E109: 2022 Bestie Awards Live from Twitter HQ
Jason Calacanis (host), David Friedberg (host), David Sacks (host), Chamath Palihapitiya (host), Narrator, Narrator, Elon Musk (guest), Likely Twitter employee/colleague (unidentified) (guest), Vivek Ramaswamy (guest)
In this episode of All-In Podcast, featuring Jason Calacanis and David Friedberg, E109: 2022 Bestie Awards Live from Twitter HQ explores 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.
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.
Key Takeaways
The ‘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. ...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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Elon Musk is using Twitter as a case study in extreme cost-cutting and fast product iteration.
He slashed headcount and contractors, instituted an aggressive ‘bias to action’ culture (‘swing for the fences, roll back 10%’), and rapidly shipped features like view counts and organizational affiliations, which the hosts say is now influencing how other tech CEOs think about layoffs and execution.
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The Twitter Files highlight a troubling pattern of state–platform–media coordination.
Documents reviewed by journalists like Shellenberger suggest FBI and other agencies both over‑inflated foreign influence threats and directly flagged content and accounts—sometimes satire—for moderation, raising concerns about censorship, lack of warrants, and a ‘media-controlled simulation’ of reality.
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Notable Quotes
“There 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
Questions Answered in This Episode
How convincing is the case that DeSantis, Xi, or Zelenskyy was the true ‘biggest political winner’ of 2022, and what metrics should define that judgment?
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. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
To what extent did investors and founders fail to internalize the macro regime shift early enough, and how should capital allocation frameworks change going forward?
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. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Does ChatGPT fundamentally threaten Google’s business model, or will Google adapt by absorbing or out-innovating conversational AI within its own ecosystem?
Elon Musk makes a lengthy surprise appearance from Twitter HQ, explaining his hyper-iterative product philosophy, radical cost-cutting, views on free speech vs. ...
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What guardrails, if any, should exist to prevent or regulate coordination between intelligence agencies, tech platforms, and legacy media on moderation and ‘misinformation’?
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.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Has Elon Musk’s approach at Twitter—radical layoffs, product sprints, and a more absolutist free speech stance—created a repeatable playbook for struggling tech companies, or is it uniquely dependent on his personality and risk tolerance?
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Transcript Preview
Hey, everybody. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. It is the end of 2022 and once again, we're doing our Bestie Awards. Yes, at the end of the year, we do our Bestie Awards. This is where we give awards to the biggest winners, losers, and many other categories that you love. With me again, of course, the Sultan of Science, deep in his Kurosawa, uh, vibes. How are you doing, Sultan?
It was great to see you guys for dinner last night. Sacks, we missed you. That was a lot of fun. We all got together twice this week for dinner, uh, while we were on vacation.
Mm-hmm.
And, uh, during our dinner, we took a vote, and Sacks, you are now the director of the All-In Summit. Congratulations.
Yes, congratulations. Yes, the grift is on.
Good. My first act is to veto it. (laughs)
(laughs)
Okay. There you go. Sorry to the fans. Also with us, of course, is-
(laughs) .
... the dictator himself, Chamath Palihapitiya, deep in his turtleneck phase and his vibes. Tell us about, uh, your winter vibes, Bestie.
I mean, I can't believe that we all took over Lake Tahoe for a week together. It's cool. It's been a lot of fun. I gotta say, Sacks, you'll be surprised. J-Cal has the life hack of life hacks here. He's figured out how to basically get everything pre-wired. All the restaurants, all the reservations. It's been great. I've loved it.
We've had a wonderful time.
He books an eight-person table for every night, and he does it, what, months in advance? So every night you got an option.
About two weeks out, every-
Yeah.
... two weeks out, I, I get a table of eight, uh, for five, six nights in a row, and, and then I invite my besties out.
And oddly, it turned out there was only (laughs) one person from J-Cal's side, just himself. (laughs)
Yes, just himself.
So there was always a room for the rest of us to show up. (laughs)
We had a wonderful time. Uh, I picked up the check for the nachos and Chamath brought $6,000 worth of wine.
(laughs) I brought my own also to the restaurant yesterday so we could open the wine properly.
It was wonderful. We've had a wonderful time. And of course, with us, looks like he had to work over the Christmas break, uh, Sacks, how are you doing, brother? You working today?
I'm good. I'm just hanging out somewhere.
Wow, come on. You can be honest. You're at the Twitter HQ. I recognize that incredible architecture and design. They spent so much money on that office space.
Beautiful office.
That's definitely beautiful office.
They've got their own bespoke coffee shop here called The Perch.
We're the people that work there.
(laughs)
(laughs)
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