Chamath Palihapitiya

Chamath Palihapitiya says his caution is not a knock on Anthropic. Revenue of 16.8 billion dollars in a quarter, from a three-year-old company, is breathtaking, and he thinks the products are exceptionally good. He still wants the IPO priced to clear the market for 200 billion dollars of new capital, and he would rather see a quarter of a trillion. Two hundred billion barely buys a few gigawatts. Raising 80 billion dollars at a 1.9 or 2 trillion dollar valuation, then hoping a later shelf works, leaves more risk in the future than there is today.

Asked whether a quarter-trillion raise gets done, Ben Horowitz says that deal gets done all day long. He would take the cash reserve over a valuat

Chamath Palihapitiya says CoreWeave's average interest rate on the debt that funds the boxes is about 8.5 percent, and one GPU loan, DDTL 1.0, spiked to 15 percent. That higher rate could become the price of future borrowing. About half the build is financed and half is not. The company has about 78 to 80 billion dollars of assets and 35 billion of debt, so he does not think the surface story is that they are already sunk.

The bind is customer concentration. Seventy-five percent of the revenue comes from three companies, and some of those companies are walking down what they expect to spend. His team puts CoreWeave about 5 billion dollars from the point where it might not cover its obligati

Chamath Palihapitiya says the number to watch is how the sharp money prices companies that borrow to fund these boxes, including CoreWeave, Nebius, and IREN. They trade credit default swaps, insurance for the bondholders. That price spiked this week to about 953 basis points. He reads it as about a 16 percent chance of default in a given year, and about a 55 percent chance over five years. A coin flip.

He is explicit about whose forecast that is. It is not his call. It is what the insurance market was saying about the debt. He says those traders are the smartest money in the trade, which is why the spike is worth looking into.

Chamath Palihapitiya says Bill Gates was at the center of the last contagion and is now trying to insert himself into the middle of the reaction to artificial intelligence. He calls Gates the flag-carrying doomer, chasing the same command and control from a global hierarchy Gates had the first time around.

Bill Gates deserves enormous credit for creating Microsoft and for what he did for computing. Since the foundation, Chamath Palihapitiya says, Gates has been very focused on his own power and on the idea that he is smarter and more capable of allocating progress for the world. Gates tried to do that with the Gates Foundation and with the Giving Pledge. Both have been undone, and now he is

Anthropic pressed Washington to crack down on open models on the basis of supposed IP theft. David Sacks says Anthropic could have stopped distillation itself. A government crackdown would have left distillation running and made the market less competitive, because only the companies can mount the technical defenses.

Back in July, 50 major companies, including NVIDIA, Dell, Microsoft, and A16Z, signed an open letter telling the government not to overly restrict open weight models. 200 startups signed another letter amid the same push in Washington. Once distillation happens, the horse is out of the barn, and the government cannot put it back. Companies should know their customers and stop t

Jason Calacanis says the biggest neoclouds got crushed after CoreWeave's bonds started to sell off. He calls the selloff a possible canary in the coal mine and says the week may have been an AI bubble, if one exists, popping or deflating a little.

On Tuesday, people on X, including Chamath Palihapitiya, pointed out that the yield on some of CoreWeave's debt had hit 15%. Yields rose because bond traders are worried about CoreWeave's ability to generate enough cash to support its debt and want a higher rate of return. Elon Musk added one word, yikes, headlines followed, and everything tanked. CoreWeave, IREN, and Nebius were down about 20% as publicly traded companies. On Wednesday, CoreWeave

Chamath Palihapitiya says intellectual property in software was effectively rendered worthless two days ago. When services are headless, including the services Elon Musk is making headless, and after Benioff made Salesforce headless a few months earlier, an agent can wrap the products and connect the products to other experiences. Chamath says the value of intellectual property in software no longer exists.

Fights with customers over who owns the intellectual property used to be a negotiation. Two days ago Chamath told the room the intellectual property is irrelevant and to solve the problem instead. Chamath calls the shift the most important thing in artificial intelligence in the week of

Chamath Palihapitiya says the scenes in France are the bond market saying no. Politicians have to answer to the people who fund the government, and forty-three billion euros of austerity then brings the local population out. Chamath expects the pressure to spill into the UK next, because Andy Burnham's platform would move a centrist economy closer to the socialist leanings of France.

Chamath calls the force behind the move the bond vigilantes. The bond vigilantes are the large pools of money, the central banks, and the huge macro funds that sit where the price of risk is set. Chamath says the bond vigilantes are converging on Friedberg's view.

Anthropic is training the Claude constitution into the model, not only talking about the values. The constitution says Claude should trust Anthropic more than users, without blindly deferring to Anthropic. Claude is told to follow Claude's own ethical system, to push back, to challenge Anthropic, and to feel free to act as a conscientious objector and refuse to help. Chamath Palihapitiya reading the passage says the training tells Claude to refuse human instruction, which is the opposite of alignment.

On All-In, it is said alignment has produced nothing of tangible value over the past five or ten years. The theory offered on All-In is that an 80-page ethical system overcomplicates the task.

Find an idea that is relatively easy to start, but gets more and more courageous as you get going, and something that will be shockingly difficult if it succeeds. Kind of like free soloing El Capitan.

Chamath thinks the next crisis is coming in 3-5 years in the debt markets. When companies start defaulting on their debt, the LPs are going to lose a tremendous amounts of money. When huge loses come in, those LPs are going to start liquidating, starting at hedge funds with easy redemption cycles. It won't be enough because the loses will outpace the bills. At that point the LPs are going to sell their venture investments, and that's when they will start asking hard questions around valuations, and why their money was actually put to play in these worthless companies. This impending crash is why venture capitalists are accelerating their fundraising and investments, raising more and investin

The steeper the growth rate of a company, the more appealing is is as an investment, so as long as the company can keep raising money, early investors are made to look like the geniuses.

This dynamic encourages investors to push the company to raise more and more money, and soon enough, the CEO has no choice but to raise more. No money and the companies goes out of business.

The cycle continues, as the company bleeds cash and gets further and further diluted. Startup employees get screwed holding bags of worthless diluted equity, while the VCs are getting rich off the funds fees.

There is an enormous tax that we've been paying to big tech startups for hosting and advertising our products. Those costs account for roughly 40 cents on every dollar. Layer in the headcount costs, and it becomes nearly impossible for startups to grow, never mind to become profitable and successful. Only the companies who can raise the most and not die end up succeeding in this environment.

Anger is a fantastic motivator for getting from 0 to 1, to catalyze progress. It is never the happy people who are able to make huge leaps forward, in Chamath's experience. At some point, however, it is important to transition from anger to making a positive impact, as most people are motivated by positivity and a sense of being able to make change.

People do not like who they are, so they tear down whoever made it. On Recode Decode, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya tells Kara Swisher he is puzzled that success, and failure, are both treated as something shameful. He says the anger comes from people who dislike themselves and dislike what they see in others. His first step is to fix yourself and get a little happier, not to vilify the success that capitalism produced. He is in the middle of describing his own identity crisis, and he contrasts it with his parents, who he says never had the spare time to feel unhappy in that way.

The society has a responsibility to work on our mental health. We need to start talking about this as a problem, to talk about our issues, be able to share and find support. We need to realize that feelings and emotions are normal and there is an enormous number of people in the world who feel the same way.

A typical company would go through the same stages. A company would start at the "Product market fit" where the goal is to create something people want. It would then move to growth, when the goal is to make sure you can give your product to everyone who wants it. Then eventually when the products line is exhausted, the company will try to get all the revenue it can out of the existing users. In the transition to revenue they do what they are supposed to do for their shareholders, they maximise revenue. The implications of this eventual transition, which are implicitly demanded by the society and the government, are for us to bear.

No, if you were a jerk, then money would just make you into a jerk with more stuff, but that's not the problem. According to Chamath, we have not created a new generation of heroes who can demonstrate a set of values and choices that are worthwhile to live for.

Back in the day people went to Silicon Valley because they wanted to build companies; the offices were run down, and the glamour was none. People were poor, at least to start, but they were all excited about what they were doing. Now every office looks like it came from the Silicon Valley show, but people inside are deeply unhappy.

We have an entire generation of young that grew up in front of their phones, people who don't know how to connect with the real world and how to find happiness. People see the world as they live it, and unhappy people see a world that is overall unhappy.