‘All Things Chamath’: Palihapitiya Outlines His Vision

[Music] i'm eric schatzker and welcome to bloomberg's front row today i'm talking to chamath palahapitya the larger than life founder of social capital chamoth made his mark as a disruptive force in silicon valley now he's upending wall street as the king of spax and superhero to the robin hood crowd on reddit his immodest goal to build a berkshire hathaway for the social media generation i do want to have a berkshire-like instrument that is all things you know i mean not to sound you could just look at all things chopped chamaf has set his sights on everything from cryptocurrencies to etfs we had a lot of ground to cover day traders hedge funds and the gamestop moment how chamath made his first 10 billion dollars the next frontiers for social capital his political ambitions in california and beyond here's my conversation with chamath palahapitya to those who don't understand your anti-establishment appeal what do you stand for um i think it's sort of defined in the mission of social capital which is that i believe in an even starting line i think that's probably the simplest encapsulation of of my belief and how the world should work which is that you know we should all effectively get access to the same resources and that as many of us as possible should be allowed to get to the starting line and then the gun should fire and then the outcomes will be what the outcomes will be um and i think a lot of us feel that that isn't necessarily always the case that there's kind of entrenched hierarchies that prevent progress so i push against those because they they touch a very deep emotional part of my value system um and i just don't think that the world is a better place for them and i think we're better off without them jamaat you have acquired a powerful and influential voice increasingly so on wall street um why were you so excited by the game stop short squeeze and then so outraged when robin hood had to throttle buy orders look on the way in i think what gamestop showed was the narrative fallacy uh on wall street i think for years there was these folks that sort of you know were these wizards behind the veil and um they had a way of conducting themselves that purported to be just intellectually superior to everybody else but in reality what that short showed was that they were prone to the same you know poor decision-making um and broken systems and technologies that everybody else has to deal with and so i found that kind of funny i think it also spoke to the fact that you know we really haven't looked closely enough at the systems that were broken as a result of 1998 and ltcm long-term capital management in 2006 seven and eight with bayer lehman and we're allowing the same problem you know slightly different but roughly the same problem to repeat itself over and over again um and so that's what sort of angered me about gamestop um and then on the on the back end of it i just felt like these two worlds collided in a way where i doubt that in the end in the final analysis there was any collusion of any kind but just the stench of this whole thing just goes to show you back to where we were talking about before about how difficult it is for normal everyday folks to have access to any kind of return so if you if you know sort of we break down the capitalist philosophy they are just fundamentally stuck in this cul-de-sac of always being labor and always being sort of at the you know ownership of the of of capital of the ownership class and the fact that normal folks can get access to returns and you know close the inequality gap is just going to make all of the things we're dealing with today a lot worse than they already are from what i can tell you appear to have reconsidered a couple of the things that you said in the heat of the gamestop moment where do you stand on hedge funds as a group of actors and the role they play in modern finance and and also the other thing that came up in the context of of this situation short selling um i think hedge funds are a really important part of the financial infrastructure and i think that they should exist and i hope that you know the ones that are good can thrive but i also believe that disclosure needs to get improved i think in every other part of society as the internet has become more sophisticated as software has become more sophisticated things have aired towards real-time disclosure of everything in every market it's just not true in finance where people are able to sort of use the rules and bend them to obfuscate the truth so you know for example there was a rule that the sec was considering where you wouldn't have to publish your longs anymore on the same frequency to me that that's that's nuts i think that actually you know we live in a world where your longs and your shorts should be published in real time um because again what separates you should be your analysis and your interpretation of the facts not obfuscation another thing is that i think that you should be you know forced to disclose the margin that you're running and how much leverage you have and you know i think that hedge funds and banks are no different they're a critical part of the financial infrastructure they should be treated in the same way um and instead i think after 2007 and 8 a lot of the risk effectively quote unquote went off balance sheet and away from the banks and towards these other really important doctors but who just don't have that much oversight i still think hedge funds will do really well i still think that there are some folks who are incredibly talented who'll make just a ton of money for themselves and for their investors but i think disclosure needs to go up in terms of short selling i buy the fact that it's an important part of the market um i'm not a huge fan of it um i do think that certain folks really use it to run a neutral strategy and you know i think that that's great um but i also think that you know now in the world of social media and we've seen this recently you know disinformation can be used to not just cause political damage but i think this information can also cause economic damage and so i think that the sec is going to have to deal with that issue and figure that out how do we manage information or interpretation or sensationalizing of things that all of a sudden can whip saw the markets up and down um and these actors how are they regulated are they allowed to just say whatever they want and the implications are what they are or is there a higher standard now that there's so much distribution for so many more people that is a calm sober and thoughtful analysis it wasn't a few weeks ago what changed well look um as with everything i really do take pride in the fact that i um have strong opinions about their weekly health i think it's important to have a point and you know i come to very quick conclusions but also sometimes i'm emotional and those conclusions are more judgments and then i take a step back and i'm fortunate enough to have a lot of people around me that question what i said and push back and then i re-underwrite and it's no it's not dissimilar to an investment you know i try to come to a very quick point of view but then i get data and i constantly re-underwrite and you know then the heat of the moment passes uh you know deal heat or you know emotional judgment and then what's left is a sober assessment of the truth and facts and um you know that's sort of where i am now on this and frankly you know most of the things that i do one of the things the game stop episode let's call it sean a light on is robin hood and not just robin hood as a company but zero commissioned trades and the ability for retail let's call them retail investors to participate in a momentum chase do you think on balance that apps like robin hood and the way that they've gamified and you've heard that term many times trading not investing but trading is a healthy thing on balance i think that it should be allowed to exist you use the word healthy do i i think it's healthy not particularly because i think it again it keeps people in this ghetto of being labor um i started as a day trader effectively meaning on the side i would speculate in my you know teens and in my 20s an investor is not a speculator and it's not a day trader um and i think that a lot of retail a lot of normal people the only way they will close the inequality gap is because they take it upon themselves to learn how to become an investor the government's not going to save them no law is going to save them no you know taxation of the rich is going to save them they can save themselves and you have to learn how to invest which is to put money into the things you care about and then do nothing and learning that second part is super hard and so if you have apps that glorify speculation you're not going to teach the right kind of behavior so of course they should exist i believe in a free market am i a fan of them not particularly i want to understand shamath how you decide what to invest in do you believe and this is a subject that's come up on your podcast your all-in podcast do you believe in fundamentals or has been as has been argued a stock can trade wherever regardless of whether it is or isn't hinged you know to the fundamentals of the underlying business well maybe i can just give you an insight into how i process any opportunity sure company random company comes in uh to the top of the fund immediately i'm making a very quick hopefully it's a decision but maybe sometimes it's a judgment um and i'm asking myself does this fit into my world view or not meaning is it is it in my circle of confidence and i have a very simple way of looking at this is it going to fix something inequality that i think is important or is it going to fix something in climate change that i think is important those are the only two things i care about inequality and climate change under inequality there's a bunch of stuff financial equality is important health care equality is important education equality is important so it allows me to organize a lot of different opportunities um and i'm trying to figure out is there a consumer proposition here that's important for them does it make something more symmetric does it take something that was asymmetric and fix it so that's my first judgment which is qualitative that's why whenever i start my one pager it's always what is the strategy and you can read all of these one pages now and what you'll get away from them is the first lens is equality and or climate change then i start to do the fundamental work and you know this is where i have a real issue with a lot of people who say that they're value investors i think that i'm a value investor um the thing is that when you look up the word value in the dictionary it doesn't mean cheap it doesn't mean a cigar but with two puffs you know that famous buffett monger club i think it actually means something that has value and so then i'm really thinking about you know what are the cash flows of this business how does it create a moat right meaning in software some technological way that's hard for people to compete with it and then can i get it for a price where there's a margin of safety where if they miss execute for a quarter or if they have a little hiccup it's going to be okay because you know we've got an entry point where five or ten years from now this thing will be five to ten times bigger and that's how we think about all these things and if you look at the deals that i've done they kind of map pretty singularly one to one to that um framework so let's use a real world example obviously this is not the kind of deal you're doing but if you look at tesla today through that lens is that stock a buy with a market cap north of 800 billion dollars uh i mean the short answer is yes um the reason is that i think people it took people look i bought tesla in 2014 or 15. i was one of the largest owners of the convertible debt you know i felt that that was the best margin of safety way to bet on tesla um it's turned out to be an enormous winner um and i really believe in what elon is doing i think he's the most important entrepreneur of our of our lifetime right now um it's taken people 15 years to embrace um that they're going to be now a legitimate car company but when i underwrote the investment my bet was on something bigger and i think that elon is well past building a car company and i think it'll take another five or ten years for people to figure out what this next arc of innovation is and what that is is the deregulation of energy if you look under the hood you know utilities spend tens of billions of dollars hundreds of billions of dollars a year all around the world on catholics they are completely regulated they feel completely safe they feel like they can issue debt ad nauseum you know they can cause all kinds of damage into the environment or otherwise look at pg e and still come away unscathed because they're protected except that something is happening that nobody forecasted which is the complete bottoms up disruption of energy and that's the only way that this thing is going to get deregulated it's not going to be by law or dictate it's not going to be you know a big monolithic competitor it's going to be because every home installs hydro panels solar panels batteries and then software that basically allows them to live off the grid and then eventually pump their excess energy into battery solutions and other things that are controlled by cities and towns and governments who then in turn will turn up their usage of peakers at a minimum and then over time we'll have very different characteristics of usage from traditional utilities that is what tesla is powering that is what allows it to be a multi-trillion dollar company so it doesn't have the same return profile as when i bought it at what is it equivalently now 25 or 30 bucks a share well obviously not but can it be multiples higher than where it is today absolutely jamal you've built an extraordinary franchise in special purpose acquisition companies six spacks billions of dollars raised so far tell me from your perspective is there a limit is there a limit to what you can do with spax is there a limit to the size of the spac revolution in terms of available capital or quality of of targets i think what's happening in spanx is really about the dismantling of the traditional capital markets with respect to fundraising so the equity capital markets you know really had one uh go-to move which was the ipo and then obviously there was follow-on financings and all that other stuff but the traditional s1 driven ipo process and what you picked was a brand that you trusted to be your on-ramp into the public marketplace um you pick gold you pick morgan stanley you pick jp morgan credit suisse borrow please etc i think in 2021 and going forward you're still picking brands but that choice has become more atomized and instead you know you'll pick the ipo 2.0 platform that myself and ian osborne created you'll pick you know the reinvent platform that reed hoffman and mark pincus has stood up um you'll pick um you know the spat platform that al gores has created and there's many uh different versions of this but that is the exact same decision that used to happen 25 years ago when you used to pick a banker except now you're picking an individual level partner and so i think that spax are very much here to stay back in the you know using the language of inequality it evens the playing field it democratizes access to high-growth companies how because it allows retail and it allows long-tail institutional investors folks that may not have necessarily been tier one hedge funds now they can also play you know they may get allocation in the original spac ipo they can go buy in the market as soon as it goes public they can participate in the pipe they can buy after a deal is announced so many opportunities versus one allocation in a book building process that a traditional s1 process was all about what's the biggest spec you can see yourself raising having a bigger size doesn't necessarily help in fact what's more useful is to actually have a reasonable size because you can upsize a deal with a pipe and instead focus on sectors and themes and the reason is because again going back to brands entrepreneurs want to partner with people that deeply understand your business and so it's much more likely that if you had two or three specs all of the same size except with sector focuses you could find different independent directors that were subject matter experts that'll make the companies better it'll make the diligence process more useful the decisions are higher quality um and so i think that's where the world should go um but i'll tell you like you know putting up 400 million dollars back to work is meaningfully easier than a billion dollars back and i've done both um but the former is is much more flexible than the latter you describe finance often as a game rigged in favor of insiders at the expense of outsiders especially the retail investor the little guy if you will but i would make the following observations and others have as well about specs the sponsor gets a 20 promote wall street banks get paid underwriting fees twice hedge funds get big share allocations and then cash in the warrants to make a risk-free return and finally giant investors like fidelity blackrock neuberger berman and well-connected billionaires like yourself get to participate in pipe transactions at ten dollars a share right the same price as the retail investor but with total information how is that not a giveaway to insiders at the expense of outsiders yeah i think this is a really good point you're making so let me break down a few of these points um look the first is that if you can generate superior returns you should be allowed to compensate and participate uh yourself in that when i you know used to manage institutional money again all of this capital is my own um but when i used to manage institutional capital in early stage investing i charged a 30 carry no hurdle no nothing and people were willing to bet that i could generate returns and i have you know 30 plus percent returns over the last decade that justified a 30 carry similarly here on the deals that i do i take a 20 carry and i think that i can find targets and find opportunities that will make that um more than reasonable in the final analysis and i think that if you look at the returns we've generated for shareholders it's been nothing short of incredible inclusive of the carry that i've taken that being said i've i've always thought it was important as well to do two things number one eric is to put a lot of my own money on the line so that there was never a question of why i was in this and i was in this to make sure that i could find great companies that i thought again fixed inequality or climate change but then second to accelerate those things with our capital and to make sure that i could explain it to people including normal folks and retail investors and i do that by saying listen just so you know where i'm coming from i'm going to put in more money than any of you and you should take that as a serious signal that i think that this is important and i take it very seriously the second is that it allows me ball control and then having ball control allows us to basically slowly even the playing field now what do i mean by that and this is to the second point that you brought up i think that there is a lot of work that we can do to make sure that retail a has more allocation of the ipos right now we have a a pretty decent allocation but small and the reason is that the technology that we use to allocate shares in ipos is brittle and i've been working with a partner i don't have much to say beyond it's an intention right now but i'm working with a partner and with credit suites our banker to expose more of our initial ipo allocations to retail the second is that we are going to start a process to try to educate the regulators so that they can expand how they think about what an accredited investor should be the reason why we cannot give access to the pipes and some of these other mechanisms to retail is because of very strict regulatory definitions that we live by about who is a you know quib who is an accredited investor and those things are changing but they're changing slowly my perspective is that right now the way we define it is too broken so i think that there's work that i can do and hopefully people will listen to those arguments and expand the rules and that way more people will be allowed to buy pipes and these other things but i want to be really clear that is where we would like to move the ball so that everybody can be in an open even playing field bid for the ipos you know bid for the pipes uh participate with complete transparent information you're an experienced investor you're an experienced manager and you can argue persuasively for the 20 promote or carry if you prefer that you earn an expat transaction there are people raising spax who have no experience as investors no experience running companies is that movie going to end well the good news is humans are adaptive and i think the answer is yes we will be okay will there be a bunch of bumps along the way i think so too um and so yeah we have a real responsibility to educate um and teach people but again you know we need brands to do that because you know nobody's gonna listen to buffett buffett doesn't have the energy to to say what he said 30 and 40 years ago in 2021 and that's okay he's earned the right to basically chill out and be the goat but there has to be other folks that take that mantle and you know take the baton and do it as well to this younger generation in the language they understand and look you know to your point that's why people say like who is this guy well who i am is a byproduct of my generation and my media culture which is faceted not always great facets but multifaceted and so you have to speak in the language of the times in order to get your point across so think big for a minute if you really want to disrupt a game rigged in favor of insiders at the expense of the outsiders how else would you like to transform finance um i do want to have a berkshire-like instrument that is all things you know i mean not to sound egotistical but all things all things social capital look i mean i was the one that backed up the truck in 2012 on bitcoin you know 2014 and 15 in amazon 2015 in tesla um you know these facts are doing well um you know i i can be a little judgmental at times but i'm a good decision maker and um i think i know where the world's roughly going and i want to translate that i've made enough money for myself it doesn't really float my boat i do it as a demarcation of success and to keep the pressure on but the best pressure for me was if i you know was was an instrument that retail normal ordinary folks could use to close the inequality gap for themselves one of the things buffett did was effectively hold forever right put his permanent capital to work and almost never sold is that you as well is the money that you have in whether it's virgin galactic or clover health or open door sofi permanent capital that you're never taking out um yes but with an asterisk but you know buffett became a billionaire at 58. i because of facebook quite honestly got extremely lucky in my early 30s um but this last decade has been training and you know these last few years now i'm really on the field i got my pads on and i feel like i can play as good as anybody else um but the reality is all of the things i want to do vastly outweighs the capital that i have you know probably i'm you know running 10 plus billion dollars 10 15 billion i don't know the exact number to be completely honest i should um but i am risk on and i am moving a lot of balls down the field myself and my team um and the reality is that those things sometimes consume capital so at the end of last year you know my family office called and said hey uh dummy uh you know you need to put a little bit of money here just to like make sure that we have liquidity and we can keep doing all these things and so i had to sell you know a couple million shares of virgin i didn't want to i haven't sold a single share of anything uh that i've done uh in this back platform um in the pipes other than the those few million shares of virgin so if given my brothers eric and if like you know um if i if i could if i could really just go for it uh i wouldn't sell the share of anything i buy because i believe in you but every now and then i run up into liquidity constraints like everybody else and i get a call and they say c'mon stop slow down and i say no and then they say okay then at least give me as give us a little buffer here so that we can continue to do all the things you want is the 10 to 15 billion dollars you're marshaling is that money inside social capital or is that in total does that include what you're doing in your family office and personal holdings that you may have and say bitcoin or tesla or amazon or facebook or whatever i know it's like the totality of everything but it's like sloshing around in a bunch of like llc like this is the thing like like social capital is more of a name you know meaning is it an entity yeah technically there's a company with the name social capital on it but you know everything is flowed through a byzantine bunch of llc's and this and that that that i personally own this is why you know part of the work now that i have to do this year is reorganize myself so you know social capital 1.0 was a traditional um set of venture funds called social capital um social capital 2.0 is basically my family office but and for scholarship capital 3.0 to become a reality which i would like to do in the next couple of years i have to do some cleanup work now and again this is sort of like you know when when uh when the music's on you have to be dancing and so i haven't had time to do that because you know i see opportunities then i want to seize them and i want to invest thinking that i'll just come back and clean up whatever organizational mess is created afterwards and this social capital 3.0 would be a public company that's my ambition i think that i want to be held accountable to folks i want to look i i've learned that look like i make better decisions when i am authentic and transparent and so the best way to do that is just to be living my life out for everybody to see my professional business life um and so i like the idea of the transparency of the public markets i love the idea of having investor calls um having an analyst day teaching people um learning for people um having a you know a yearly thing that buffett does i would want to do our own it won't be as grandiose or as big but you know maybe it will in 30 or 40 years and so you know i i i want to do those things and i mean look i'm going to work until i'm 65 and so between now and 65 that's the goal and you know to be honest with you i don't have a very high regard for money um and i don't know uh mr buffett to really tell you what he thinks about it but i grew up with nothing i'm gonna die with nothing and this is purely an instrument that i can use to put the foot on the gas so i'll give you an example you know today for all the valley who talk about climate change china controls 80 of lithium-ion battery reproduction and so to the extent that we ever get into a geopolitical posture where china decides to slow down the progress of the united states one of the ways in which you can do it is just to basically slow the trickle of the critical inputs and precursors that we need to make batteries no batteries guess what eric no climate change and so you know that's an area that i'm going to invest in and that's an area i'm going to go for it it's is it risky yeah will it cost several billion dollars probably more um could it fail i think if we think through it from first principles i think it has a very high degree uh chance of being successful um but you know i'm gonna make a huge bet um and so i'm willing to take the product list um so in that way i think i could be different give me a sense chamoth of of what the reorganization involves what's going to go into this holding company what businesses or activities are you operating currently out of social capital 2.0 that will end up in 3.0 so obviously we have our spat business um and that's uh an incredibly um great machine um you know between credit suisse skadden arps connot social capital um it's just it's like this is like the all-star team i mean it's like you know 1992 barcelona olympics us team usa yeah it feels these guys are just such close and so it's an honor to work with them so that whole platform um i do have an aspiration to cut and paste and do an equivalent platform solely focused on biotech because i think that that's a very different risk profile smaller deal sizes but i you can expect me to explore that um i think that etfs have something that have always intrigued me then we have a bunch of businesses where we own and awkward you know we started an insurance company uh next generation ai machine learning insurance business um that's writing some very complicated reinsurance products around you know cat risk and pandemic risk and cyber risk i'm really excited by that we have two healthcare companies um we have an enterprise software business that is doing something very unique um and so you know there'll be a bunch of those assets you've said shamath you were a billionaire by the time you were in your early 30s do you have any idea what you're worth today yeah i don't i mean i i probably shouldn't uh but i don't um i have a rough sense you know highs you know i think it's i mean i think i just told you it's kind of probably in the 10 to 20 issues north of 10 okay i want to quote one of your all-time most popular tweets when bitcoin gets to 150 000 i'll buy the hamptons and convert it to a sleep away camp for kids working farms and low-cost housing what inspired you to write that one well um i can't take all the credit of friends of mine and i we have a little group chat and we were just you know uh talking about random things for the summer you know the hope that the pandemic eases and um one of my friends uh rob goldberg actually was the one that said champions and it just kind of like set off a light bulb and then i just wrote it and i kind of published it i you know it's very tongue-in-cheek i mean you know i did another one which said like i think when bitcoin gets to forty thousand or a hundred thousand i'm gonna buy goldman sachs and rename it sacks these are all jokes you know this is the part of my personality that some folks don't get um which is just this is just tongue-in-cheek it's just honestly i never thought i'd be here uh i'm enjoying the ride every minute of this feels like a complete dream i admire you for not taking yourself too seriously the bitcoin thing however is very serious yeah north of 40 000 so it's not 150 you can't buy the hamptons yet it's not a hundred you can't buy goldman sachs yet but um can i tell you something about bitcoin which is so important it's so i think bitcoin is very important because it just shows the fragility of you know the traditional financial infrastructure um and if you just look at the quantity and the size of like the m2 money supply as an example the real question i think people should be asking ourselves is okay bitcoin becomes a de facto reserve currency that basically displaces gold what replaces the us dollar and here's where if you want to just bear with me for a second it's not bitcoin that replaces the us dollar it is a stable and what does all of that mean in less fancy language there are companies around the world that are replacing one fixed us dollar with one digital token of a us dollar and by simply making that small abstraction they're able to completely build financial rails that didn't exist before on-ramps and off-ramps for trading to asset management to banking to payments processing there's a revolution happening it's not felt as much in the united states because people don't see it because the financial services infrastructure is so robust but when you look at the developing world and if you look in any market where there is any form of currency manipulation or currency instability that's the future and so you know bitcoin is a canary in a coal mine for a completely virtual um largely anonymous and we can debate whether that's good or not um financial reality um and so you know i think it's it's a very important trend that's worth understanding the other thing is so many of the dislocations that we've seen um won't happen anymore when we go on those rails so you know going back to this whole gamestop debacle as i've learned more and as you probably know now too you know a lot of this has to do with the arcane way in which stocks are settled and what i learned was we used to have a t plus three you know after the trading day three days later is when you'd settle and it was moving heaven and earth crying and screaming to move companies to go to t plus two well if you're running a stable coin or you know smart contracts on top of ethereum all of this next generation infrastructure i mean this is t plus zero right you're settling things in analysis and that's really good for everybody in addition to bitcoin which coins if you will cryptocurrencies digital assets are are you a holder of are you a believer in well i will be publishing this soon um i am building a fairly sizable portfolio of um what are called uh nfts uh non-fungible tokens um some digital art um some you know virtual trading cards and these may sound crazy to some um but i do think that that's the next frontier of digital currency and digital assets um and so i have been building a portfolio my decision is the team and i will announce it we will publicize everything we own and we will make our holdings transparent so that folks can track along and see as we buy and sell these um so that that's coming in a few months i'm not really ready to show the details of exactly what we hold yet but i'm really excited maybe in a few weeks actually but i'm very excited we're almost ready to tell them do you still want to break up big tech well i think they need to get regulated i think that companies like facebook and google will be subject to much stricter laws section 230 will change and recognize them as quasi publishers and i say quasi because this is where again laws and politicians understanding of the economy is still too brittle but if they can bring the right people to teach them what an algorithm is and you know what machine learning and what you know weights are and how these things operate what they'll see is a mechanized publisher and there should be rules for mechanized publishers that are different from being a dumpling so i think that that's going to happen um and then you know for for microsoft apple and amazon i don't think that much is going to happen and the reason is because i think that those guys are generally on the right side of history and they generally don't air towards the type of hot button issues that politicians care about like facebook and google threaten the institutionalized structures of power and influence that codify policies you know amazon prime doesn't do that getting toothpaste you know the next day it's just not that disruptive so you know the laws will affect the folks that um you know threaten to disrupt politicians first and foremost and you think politicians can meet that threat with regulation as opposed to in facebook's case forcing the company to divest of say instagram or whatsapp well can they i'm not sure that they can will they yes and i think that look when you look at mark's stated strategies such stated strategy you know if i had to again do a one-pager for that laboriously long thing that he wrote it's basically what he said was i am going to take all these products i'm going to entangle them together so that institutionally this code base is monolithic now this is an engineer speaking to you such that if any sort of you know uh carve outs or divestitures were to come to pass it would take years for us to disentangle this mess which are many more years where i can bet on the laws changing the government changing or their minds so i think from a business strategy perspective it was both obvious and really but i don't think it was seen for what it was by politicians chamath you've been an outspoken critic of gavin newsom and even stoked speculation that you might run for governor of california what are your political ambitions do you have any i would like to promote centrism and i would like to coalesce people around centrist normal moderate goals of progress and then to have candidates who can carry the water on that platform that's that's my real political ambition um i don't have any particular ambition to run particularly because the implications of doing that job day-to-day for me i think are a little under leveraged um in the sense that you know the conflict of interest and the divestiture rules would force me to a bunch of things that are really important to me i mean going back to batteries you know i couldn't do anything um you know if i thought that it was really important for me to secure lithium supply for united states battery manufacturers i mean today i can just write that check right i can mobilize the capital and i can go and get that and secure the united states supply of lithium i couldn't do that if i was going um and so i wouldn't be able to act in ways that are important for us so but i do think that i can see if you know floating a trial balloon allows us to coalesce around moderate ideals because i think when politicians are at their best it's when they get out of the way you know they kind of do you know not much harm and they kind of move laws along in a progressive mandate that allows the rest of us freedom to operate and so you know that's kind of my belief i think extremism is kind of very short-lived and it's just the manifestation of the fact that that these systems are broken and need fixing but the way to fix them is with technology and the only way to harness the resources of technological people is via for-profit mechanisms and so governments need to set up the incentives and mostly just kind of step aside and get out of the way whether we like it or not politics is a money game have you given thought to how much money you want to put behind these candidates whom you'd like to see in office espousing the ideals you share um on the assumption that you know citizens united doesn't get overturned you know my plan will build it's not that today today it's in the millions a year but my plan will build to hundreds of millions i mean but think of what has happened in american politics because of the coast uh or the mercers um what is the moderate version you know where where are the group of people that over 20 or 30 years can systematically build an infrastructure that promotes just centrist decency it doesn't exist right now and so yeah i would like to build that and i'm happy to you know pay my share of that at the moment i think you're spending some money to recall the governor gavin newsom i saw a figure of a hundred thousand dollars how much are you willing to put toward that issue yeah probably a few million i mean you know like that's not insubstantial no it's not i think it's about sending a message um look we are in a very terrible place in california so on the one hand this is you know having lived in sri lanka and then ottawa and then toronto and new york and dc and now here in california i mean i'm biased but this literally is the single best place on earth i mean the weather the food the people the temperament it's just the ingenuity it's incredible and um there should be you know growth for years and years here but the schools are completely broken the air is the worst the crime is some of the highest the taxes are some of the highest so we're like completely upside down and we're in like you know bonkers land here um and it's and you know look i think it's 40 000 taxpayers in california represent you know more than 50 percent of the entire tax base forty thousand out of sixty million and those folks are the most mobile and now they've already started to move toyota is gone oracle has left tesla has left this none of this had to happen um and so you know california has some swung too far to the left there's no centrism there's no moderate reasonable approach to live and let live anymore it's a bunch of sanctimonious judging and i just think that that has to stop are you going to stay or are you going to follow some of those other billionaires to aspen or to austin i don't cut in love i mean i i owe that i owe this place happy you know um i owe me erica everything you know i'm not i'm not trying to scalp an extra 13 of my taxes i could care i heard you in a conversation with kara swisher a few years ago described your mood at the time i am not your slave it would appear that you've you've reached a different mindset i was living somebody else's life um and that life would have been amazing for some other person but it didn't map to my values of how i should live my life and what things matter to me and how you know transparent and authentic i wanted to be and that was a you know an emotional outburst that really encapsulated the anger i felt and how trapped i felt and mostly the anger was at me you know i could have said it better than i am not your slave but i did it i'm okay with it i said it it's true that's how i felt at the time um but yeah i i feel like i'm working for me now and that feels great well i wish you luck with those goals and i look forward to talking to you along the way it's been a pleasure shaman thank you eric thank you very very much

Channel: Bloomberg Television

Views: 1,035,275

Keywords: finance, news, Bloomberg

Id: wqtd8CuqF7A

Length: 48min 29sec (2909 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021