Chamath Palihapitiya

Two obvious takeaways: 1. The US Federal Government needs to stop underwriting college loans immediately. 2. Too many people are entering into a financial quagmire they will never pay off to get a degree that increasingly has little to no value.

“Move Fast and Break Things” vs “Move Slow and Forge Things” “Move fast and break things” was a something we invented at Facebook to get a bunch of entitled Ivy League kids to grind for us. It worked. Then, all of Silicon Valley mistakenly confused correlation with causation and adopted this mode for themselves without questioning it. In a world of AI, those that continue to pray at this altar will be the first to lose their jobs. Moving fast and breaking things is exactly the low hanging fruit that AI will automate. Learn to move slow and forge things. Make things that can stand the test of time. Learn discipline and process and you’ll …

What I read this week... 1) @Google announced Gemini 3 on November 18, 2025, calling it its “most intelligent” model to date and rolling it out day-one across Search (AI Mode), the Gemini app, AI Studio, Vertex AI, and a new agentic dev environment called Google Antigravity. It has topped the charts on: - LMArena Leaderboard with a breakthrough score right above Grok’s 4.1 release - Humanity’s Last Exam with PhD-level reasoning - GPQA Diamond (for scientific knowledge) And leading many more benchmarks, showing that scaling laws are still intact. The key insight is that multiple sources, including model cards and press coverage, confirm th…

New pod!

Deep Dive: A Primer on Mag7 (Part 7 - Microsoft) Microsoft has spent fifty years building platforms that sit underneath the modern economy. BASIC made early computers usable. MS DOS and Windows standardized personal computing. Office became the core productivity layer for organizations. Today, Azure is the platform that ties the company together and anchors its role in the AI era. Microsoft’s strategy has been consistent: build a platform, attract developers and enterprises to it, and reinvest the resulting cash flow into infrastructure that strengthens the platform. Azure is the latest and most important expression of that approach. Azu…

When I was on JRE last September, the first scaled use case I mentioned for AI, autonomy and robotics was in policing. See below that it is now beginning to scale. More generally, the most powerful positive human consequence of AI, autonomy and robotics will be the sheer number of human lives saved by preventing all manner of tragedies: Drunk driving fatalities General driving fatalities Policing fatalities Intervention and interdiction Expect more AI, autonomy and robots to appear in our daily lives as we seek to eliminate preventable and negative long tail outcomes.

You can have all the money in the world, but if you don't have your health, you're broke. I came from an unhealthy background (overweight, family history of heart disease and diabetes) and over the past decade have reduced my "health system" to a few critical things that works incredibly well for me: Everyday: Exercise/mobility, eat as well as I can Every 2 years: Full body MRI Every 5 years: Contrast CT of my heart We documented my protocol and followed me around for a week while I ran it.

Wow.

What I read this week... 1) Record Government Shutdown Ends The U.S. federal government reopened after a 43-day shutdown when the Senate passed a funding bill by a 60-40 vote on November 10, and the Donald Trump administration signed it into law on November 12. The deal took the Senate 15 tries to obtain the 60-vote threshold, finally ending the longest shutdown in US history (43 days). The legislation restores funding for most agencies through January 30, 2026. Roughly 1.4 million federal workers have gone without pay for six weeks, while half of them were required to keep working without paychecks. The new continuing resolution includes…

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Every few months, the market hands out free money…just have to listen, open your window and stick your basket out.

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We have too many colleges graduating kids into suffocating student debt and worthless degrees. We’ve created an artificial societal culture that celebrates a “BA” or “Masters” or “PhD” without asking the critical question: “In what?” For America to thrive, there should be fewer colleges and college grads for the sake of “graduating from college” and more people who are economically thriving because they make good decisions upon graduating from high school. This can happen by having the awareness, as a society, to celebrate the mechanic, nurse or electrician as much or more than the “Masters” because we have the brains to realize: Mechani…

Current valuation is less than $4.3B while all of their fundraising rounds since 2019 were well above this. I don’t know the business so am not opining on its quality (although the metrics below are good), but am observing that yet again, 2020-2024 funding rounds in venture were a total aberration and are 50% off from their true mark. The valuation headwinds will only grow as AI scales and many companies have no clear strategy other than to claim they are “AI enabled” vs clean sheet designs that will disrupt their existing traction. More pain coming if you are long traditional software in venture… Series D
Date: June 2019
Amount Raised: $…

100% agree. It’s all about solar. Everything else is a rounding error.

I got this slightly wrong in the re-telling. Bill's idea is for schools to take the first 10-20% loss of the loan amount. Anyways, its a great idea. I hope it sees the light of day.

New pod!

Shutdown over, now back to work!

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“The days are long but the years are short.” After 13 years of building, operating and hardening our platform of autonomous maritime drones, our team announced a critical partnership with Lockheed Martin a few weeks ago. Through this relationship, we will now equip our drones with Lockheed’s advanced air-to-ground missile launchers. What does this mean? This is the true beginning of an autonomous, scalable 24/7/365 naval platform to defend, protect and do reconnaissance on behalf of America anywhere in the world. Congrats and thanks to John Donavan who was critical and to our founder/CEO Richard Jenkins. It’s important to see America adv…

This was beyond reckless and irresponsible. They should play this “side by side” clip on BBC so people can see both versions and judge for themselves.

What I Read This Week... 1) Elon Musk’s $1 Trillion Pay Package Tesla shareholders have approved the largest executive compensation package in corporate history: $1 trillion in stock options for Elon Musk, contingent upon hitting a series of operational and market-cap milestones. The plan, first proposed earlier this year and modified after legal challenges to Elon’s prior 2018 pay deal, ties Elon’s earnings to twelve escalating performance tranches. Each tranche vests only if Tesla meets both revenue and market-capitalization targets, culminating in a total company valuation of $8.5 trillion (Tesla's current market cap today sits at ~$1.…

Pod up!!

Worth reading the whole thing, but this is the most important thing: “If Elon gets paid 1 trillion dollars, I will be a multimillionaire.” It’s important who you hitch your wagon to. Socialists have proven to be shitty wagons. Modern Thomas Edison is a great wagon.

Deep Dive: China’s Global Strategy and Power Balance Until recently, the modern United States had never faced a true systemic competitor. Neither the Soviet Union nor the combined economies of Germany, Italy, and Japan during WW2 ever accounted for more than 60% of U.S. GDP. When the Soviet Union began to disintegrate in 1990, Charles Krauthammer declared America the world's only superpower, writing: "the immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar." In retrospect, 2001 marked a turning point. The U.S. supported China's admission into the WTO, hoping it would open China's market and moderate its authoritarian regime. T…

Figure and Optimus are making astounding progress.

Many of the key pillars of the Mamdani campaign are not possible as mayor. They need the state legislature and the Governor. You can’t implement free buses, for example, at the city level. It is controlled by the MTA which is a state level organization. Nor can you implement a wealth tax. But none of these facts mattered on election night nor were they duly interrogated by anyone: media, opponents, voters. It’s like getting elected as a Governor promising to renegotiate NATO. The claim lacks basic authority but if everyone ignores it then…you get what you get: a perfect storm of unseriousness meeting vibes meeting discontent. I also think…

Grok’s answer is a good one and worth considering.

Why are batteries a national security issue? It is THE energy source for critical applications today and, even more importantly, tomorrow: Cars Data Center Batteries (ESS) Military and defense drones Robots If we are to be a resilient nation that is in control of our own destiny in all political/economic/military weather conditions, we will need domestic battery companies to do the following three things: 1. Make Cathode Active Material (CAM) domestically. 2. Make cells domestically that contain domestic CAM. 3. Make packs domestically from cells (2). It can be done and is happening. I cofounded @Mitra_Chem five years ago to help solve…

Here is Peter Thiel’s email to Zuck and Andreessen in Jan-2020 predicting socialism. Tl;dr too much student debt and lack of affordable housing keeps young people with negative capital for too long. And without a stake in the capitalist system, they will turn against it. https://t.co/BOKgwJ2cV0