold 16.8 million shares for $638 million. Today, we're going to take a look together at a very interesting investment by Peter Thiel that could be considered a big mistake, but also holds some potential...

Here's a cautionary tale from late last year that you may have missed, but it certainly contains a strong warning not to be confident about predictions about human immunology. As it turned out during the Omicron wave, and I'm very, very glad to use the past tense in this sentence, several existing monoclonal antibodies to SARS-Cov-2 turned out to be useless against the new variant. At the same time, the effectiveness of the vaccination was reduced, but it still remained at a very useful level after the booster injection.

Adagio $ADGI

This is where Adagio $ADGI, a small company in which Peter Thiel has just invested, comes in. On their website you can still see their ADG20 antibody, which was supposed to be broadly neutralizing and hit a wide range of coronavirus types (and their mutants). It's safe to say that Adagio immediately raised expectations and the potential for vaccination.

Here is a press release from late November claiming that none of the Omicron mutations were linked to escape from the relentless ADG20. They expected that it would work, that it would work well, that it would deal with Omicron and all the other variants that had raised concerns so far, that it would be well equipped to deal with whatever else came along, and that a single injection would be effective for up to a year.

People who bought into their August IPO (or their earlier private financing of more than $300 million) were probably glad to hear all this; the stock rose from about $18 to more than $46 after the news. The celebration didn't last very long, however. Two weeks later, clinical results showed that ADG20 was not, in fact, effective against Omicron.

Shares have plummeted to $7, and if you lust for them today, you can get them for less than that amount. Just as Peter Thiel did in March (03/28/2022) of this year at a price of $3.81. This brings me to my question... Despite the stock continuing to be absolutely devastated, Peter Thiel decided to invest in it and his position is currently about 19.69% in the black.

Is Peter Thiel expecting another massive spike up in the stock, or is this a bad investment that he will likely lose on? What do you think, let us know in the comments...

DISCLAIMER: I'm not an investment professional, just a biased retail investor, so this is not an investment recommendation.