Chamath Palihapitiya

The American Tort Reform Foundation scored LA as its top “judicial hellhole”. LA is the standard bearer for the rest of the state. So you can only imagine how impossible it is to do business anywhere else in California. Once the politicians overpower you and have the law in their favor, they then come for your money and property. If you don’t believe me, wait until you see the ballot propositions unveiled over the next few days/weeks. California politicians and their henchmen have ruined the best place in America.

This is directionally right. The HBM vs SRAM tradeoff in architecture design was clear many years ago. Those that picked HBM are in a queue behind Nvidia and Google. Good luck with that. More broadly, LLM decode patterns favor SRAM. But unlike Gavin, I think this creates a lane for even more heterogenous silicon to support AI models in the future. Not less. I suspect that the two axes that matter are accuracy vs speed and if you can design a focused solution for a specific AI use case, there will be a market.

This is because California’s state and local politicians have completely broken LA and the state in general. It is increasingly untenable to do business: - Too many permits - Too many laws - Too much overreach - Too many delays - Too many taxes It’s killed Hollywood and it’s coming for Silicon Valley next. The difference is that Silicon Valley can move. Hollywood just sat by while the government and party they blindly supported gutted their industry. We won’t.

@c4chaos @FinanceNews_247 @Jason And SpaceX (Swarm)

This idiotic attack, by an inept California politician, on a productive California resident caused him to leave. It should not be lost on anyone that this has already cost California $10’s of billions in lost taxes from Elon and the plethora of well paid employees that followed him out of the state. That number will exceed $200B+ as SpaceX goes public and Tesla grows even more and whatever amazing new companies he starts from now…in Texas. Said differently, had California embraced its innovators and worked with them to find ways to support them, they could count on hundreds of billions in tax revenue. Without him, they’ve gone from surplus…

💀 💀

Slowly, then all at once. https://t.co/ZXGUltKEQU

California will be bankrupt by 2030. If you’re expecting a state pension, it is at risk. If you don’t believe it, check Grok or Gemini and explore how California politicians changed the reporting rules on your pension so they could hide how underwater it is. The middle class citizens of California will soon be asked to pay a huge price to bail out the state. Why them? Because that is where most of the wealth of California resides. It’s easy to single out “billionaires” but there aren’t many of them and they can and will all leave before the bottom falls out. They are leaving in droves already. The mismanagement in California is biblical…

I’ve had the luck of seeing James up close over this past year. He’s a real one. Truly one of the good guys. https://t.co/O8XRxUdJtD

Merry Christmas!! 🎄🎁 🎊 https://t.co/UIU80bFgV7

In a nutshell…

Taken Sep 1, 2016 when @JonathanRoss321 convinced me we could take on the giants, build new silicon and that AI was coming. In typical SV fashion, we didn’t even have a company yet - just a term sheet from me to invest and the three of us. I spent the next month recruiting as many of the TPU team from Google Wisconsin as I could. “Welcome to chips”, I thought. The company, as with all important companies, went through its own trials and tribulations including promoting Jonathan from CTO to CEO and the inevitable falling out and repair of his and my relationship. Anyways, it all happened for a reason. Today we close this almost decade chapte…

2025 is a banger: High economic growth Record high stock market Falling inflation Falling crime There’s more work to do but 2026 already has a lot in the pipeline to build on top of this and help all Americans: Trump tax cuts Energy supercycle Fed rate cuts …

The H1B system has been manipulated by some companies as a form of labor arbitrage to staff up cheap labor - with many abuses well documented. The most negative consequence is the displacement of qualified American workers. That is why this proposed change has the potential to make the H1B visa system much less prone to abuse and a more constructive part of the American labor model.

Imagine what would be found if the federal government (aka taxpayers) slowed transfer payments to California, Minnesota etc until it passed an audit? Is passing an audit an unreasonable ask in return for hundreds of billions of dollars per year?

Treasury Secretary @SecScottBessent and us review the year in the US Economy. Enjoy!

California is proposing a 5% excise tax on “billionaires”. I put it in quotes because it proposes counting everything and the kitchen sink as a dragnet to qualify as many people as possible. But what they are really doing is breaking the seal on a trend that will bankrupt the state. The inevitable outcome will be an exodus of the state’s most talented entrepreneurs who can and will choose to build their companies in less regressive states. All that will be left behind is the middle class. The tax burden, then, will fall to the middle class because after the “richest” choose to leave, the middle class are both (a) the only ones left and (b…

A crazy idea would be a mandate that federal funding for universities can only happen when/if the ideological balance of its professors are within +/- 20%. Any institutions that opts out/takes zero funding from the federal government (ie from taxpayers) can still do whatever they want. Assuming neither side is more wrong nor right, the debate and ultimate quality of students coming from schools with more ideological balance would be meaningfully better I suspect.

“Show me the incentive and I’ll show you the outcome…” https://t.co/QJAbUuo9bc

Taxes in California can make an Uber ride across LA more expensive than an airplane ticket from LA to Miami… https://t.co/FT7SGD2BfP

“Milton Friedman observed that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. But affordability—the prices of particular things—can be very much a local phenomenon.” Case in point, California has the worst affordability crisis in America - entirely created by our state politicians and their ineffectiveness. A case in a few pictures…

How corrupt and broken is California that we are the only state that hasn’t paid this. Stock markets are at record highs, 6 companies with trillion dollar market caps and yet these guys can’t seem to keep their fiscal house in order. Add to this the exodus that will happen because of this potential new 5% excise tax, mark my words: The state is pushing itself closer and closer to bankruptcy. We need fiscal discipline asap.

If a public company went through an audit like this, the report would show a failing grade along with what is called “material weaknesses”. It would be a five alarm fire. The result would be a period to cure these weaknesses. Otherwise, the CEO/CFO would be fired, the company would not be allowed to raise money etc. If you’re a government and you run things this shoddily, it should be illegal to keep raises taxes to increase revenues without first passing an audit that shows you have a good handle on the taxes you already collect from residents.

Buyer beware… .@friedberg just told me she is polling SECOND for President in 2028 amongst Democrats. Her desires are a very slippery slope and the end result is a police state with top down censorship by nameless/faceless people you didn’t elect. Basically, a thought police. This concerns me enough that I will now allocate some of my time in 2026 to ideas that promote unabashed privacy and freedom of speech. I had thought this was a solved problem after @elonmusk bought X but clearly it’s not. While I think an AOC outcome is still unlikely, it’s one election and we could quickly return to a world of indiscriminate de-banking, censorship …

Intent is all you need…

Pod this week!

What??

Wow

Transpilers are very tricky. We started working on this initially at 8090 but had to pivot - it was really hard without access to the core chip. One hyperscaler gave us this access but it still wasn’t enough. Pytorch is v tricky and hyper optimized for Nvidia silicon. We likely would have overcome it but it was impossible to get things moving quickly. I hope Google finds more success.

In a nutshell…