Chamath Palihapitiya

Here, below, is a press release announcing that a person worth $50-100B (depending on SpaceX valuation) has left California. And this is one person! There are many, many others. Now, California’s budget can exclude any tax revenue from Peter Thiel going forward. And it will learn the hard way the many others for whom this is now also true. Why was this asset seizure law, falsely labeled as a “Billionaire Tax”, a smart idea, again? Why didn’t Newsom kill it? Because he wanted more revenue to leak to daycares? All the billionaires are leaving now so only the millionaires and middle class will be left. Mathematically, it means California tax…

Because taxes create government revenues which they can then use to reward their supporters. It’s old school corruption on a multi-trillion dollar scale.

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A couple of important thoughts and clarifications: Where is Bernie right? He is right that a handful of the Tech Billionaire class are completely and totally loathsome. Monopolists who’ve flouted privacy, dampened free speech, enabled debanking and sewed societal chaos with their money while they haven’t given back in any meaningful way relative to their wealth. But not everyone is like this. Most have become successful by working hard and making useful things that many people need and has generally added to societal progress. Where is Bernie wrong? This bill is not a Billionaire Tax. In fact, the state AG removed that language from the t…

More taxation WILL NOT FIX HEALTHCARE as you can see below. We need to address the incentives written into Obamacare - specifically that the margins of healthcare companies are capped at 15% and the unwinding of the M&A bonanza that created mega corps in healthcare. While it may have been well intentioned, and people then thought that forcing these companies to make a fixed amount would lower costs, it didn’t. Instead, these companies raised prices so they could make ther fixed margin on a larger number! We now have a decade of data to know this is true and it doesn’t work as intended. Separately, allowing insures and PBMs and providers to…

The reason you can’t afford healthcare: Healthcare premiums are too high. Taxing Jeff Bezos more may be right for other reasons but it will do nothing to fix this. Premiums are too high because insurance companies game the pricing model brought by Obamacare. Obamacare capped gross margins at 15%. So for healthcare companies to make more money, they didn’t have to find efficiency or compete harder, they could coordinate and raise prices. And they did that. Making 15% on $10,000 with little competition is better for them than making 15% or more on $1,000. Now Obamacare says you must spend these extra dollars on services but if you look at …

Free daycare has been a talking point for years. Turns out if politicians had stopped fraud to the fake, non existent daycares you would have had enough money to give the real thing away for free.

Can’t have kids because you can’t afford daycare. Can’t afford daycare because most of the money is actually given to imaginary daycares, resulting in fewer spots and higher prices from the few real ones. It doesn’t have to be this way.

She’s not wrong…

The bond market is waking up to the fraud. Politicians may be able to sweep this under the rug but nothing can stop the bond market… Pain is coming via interest rates on muni and state bonds…no bond holder wants to be the bagholder for waste, fraud and abuse.

The great Will Durant: “Freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917.”

What?!

Never stop learing…

The market dynamics in AI are insane: huge capital and power needs meets rapid consumer adoption meets huge potential economic and social impact meets geographic competition at scale. https://t.co/Dovn0IC6VC

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No idea this existed until today. People can make billions ratting out the fraud: What is “qui tam”? Via Gemini: “Qui tam is a legal provision that allows a private individual (known as a relator) to file a lawsuit on behalf of the government to recover funds lost to fraud. The term comes from the Latin phrase qui tam pro domino rege quam pro se ipso in hac parte sequitur, meaning "he who brings the action for the king as well as for himself." In California, these actions are primarily governed by the California False Claims Act (CFCA), which is modeled after the federal version but tailored to protect state and local taxpayer money. Ho…

We may be witnessing the Cambrian explosion that creates DOGE 2.0 - completely decentralized gonzo journalism exposing fraud all over the country.

Minnesota is proof positive how broken “liberal” ideology is. In their haste to “create more equity”, “right historic wrongs”, “celebrate diversity” and all manner of other well established orthodoxy, they have instead, completely upended the rule of law, enabled rampant fraud while looking the other way and through their voting laws have broken down the integrity of their state’s democracy. Truly insane stuff going on there rn…

I trust @Cernovich instincts here. If he thinks a grant program can unlock tens of investigative journalists to uncover the breadth and scale of California’s fraud, many people will support it. Cerno?

Wait until @nickshirleyy gets to California!

Dear @FBIDirectorKash Please send some folks to California as well. https://t.co/5ewcOeCbEj

Should California have to pass even a remedial audit in order to spend tax revenues?

Anyone who thinks the California government has a revenue problem is mathematically illiterate or part of the fraud. California does not have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. Politicians and their henchmen stealing tens of billions of dollars PER YEAR from our pockets. Ask yourself why they can’t pass an audit! Ask yourself why they change the reporting rules on your pension! Do you start to see a pattern? Endless reams of money keep falling through the cracks with no accountability into the waiting hands of thieves. When is enough, enough? California will soon start to lose its grip on being the most vibrant state in Americ…

Cancel your @nytimes subscription and give the money to @nickshirleyy instead!

My bestie w the 🔥

Your daily reminder that if you are hoping for a California state pension, because of the fraud and grift of your elected officials in California, your state pension is at risk. California politicians decided that the best way to cover up their addiction to overspending/under-delivering is to change the reporting rules at the pension system to be as aggressive as possible. Why? Because pensions are constitutionally protected and if it looked underfunded, more tax money would have to go to them (and away from politicians) to fill that hole. So the politicians changed the reporting rules to make the pensions look healthy…but they’re not. T…

More fraud by California’s elected “leaders”… “LAFD Battalion Chief Kenneth Cook, who wrote the after-action report on the Palisades fire, declined to endorse the final version. In an email, Cook wrote that “the current version appears highly unprofessional and inconsistent with our established standards.””

It’s not 1% a year for 5 years. It’s a one time 5% tax on all assets and it will kill entrepreneurship in California. Here is an example: John Doe starts a company. He takes a nominal salary - say $150k for this example - and the rest in equity in the company. Let’s say he owns 20%. He raises VC capital in 2026 from someone that invests $100M into the company and values the company at $6B. This means his 20% is “worth” $1.2B. I put it in quotes because he can’t actually sell. He has a paper value that putatively says he’s a billionaire. But he actually lives on $150k because that is what his income is. Just because someone decides to make…

In Silicon Valley, a critical lesson of leadership is that throwing money at a problem doesn’t solve it. Ingenuity and resolve does. Take Californias K-12 education as an example that proves this point yet again. If you’ve lived in California, since 2020, you’ve collectively paid in $653.3 Billion through your income taxes to educate your kids. The results? Terrible. “The latest 2024 NAEP results (released in January 2025) and the most recent per-pupil spending data reveal a significant "efficiency gap" in California’s education system. California currently ranks as one of the highest-spending states in the country, yet its student perfo…

California was supposed to be the place where you “lived and let live”. How, instead then, did it become the most oppressive, over regulated and overtaxed place in America while also being the worst on crime, housing and education of our kids?