Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, on CNBC this morning, recalled the moment he realized he’d been “lied to” about Donald Trump and marveled at the TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) he sees blocking people from setting up “Trump accounts” to literally get “free money” for their children.
Unbelievable person. Very smart on top of it. Open-minded. Great president.
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You know what’s so funny? People can be lazy and reductive. There are enough people that I hear who are lazy and reductive, and they’re going to end up where they’re supposed to end up—in a little cul-de-sac of their own making.
The reality is that most of us were lied to by the media about President Trump. If you just go back to the source material, you should take away two things.
One, he didn’t say half the things they said he said.
Two, why did these other people just fabricate what they wanted to say so that they could essentially assassinate his character?
I think that second thing is completely unacceptable in America, and there have still been no repercussions, really.
I took the time to learn about it. I admitted on the pod—which has millions of viewers—that I got it totally wrong, because I went and watched Charlottesville.
The first person to call me was President Trump. I got to know him, and when I put the phone down, I called my wife and said, “We got it totally, totally wrong. We were lied to.”
Then I got to know him, and he is fantastic.
SORKIN: Okay, let me ask you a different question. There are many people watching who are going to say—who are on the other side of this… My question to you is… If you were to look at this president and say the things you disagree with him about, or that you—what would they be?
CHAMATH PALIHAPITYA: I thought some of the ways in which some of the cuts were done in certain organizations were probably not ideal. I think it was a little too chaotic in the end. I think DOGE made a ton of sense, but I think there was too much glass broken.
I’ll give you a simple example of this. We just published something this morning. We, meaning 80-90, worked with CMS, and we took a 50-year-old system. This is the core system. It processes half a trillion dollars a year in health care payments for Americans.
Nobody knew the system end to end. They put us and Palantir in a sandbox and said, “Can you help us decode what’s going on?”
In 40 days, we—8090—produced the 500,000 rules that process half a trillion dollars in health care payments so that the team could figure out what’s going on. “Where’s the fraud? Where’s not the fraud?” There are all these things that were possible. It took a little bit longer because it was a little chaotic. That’s an example.
The second example: Maybe the way in which we funded the research budgets of universities. I didn’t particularly like that as much.
But on the broad-based things that he did, I think he has been way more right than wrong.
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The most important thing that got me to see his point of view is that he was completely binary on “there cannot be nuclear war.”
What’s so interesting about Warren Buffett in that last segment—who, by the way, should give all of his money, if he wants to give it away, to Trump accounts. I’m just going to say that. Way better for the man who basically told all of us to buy an index fund.
Here, you can literally give $140 billion in index funds.
If you ask Buffett, Buffett would also say the same thing — he and Munger used to say in their letters: There’s only one risk for humanity—nuclear war.
When you have a madman country that is attempting to destabilize the ability for all of us just to live our lives, I think he was pulled into a situation he didn’t want to be in because he believed strongly in no nuclear weapons.
I support that because I think everybody is forgetting the chaos that that kind of thing can create in the world.
Now, can I just say something else? You’re allowed to disagree with the guy. You’re allowed to maybe dislike the guy.
But as an adult, living human being that is responsible for taking care of your family, you have to get past the TDS. See where he’s right. See where he’s wrong.
But the TDS thing that’s stopping people from making a savings account for their children that can give them free money—it is insane!
