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SAN FRANCISCO Peter Thiel, the PayPal co-founder and Facebook Inc’s first outside investor, is in talks to invest $ 150 million in Airbnb as part of a fresh investment round that would value the lodging rental start-up at $ 2.5 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday, citing unnamed sources. The investment, if completed under the reported terms, would make Airbnb one of the Silicon Valley’s most highly-valued private companies just four years after the company was founded by a trio of graduates from the Rhode Island School of Design. Techcrunch, a technology blog, reported last month that Airbnb had [...]

Facebook Inc (FB) director Peter Thiel sold roughly 20 million shares in the Internet social networking company last week, cashing out the majority of his stake, according to a regulatory filing. Thiel sold his shares on Thursday and Friday, at prices ranging between $ 19.27 and $ 20.69 per share, as the first “lock-up” barring early investors and insiders from selling shares after the initial public offering was lifted. Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg in his Harvard University dorm room, became the only U.S. company to debut with a market value of more than $ 100 billion. But investors have [...]