Peter Thiel just became $101 million richer

Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist and PayPal cofounder, sold 857,626 Class A shares in Facebook earlier this week - worth just over $101 million in total, according to an SEC filing.

Thiel, who has sat on Facebook's board of directors since April 2005 and was the company's first institutional investor, sold the shares through his Rivendell One LLC holding company (Rivendell is a "Lord of the Rings" reference.)

He now owns 214,407 Class A shares in the company, which, at Facebook's current share price (~$118) are valued at about $25.3 million.

Facebook was not immediately available to comment.

Thiel memorably sold 20.6 million of his 26.6 million shares in the company in August of 2012, shortly after Facebook's IPO, earning him almost $400 million off the back of a mere $500,000 original investment. He also sold 16.8 million shares during Facebook's IPO in May of that year.

At the time, some people assumed that Thiel was planning to step down from Facebook's board and, at the very least, it didn't look like a vote of confidence for Facebook - but it wasn't the case back then and the VC has been known to sell off considerable lumps of Facebook stock in the past, so there's probably not much to read into this stock sell-off either.

The last time Thiel sold Facebook stock before this week was back in August 2015, when he cashed in $100.4 million of Class A shares.

Thiel - who is also an investor in Palantir, Airbnb, and Stripe - has a net worth of $2.7 billion, according to Forbes.