All-In PodcastLA's Wildfire Disaster, Zuck Flips on Free Speech, Why Trump Wants Greenland
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,138 words- 0:00 – 9:16
The Besties welcome Cyan Banister!
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
I just got a haircut with a, with a new person. She was like... I'm like, "Do what you want." This is what she did.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay. Well, let me know who she is. Chamath and I will go beat her up and get, um, get your money back. Did she feather your bangs and blow your hair up? She did. She gave you a blow, didn't she?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's starting already, okay.
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs) No, but that's a blow-dryer. Just, yes, right? She blow-dried your hair?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
At the end she gave me a little...
- JCJason Calacanis
Yeah, that's not sustainable, so you can't tell what the quality of the haircut's like because you're never gonna do that again.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You don't have the skill. I've never blow-dried my hair in my life.
- JCJason Calacanis
No, I understand that. Then this is why, because if you get the blow and it looks good in the blow-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Just say blowout, please. (laughs) Just say blowout. It's a full word.
- JCJason Calacanis
Why? What are we, six? Just grow up you (beep) -
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
The way you're saying it, you're saying it to provoke a reaction. Come on.
- JCJason Calacanis
No, I'm not.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) You're such a liar.
- JCJason Calacanis
I love it.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Tell us about what your rules for blows are.
- JCJason Calacanis
What I'm saying is if you get a haircut and, and you get a blow, it's very hard for you to know...
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
No, but I'm serious. It's very hard for you to know what it's gonna look like the next day when you take a shower and when you don't, you know, blow it.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's true. Oh, you're saying the self-blow can't match the stylist blow?
- JCJason Calacanis
It's just important when you get a haircut with a new stylist or a hairdresser or a barber-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Actually, yes.
- JCJason Calacanis
... you cannot let them blow you.
- CBCyan Banister
He's not happy with the ending.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Got it. It was an unhappy ending, because when you blow yourself, Chamath, which people have accused you of blowing yourself on this very program, when you blow yourself, it's not gonna come out the way it did. It won't be as fabulous.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Every time I've blown myself it's been perfect.
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- CBCyan Banister
(laughs)
- DFDavid Friedberg
We'll let your winner slide.
- JCJason Calacanis
Rain Man, David Sacks.
- 9:16 – 36:51
Reacting to the devastating wildfires in LA: broken incentives, leadership failures, lessons learned
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
All right, let's get to more important things. There is an unbelievable tragedy occurring in Los Angeles, uh, as we're speaking, devastating wildfires. Basically have formed a ring around LA. The most destructive of which has been the Palisades fire, and which has stretched into Malibu, obviously. And 15,000 acres or so have been burned in that area. Thousands of homes, maybe 2,000 homes. Here are some images. They're just devastating. And we have a lot of friends in this area, and the area you're seeing on fire, if you don't know the topography of Los Angeles, is north of Santa Monica, you have Palisades and then Malibu, and obviously east of the 405, you have things that you've heard of, like Bel Air and Brentwood. This area is part of a mountain area called the Santa Monica Mountains, and they get very dry, and there's a phenomenon, which we'll get into, called the Santa Ana winds that blow really, really strongly, and a perfect storm has happened, where thousands of homes and, tragically, five lives, and I'm sure there will be more, unfortunately, have burned to down. This video of driving down PCH, if you've ever driven PCH, the Pacific Coast Highway, these are 10, 20, $50 million homes that are literally on the Pacific Ocean. The most coveted homes in Los Angeles are not Bel Air and Brentwood. You might think that, 'cause you hear them on TV, but really, if you were an incredibly successful person, you would aspire to live in the Pacific Palisades, just west of Brentwood and just south of Malibu, or Malibu. Many celebrities live there, many executives, et cetera. And these homes are gone. Thousands and thousands of homes. It's, this has turned into the ultimate Rorschach test on social media, where people are projecting into this tragedy, which tragically occurs every year to varying degrees, and maybe every 20, 30 years, it's an acute situation. We'll get into that in a moment. But looking at this absolute, just devastating loss of property and lives, the loss could've been a lot worse. Freeberg, from a scientific perspective, maybe we'll start there, when you look at these wildfires, extreme weather, global warming, and you look at the situation, is that where your mind goes? Or in this Rorschach test of how you feel about these kind of tragedies and how you interpret it, do you go somewhere else? The incompetence of California's government, DEI, Ukraine, I mean, everybody is superimposing on this natural disaster whatever their pet issues are. Where do you come to when you look at this?
- CBCyan Banister
I don't think that those are exclusive.
- DSDavid Sacks
Okay.
- CBCyan Banister
I think that you can have had both incompetent planning and execution by leadership as well as have kind of a uncontrollable circumstances that management and planning weren't necessarily gonna solve, and I'll, I'll kind of talk about a couple of these points real quick. First of all, like, we talked about when the hurricane hit a couple of months ago, remember? And as you guys know, I have an office, uh, or facility out in Nashville, so we were exposed to the flooding circumstances, and we talked about the, the frequency of, of that sort of an event having been such a rare occurrence becoming more common. Similarly, we're seeing more frequent high, high wind events in California, flooding events in California, and extremely hot events in California. If you look at this link I sent out, Nick, in terms of the total precipitation over this current what's called rain season, the Southern California region is basically at a s- you know, call it 0% of normal. So, this is Southern California. You can see that third column. That's the percent of normal rainfall that has been experienced. There's been zero rain in these regions. So everything is primed to be very dry, and then you get these Santa Ana winds, 100 mile an hour winds. No matter how much underbrush you clear out, no matter how many trees you remove, if there are some embers in the air, there's a 100 mile an hour wind, that is gonna create a fire hurricane and a lot of homes are gonna get caught on fire. So it's very hard to kind of just pin the blame solely on not doing underbrush clearing, not doing removal of trees. Those should've happened. They didn't happen. That was wrong. That was bad policy, but it doesn't excuse the fact that there's a natural event that happened here that seems to be occurring with greater frequency. The thing I'll kind of pivot to if, if we wanna get there now, maybe we'll talk about that in a minute, is kind of the economic and the policy issues with respect to the Department of Insurance because I think that-
- DSDavid Sacks
Okay, let's get to that after we go through maybe-
- CBCyan Banister
Okay, yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
... a little bit of the quick reactions here.
- CBCyan Banister
I think that's where, that's where there's gonna be real pain and devastation, and that's the biggest economic consequence is the role that insurance has played in all this stuff, which we'll get to in a minute, yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
Okay, so Chamath, I think table stakes, we all agree global warming, extreme weather, depending on what degree you believe in it, there's play some factor here, and this is something that has reoccurred over and over again in this specific re- region. But on social media, we're seeing a lot of other interpretations of this event. Maybe your thoughts on some of the other interpretations, and then where, when you look at it, what do you start to think about preventing this in the future or maybe who's responsible? What's your general take on what we've seen in the last week? I mean, I'm not very sympathetic to the there were 100 mile an hour winds, not because it's not true, but there's been enough modeling that we know that these kinds of outlier weather events are happening in greater and greater frequency. Nick, maybe you can find this and just put it up here, but remember that crazy apocalyptic video of that exact same part of Southern California in 2018 burning to the ground? Can we just look at that, all of us collectively? Because that was six years ago. This is not like it was a distant memory from 100 years ago. We knew in 2018 that these types of-
- CBCyan Banister
Oh, the Sepulveda, the Sepulveda Pass. Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
So this i- this idea that we were just lollygagging around and got caught off guard by 100 mile an hour winds to me is completely not an acceptable answer. We knew in 2018 that these things could happen. We knew across the rest of the United States that these outlier weather events were happening in greater and greater frequency. If you weren't sure, you saw most of the insurance companies try to dump Southern California homes' fire coverage three months before this event happened. So all this data was in the realm of the knowable. And then when you double-click and you get into a little bit more of the details, there's a level of incompetence bordering on criminal negligence here that we need to get to the bottom of. So I'll just give you a couple of facts. In the 1950s, the average amount of timber, so wood that was harvested in California, was around six billion board feet per year. In the intervening 70 years, that shrank to about 1.5 billion board feet. And so you'd say, "Okay, well, that's a 75% reduction. We must be making a very explicit stance on conservation." It turns out that that's not entirely true because what it left behind was nearly 163 million dead trees. Dead, like gone. And so you would say, "Well, those things should've been removed." And the problem is that then there's this California Environmental Quality Act, CEQA, hopefully I'm pronouncing this right, and a whole bunch of these other regulatory policies that limited the ability of local governments and fire management to clear these dead trees and vegetation, and I think that that's a really big deal. And when you double-click on that, here's where you find the real head-scratcher, okay? Multiple bills, AB 2330, AB 1951, AB 2639, all rejected by the Democrat-controlled legislator, or worse, vetoed by Governor Newsom, that would've exempted these wildfire prevention projects from CEQA and other permitting issues. Then there were other bills to try to minimize the risk of fires by burying power lines underground, SB 103 as an example. Went nowhere, didn't even get to the governor's desk. So I'm just a little bit at a loss to explain these two bodies of data. One is...... everybody can see that these events are happening. Southern California lived through this exact type of moment just six years ago. All the bills that are meant to prevent this are blocked or vetoed. This is the ultimate expression of negligence and incompetence.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Okay. Syanne, you've, uh, heard, uh, Chamath and, and Friedberg's take here.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Some amount of incompetence, some amount of, "Hey, this keeps occurring and there might be some global warming that is contributing to it." Wh- what are you taking away-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Sure. Sure. I think-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... from this situation?
- DFDavid Friedberg
... I, I, I agree with Friedberg and Chamath. You know, it's, it's, uh, it's a lot of everything, but I also think that to add to the prevention part, uh, you know, other than clearing out underbrush and, and trees and things like that, you know, we, we don't build things in the state of California in a way that houses should be built when you know that there are fires like this. So for example, we have more wooden roofs than we really should have. We should really evaluate our materials that we're building things out of. But we also have, you know ... Down in El Segundo, you know, this is a company that I invested in, Rainmaker. We have the ability now to cloud seed and do preventative measures to actually make a region have more water, and I don't understand why we're not looking into things like this that could have prevented ... You know, we knew that this storm was coming. We knew that these winds were coming. You know, Southern California shut power down. I have a farm down there. We still don't have power because they knew that, uh, m- most of these fires are started by PG&E or downed power lines, and so they proactively shut everybody down and were still running on generators. And if you notice, there's no fires down there. But they-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Right.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... also have 100 mile per hour winds.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
And you're not seeing it, and there's plenty of mountain ranges and dryness there, you know? Avocado farms are basically just sitting fuel. So I do think it's a combination of all of those things. Incompetence is definitely one of them.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah. And I, I actually lived right next door to this area for a long time, in Brentwood, and to your point about roofs, it seems silly. And a lot of these fire-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Very silly.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... prevention things can seem silly when you first mention them, which Trump looked ... Let's face it, the way he says things sometimes is very colorful. And when he said, "Listen, you're not raking like people in," wherever he said it, "Scandinavia, Finland, are raking the forest," and he was absolutely 100% correct on that. Maybe it sounded bombastic or silly when he, the way he said it, but the truth is, in, uh, Tahoe, where we just were over the holidays, people are clearing underbrush. When I lived-
- DFDavid Friedberg
Mm-hmm.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... in Los Angeles, people who lived in the Hollywood Hills would get a fine if they didn't clear it. But there are mountain ranges that nobody owns. And when you showed that Sepulveda Pass, that's the 405 going past the Getty Center. That area has got to be cleaned by the, the city and the government and maybe they weren't doing it as much.
- DSDavid Sacks
Look at this. This is apocalyptic.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah. So, I, I know this pass very well because I would drive through it-
- DSDavid Sacks
Jason, what, what did California learn from this? What did-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- 36:51 – 59:44
Insurance issues, rebuilding headwinds, reclaiming the government
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
state."
- CBCyan Banister
I think we should talk about insurance. This is a great segue.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, yeah, it's a perfect segue.
- CBCyan Banister
Yeah.
This is the key point I wanted to say about insurance. So-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Going forward, yeah.
- CBCyan Banister
... all of this property that sits in climate-sensitive zones, or weather-sensitive zones, whatever you want to call it, like we've talked about on the coast of California, of Florida, in hurricane centers, in tornado centers, where the frequency of loss is going up, they're priced as if the frequency of loss is what it used to be, which is like, let's say you buy a home for a million dollars and the probability of your home getting wiped out by a natural disaster is a one-in-a-thousand-year kind of situation. So you have a one-in-a-thousand chance of your home getting wiped out each year, so your price for insurance on that million-dollar home should be about 10,000 bucks a year, one-tenth of 1%. So, 10,000 bucks a year for a million-dollar home sounds expensive, but it is what you have to pay for homeowner's insurance. But now let's say that the probability shifts to one in 20 years. So now you've got a one-in-20-year probability of your home getting wiped out. Are you going to pay 5% of your home value? No. And, uh, if you have a $10 million home, are you gonna pay $500,000 a year for property insurance? No. Now, what's happened is, the insurance companies have these models. They're called CAT models or catastrophe models. It used to be two companies. One was called RMS, the other one was called Equicat. And I used to work in this business, so I know it pretty well. And then all the, the companies started building in-house models and now there's startups that make models. And these models have shown that there are increased probability of complete loss in a region because of the increased probability of these crazy weather events happening, and so the price of insurance should go up. Here's the problem. There are 50 state insurance commissioners in the US. In order to sell insurance in a state, you have to have the insurance carrier and the policy approved in that state, and the states determine what rate or what price you can charge for insurance. So the state insurance commissions have a couple of goals. Number one is to keep all the insurance companies solvent, so they want to, you know, check the financials of all the insurance companies, make sure they're not writing too many policies that they won't be able to pay out. The second thing is they want to make sure that the insurance companies aren't ripping consumers off, so they have control over the rates and they don't want the rates to go up too much in any given year, so they're controlling rates and keeping them down. And then the third is they're supposed to make sure that consumers have access to insurance. And the third is a very hard thing to do. If you're trying to keep companies solvent, so you can't write too many policies, and you're saying, "Hey, you can't raise prices," and meanwhile the probability of loss has gone up, so the insurance carriers are like, "What choice do I have?" So earlier this year, State Farm pulled out of Palisades. They stopped writing fire insurance in Palisades. They canceled 1,600 policies in the exact neighborhood that just burnt down.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
In the... What about the timing of that, Freeburg? That was three months before or six months before this happened?
- CBCyan Banister
Well, but by the way, it's, it's, it's not just that.
I think it was, like, six months before, yeah.
But, yeah, but it's not... It, it, it seems crazy, but as you know, in Tahoe, a lot of the policies have been canceled.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yes.
- CBCyan Banister
In, um, in-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So it's just crazy timing. It's, it's, it's a crazy coincidence, yeah.
- CBCyan Banister
Yeah. And, and, and remember, in wine country, we had a lot of wipeouts. All of Santa Rosa was burnt out a few years ago. You guys remember that.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- CBCyan Banister
And so they started pulling out of there. So a lot of the carriers are generally pulling out of California, because when they go up to the DOI and they're like, "Hey, we need to raise rates by... We need to double the price of insurance, we need to triple the price of insurance," this is now a one-in-20-year event, the Department of Insurance says, "No, no, no, we're not gonna let you charge that much to consumers." And then the carrier's like, "Okay, we got no choice," and they exit the market. Uh, here, you can see right here, 1,600 policies canceled. This has been a big driver, is the Departments of Insurance have made it very difficult to find this free market outcome. But at the end of the day, one of three parties are gonna end up eating the cost of the change in probability of loss that has occurred. It's either the homeowner, because they're gonna end up losing the value of their home in a loss, or they're gonna end up needing to write down the value of their home when they sell it to someone who will take on that risk, which means the price has to come down. Or number two is the insurers, and there's not enough insurance capital out there to cover all these losses, so all these insurers would go bankrupt. Or the third is the taxpayer. One of those three is gonna end up eating the loss that's about to happen.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No, you know the answer.
- CBCyan Banister
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
You know the answer.
- CBCyan Banister
The taxpayer.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Taxpayer. Yeah, somebody's gonna lobby. Somebody. But hey, we're sitting here, Chamath, in the age of Doge and saying, "Hey, let's make the government smaller." In fact, Dave, you and I were talking about, at some point, Gangs of New York and the fire departments being, you know-
- CBCyan Banister
Oh, yeah, totally. Great thing. We talked about that, yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... like, crazy timing that we were talking about that two or three weeks before this happened, but-
- CBCyan Banister
Right.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... you know, when we look at making government smaller, well, that means that these kind of situations would put citizens more on their own. So let's counterbalance what you think, Chamath, about who should be responsible. We all espouse, I think, free market ideology on this program and as executives and in what we do every day. Should the people who own these homes, going forward, who decide to rebuild them here, have to pay, you know, 5, 10% of their value of home every year should their home prices collapse because it's too hard to build there? And should the free market take over this risk, or should it constantly be put on the other 329 million Americans who are gonna have to bear the brunt of what happens to the million people affected in this area?
- CBCyan Banister
Well, I mean, "should" is a very strong word. The cap on the insurance reimbursement is about three million, is my understanding. David, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but I think, I think that's right. The houses in the Palisades are anywhere from, call it one million on the low end to maybe 40 or 50 million on the high end. The average is four and a half in that particular area.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, I was about to say, the, there's, there's nothing for a million these days, yeah. It's got to be three or four minimum now.
- CBCyan Banister
Right, but the median is probably more instructive, which is probably seven or eight million, so-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yes.
- 59:44 – 1:20:19
Zuck goes full free speech, fires third-party fact-checkers, opts for Community Notes model
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Let's move on to our next topic here. Zuck just fired Meta's third party fact-checkers and he is going to embrace the community notes model from Twitter/X, which predates Elon's ownership of the platform and is an open source project for those folks who don't know. On Tuesday, made the, he made the announcement on a, in an Instagram video. He published a blog with a bunch of details and he made the signal that he was gonna move the Trust and Safety Team out of California, which he feels maybe was too, uh, far to the left, as we were just discussing in the previous story, uh, and move it to the great state of Texas. And here's a quote from his comments. "In recent years, we've developed increasingly complex systems to manage content across our platforms, partly in response to societal and political pressures to moderate content. This approach has gone too far." If you remember, back in August, Zuck sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee explaining how the FBI and Biden administration had pressured Facebook into censoring posts about COVID and Hunter Biden. You'll also remember...... that Zuckerberg has over three billion members to his platform and had no problem banning Trump from the platform after January 6th. A lot to talk about in this topic, Cyan. What's your general take of Zuck going MAGA?
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
How do you interpret his-
- DFDavid Friedberg
I actually think he always-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... change of heart?
- DFDavid Friedberg
I actually think deep down inside he always has been. You know, I-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Ah.
- DFDavid Friedberg
... I go back to the beginning days of Facebook and when there was social networks that were competing, which back at the time was MySpace, the only political party you could be was Republican or Democrat. And then along came Facebook and he added this third option called Libertarian. And I, if, I would like to go to the Wayback Machine at some point and find his profile, because his profile said he was a libertarian. So when he started Facebook, you know, that, that's where he leaned. So I think he's always been a free speech person. I think he's always... This has been deep in his heart. I think what happened was he had enormous success, they grew very large, and he had to become neutral. Or he thought he did. And so I think what we're seeing with Zuck right now with his change in his, um, you know, even how he appears with a gold chain and how he's dressing and everything that he's doing is him going back to his roots to be more authentic. 'Cause I think he hasn't been authentic for a long time and, and that was a big critique that people had of him, you know? They were just like, "When he talks he's like a robot." And I think what we're seeing is him coming out of his shell and I don't know if fighting helped it or what helped it, but, you know, I- I do think it's the best thing to do and all the platforms need to do it and should embrace it. And, uh, it can be gamed though. Community notes can be gamed. We saw it with, um... I saw a report that, you know, Kamala's campaign or, or, I don't know if they directly work for her or what happened, but they did take over community notes on X and started manipulating them. So you have to be really careful, you know, how you run a community. But in, in general, I'm all for it. I think it's the right move.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
It's but one signal, it's one system for trying to get to the truth. It's not the only one.
- DFDavid Friedberg
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Fact-checking is another one, and having no system is another one. Chamath, you're obviously an alumni, you worked side by side with Zuckerberg in the pivotal years of building the Facebook platform. What's your take on what Cyan said, and what do you attribute Zuckerberg's massive 180 here?
- DSDavid Sacks
I would start by saying I think he's a phenomenal businessman. I mean, I think the, the results speak for itself. But I also think that that is exactly what explains the shift. In many ways, he had to make that shift. I think it's fair to say that in the Obama and Biden administrations, when the winds were blowing towards censorship, they were part of that machinery. And that was the value-maximizing function for Facebook shareholders in that time. Because if you push back against that, it's not clear what would have happened to Facebook in other ways. And so, I think the decision, whether he morally agreed with it or not almost didn't matter. It's the leadership of the country in which I operate is telling me it's gonna go this way, I go that way. Once the Biden and Obama administration sort of went to the wayside, there's a very interesting picture that Donald Trump put in his book, and I just, I sent it to Nick, and I think it sort of explains the last week's events relatively well. So I'll just read it. This is a picture of him sitting in the Oval and it says, "Mark Zuckerberg would come to the Oval Office to see me. He would bring his very nice wife to dinners, be as nice as anyone could be, while always plotting to install shameful lock boxes in a true plot against the President," in J cal all caps.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Okay. Shout out to the President.
- DSDavid Sacks
"He told, he told me that there was nobody like Trump on Facebook, but at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me. We are watching him closely and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison, as will others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election."
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) Okay.
- DSDavid Sacks
Now that's what he put in the book.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
And then he was asked about this quote-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
... at a recent press conference. Nick, do you have the, the link to that?
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
He's colorful, Freyberg. Did you notice? Donald Trump, a little bit colorful.
- DSDavid Sacks
Essentially, Trump was asked about Zuckerberg's move to free speech and he, he was essen- he was asked, you know, "Do you think it was because of your threat?" And he goes, "Yeah, probably."
- D(Donald Trump (clip)
Well, I watched their news conference, and uh, I thought it was a very good news conference. I think they've, honestly, I think they've come a long way, Meta.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Do you think he's re- directly responding to the threats that you have made to him in the past with the elections?
- D(Donald Trump (clip)
Yeah, probably. Yeah, probably.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs) Wow, there it is.
- DSDavid Sacks
But again, the, the, the lens that I would put on this is now the winds are blowing in a different direction, and I do think it's the value-maximizing function. I think Elon didn't make a value-maximizing function. He made a moral decision. He did it when it was unpopular and where the winds were clearly blowing in the opposite direction. Now that those winds have changed and it's clear Trump won in early November, the decisions you make in January are more reflective of the new conditions on the field coming into the inauguration. But I do think it's the smart value-maximizing decision yet again for Facebook shareholders, and I think it begets a broader point. I think the thing is when you see Elon operate, he's a complete outlier in many dimensions, but I think the one dimension where it matters the most is that he acts morally and in the best interests of what he believes humanity benefits from. He's always done it. He was willing to torch $44 billion when he bought Twitter in order to do it. And so he does these things from his own perspective. I don't think there's any other CEO that leads this way, and I don't think they should necessarily. I do think that, you know, Mark's a good person, but his intimate feelings should be known by his wife, his children, his friends, his family.I don't think we as shareholders have any right to know necessarily. Elon is different and I think it creates an expectation that maybe we'll get that from everybody else. But I wouldn't conflate everybody else with him. So I think that this is a smart business decision. It makes a ton of sense and as you can see, (laughs) he was basically told to do it.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
So, he complied.
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Uh, Friedberg, your thoughts on Zuckerberg making this decision. If Kamala Harris had won, would he have released a statement or added Dana White to the board of Facebook? (laughs)
Episode duration: 1:47:18
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