LESSONS

I learned from my mistake in 1999 that even when you know something is irrational, if the momentum is there, it can keep going long enough to kill you.

I turned $12,415 into $1.65 million. Then I thought I could scale it into a hedge fund. I was wrong. Some edges only work at small size.

When I sold during a market drop in the 1980s, I crystallized a loss and then watched the recovery happen without me. I never made that mistake again.

I lost six billion dollars in one day in 2000. That experience taught me that the conventional rules of business can destroy you overnight. Bitcoin taught me the alternative.

The biggest mistake I made in 2017 was not taking profits. Do not repeat my mistake.

Getting fired from Facebook was the best thing that ever happened to me. I just did not know it for a few years.

We were adding 64,000 rooms a month at our peak. People said it was too fast. They were right. Speed without quality control is just chaos with a growth chart.

We raised $3.5 billion on a vision of the future. The vision was right. The timing was wrong by about a decade. That's an expensive lesson in patience.