Tim Draper, the SpaceX and Tesla investor, is selling his $7.9M private island in Tanzania

Tim Draper is selling his island in Lake Tanganyika for $7.9M or best offer, announcing it himself on X and inviting offers directly by email. The ECB reported this month that EU venture capital funds hold around 150B euros against roughly 930B euros in the United States.

Tim Draper is selling his island in Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania, for $7.9M or best offer. “Gorgeous place, but we don’t use it enough,” the venture capitalist wrote on X on Friday.

There is no broker and no listing. He is taking offers at his own work address.

The location is not the usual trophy. Lake Tanganyika is the longest freshwater lake in the world and the second deepest after Baikal, and it is shared by Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Zambia.

Draper is commonly described as a SpaceX and Tesla investor. Both were positions at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which he co-founded and where his partner Steve Jurvetson led the deals.

The cheques most often called his are elsewhere. Skype, Hotmail, Baidu and Coinbase all sit on his own list.

His best known purchase was not a company at all. He won nearly 30,000 bitcoin at a US Marshals auction in 2014, worth roughly $19M at the market price that week, and has said he did not sell.

Which makes the asking price modest by his standards. It is a reminder of what one early cheque is worth twelve years later, and of who gets to write them.

Europe published its own number this month. EU venture capital funds hold about 150B euros against roughly 930B in the United States, the ECB found, around six times as much.

The shortfall is not even. It widens in later rounds, where companies need the largest cheques.

European scale-ups lean on money from outside the bloc. The ECB flags the risk that successful startups move to where the capital is.

The most uncomfortable finding is about companies nobody funds. Among firms without venture backing, the median EU firm is nearly twice the size of its American equivalent by employment and grows about 15 percentage points faster. Brussels published a Startup and Scaleup Strategy last year promising to widen the pipe.

The composition has not shifted either. The share of European venture going into software and IT services has stalled since 2020.

The people inside those companies own less of them. Employees at late-stage European startups hold roughly half the equity their American counterparts do.

None of which is Tim Draper’s problem. He is selling an island for less than half what one lot of bitcoin cost him in 2014, and Europe’s founders are short 780B euros.