Chamath Palihapitiya: Zuckerberg, Rogan, Musk, and the Incoming “Golden Age” Under Trump

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
2020 was like an incredibly prolific period for me. You know, I'd wake up out of bed, and I was doing deals, and it was like the, I had the world in the palm of my hand, it felt like. I was, you know, moving markets every time I communicated publicly. That was incredibly dizzying, and it had the exact opposite effect on me that it should have. What it should have done, I should have taken a step back and say, hold on, this has nothing to do with me. What is this moment? And the moment would have been, we're at the tail end of zero rates. We had trillions of dollars that the government had basically given to individuals. We had an enormous M2 money supply. And instead, I thought it was me. And then in, you know, 2022, when the war in Ukraine started, the bottom fell out financially. In Silicon Valley, in, frankly, a lot of things that I was working on. It was such a wake up call. And it was the biggest blessing of my life. You know, I never thought I would be in a position to have made that much money. In hindsight, I've never been more blessed than to torch, you know, three or four billion dollars.

**Tucker Carlson** (1:23)
Welcome to The Tucker Carlson Show. We bring you stories that have not been showcased anywhere else. And they're not censored, of course, because we're not gatekeepers. We are honest brokers, here to tell you what we think you need to know and do it honestly. Check out all of our content at tuckercarlson.com. Here's the episode. Do you think, I mean, there's, you know, we're still, it's still ongoing, the war in Ukraine, but it had, you said, an immediate effect on markets. It was like a pivot point.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:53)
You could point, you could put it on a map, March of 2022, I'll never forget it.

**Tucker Carlson** (1:57)
So that war, my opinion, was, you know, welcomed by many in the West. And I wonder if, whatever they said, it was clear they were for it. Do you think that those two things are connected?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:16)
It's not clear to me how connected they are, but the first part of what you said I do agree with, which is that we have silently allowed this insidious war machine to take over large parts of the government.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:27)
Yes.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:28)
And what's so interesting about this is that it actually, I would have said, was more riddled inside the Republican Party.

**Tucker Carlson** (2:35)
Yes.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:36)
But it turns out over these last few years, especially since this MAGA takeover, this hostile takeover that Donald Trump affected, which I think is enormously important in historical context.
But it's more within the Democratic Party now. There are these neocon warmongers that want to connect the dots between people suffering and their own economic opportunity. And I think that that's very scary. And I think that whenever you see that, you have to push against that. Humans should not be at war. We should not be fighting and killing each other. It's just a simple foundational moral principle that I think we all have to live by. You just cannot go there. And you have to push back on every avenue of people that try to take you there.

**Tucker Carlson** (3:26)
I couldn't agree more. Sorry to derail what you were saying. It was very interesting. So, 2020, everything you touch seems to turn a profit. Two years later, everything changes. Why is that good for you, losing all the money? Or all that money?

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:44)
Because I had to take a step back and actually figure out how much of this was actually me and my preparation and my process, or my dark passenger. And here's what I mean by this, because I thought about this a lot. I think we all have a dark passenger. So when you are born, you're kind of like this body that has the capability to do anything. I mean, we talk about this, but we don't say it enough, but the genetic diversity of all humanity is miniscule. So I think I interpret that as the capability of all humanity is pretty incredible. But you have this huge distribution of outcomes. And part of that are the things that happen to you as you're growing up, right? Your lived experience, right? It's the nature part, not the nurture necessarily. And nature gives some people a very dark passenger, right? Some of them will then commit crimes. Some of them will become murderers. Some of them will become drug addicts. Some of them will have this litany of things happen to them. In my case, my lived experience gave me this thing where I have always battled this insecurity that I've just felt I'm basically worthless, you know? You're a kid, you come here, you don't really fit in.