All-In PodcastE109: 2022 Bestie Awards Live from Twitter HQ
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
All-In Bestie Awards: Politics, Markets, Twitter Drama, and Elon Drop-By
- The episode is the All-In Podcast’s 2022 “Bestie Awards,” where the hosts recap the year’s biggest political and business winners, losers, surprises, trends, and meltdowns. They debate figures like Ron DeSantis, Xi Jinping, Zelenskyy, Jerome Powell, Liz Truss, the progressive left, and the GOP while dissecting the Ukraine war, Roe v. Wade, and MAGA’s fading power.
- On the business side, they focus on regime change in markets driven by rising interest rates, the outperformance of energy and defense stocks, the implosion of crypto and FTX, and the existential threat ChatGPT/OpenAI poses to Google’s search model. Big Tech’s drawdown, Meta’s metaverse overreach, Disney’s CEO drama, and the resilience of firms like Lockheed, Occidental, and Stripe all feature heavily.
- Elon Musk makes a lengthy surprise appearance from Twitter HQ, explaining his hyper-iterative product philosophy, radical cost-cutting, views on free speech vs. reach, bot reduction, and the Twitter Files’ revelations about government-tech collusion. The hosts and guest journalist Michael Shellenberger then expand on how the FBI and security agencies pressured platforms and media around ‘misinformation’ and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
- They close with personal ‘best of 2022’ picks in science (fusion, CRISPR cancer cure), media (White Lotus, House of the Dragon, Tár), and investing (Druckenmiller, Buffett, quant hedge ‘pod shops’), plus tongue‑in‑cheek awards for worst trends, most loathsome companies, and self‑immolation, with FTX/SBF and political overreach drawing particular scorn.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasThe ‘red wave’ fizzled, reshaping perceptions of U.S. political power and MAGA influence.
Despite economic discontent, Republicans underperformed in the midterms, with hosts crediting poor candidate quality, election denialism, Roe v. Wade backlash, and Donald Trump’s toxicity; DeSantis emerges as a clear GOP winner while MAGA and the progressive left both lose ground.
2022 marked a decisive macro regime shift driven by aggressive Fed tightening.
Rising risk‑free rates and the end of easy money forced a wholesale repricing of growth assets, punishing tech, crypto, and Tiger-style momentum funds while rewarding energy, defense, and sophisticated macro/‘pod shop’ hedge funds that correctly modeled risk and cost of capital.
Defense and energy companies quietly became standout business winners in a terrible market.
Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and oil & gas majors significantly outperformed the S&P amid the Ukraine war and supply constraints, underscoring how geopolitical instability and underinvestment in traditional energy can drive outsized returns even as broader markets fall.
ChatGPT/OpenAI may be an existential threat to Google’s ad‑driven search paradigm.
The hosts argue that answer‑first conversational AI undermines Google’s incentive to send users through ad-laden result pages, positioning OpenAI–Microsoft as a genuine challenger to a franchise many thought unassailable and sparking a wave of ‘narrator economy’ and generative‑AI startup ideas.
Crypto’s 2022 crash, epitomized by FTX, exposed massive governance and diligence failures.
FTX’s collapse and subsequent fraud revelations are framed not just as a crypto failure but as an indictment of investors, media, and regulators who ignored basic oversight and governance in favor of hype, with the hosts expecting more SEC enforcement against token ‘grifts.’
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThere is no single person in the world that is now as powerful as Xi Jinping.
— Chamath Palihapitiya
War is terrible, but it appears to be good business.
— David Sacks (on defense stocks and Ukraine)
If you understood the capital asset pricing model going into 2022, it would have been difficult for you to not make money.
— Chamath Palihapitiya
Almost every conspiracy theory that people had about Twitter turned out to be true.
— Elon Musk
The rate at which you can make decisions is a far greater predictor of success than the accuracy of the decisions you do make.
— David Friedberg
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