Home Affordability Crisis, Palantir's Advantage, Big Short on AI, H-1B Abuse, Solar Storm Hits Earth

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
All right, everybody. Chamath is here. I'm here. Friedberg's here. But Sacksie Poo, he was up late at the White House. We'll show some pictures later. He couldn't make it today. But let's get started. We wanted to get you a show, and we wanted to get it to you on time for your weekend. Let's start with Michael Burry and his shirts. You guys know, obviously, Michael Burry, he's the capital allocator from The Big Short, and he just deregistered his firm with the SEC. He made a big bet against AI and Palantir. He disclosed the shorts against Palantir a couple of weeks ago. They weren't huge. CNBC apparently reported that the value was like $900 million. Burry says CNBC was wrong that it was just $9 million, but he had a really interesting accusation, and it's related to what we've been talking about here on the show with the build-out of...

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:50)
Can we... I'm sorry, but can we just talk about the complete and total financial illiteracy of the mainstream media?
How do you confuse $9 million and $900 million? How do you do that?

**Jason Calacanis** (1:03)
I think maybe it's the cost of the shorts versus the value of the stock that the shorts represent?

**David Friedberg** (1:11)
No, it's because there's 100 shares per option, so they were...

**Jason Calacanis** (1:14)
Oh, I see, yes, because the options have 100, of course.

**David Friedberg** (1:16)
They applied a multiple and they got it wrong. Got it, okay.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:19)
So the math, the calculator, is they got the calculator wrong.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:24)
It's not that they got the calculator wrong, it's just that they're so uninvested in assets that they don't know how asset markets work, I think is the more logical explanation, meaning if you've ever bought a home, you probably know what people are talking about when they're talking about financial elements related to a home. But I guess if you've never owned a stock or you've never hedged a position or had an option, you don't really know how any of it works. But then the problem isn't the person that wrote it, then there's no fact checking and the whole thing just gets an entire news cycle on its own, which by the way, helped his short and it never should have. Because if you heard that some random dude had a $9 million bet against the market, you would think nothing of it. But then to manufacture a headline about somebody who had a moment, it was almost 20 years ago, but whatever, he had a moment where he was right, is short the market, and you get it two orders of magnitude wrong. That seems quite wrong.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:23)
Yeah. And to your point, there is a ramification of it, which is it created a headwind against the already AI bubble, which was deflating after Brad Gerstner popped it.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:37)
I'll take a walk down conspiracy corner. Maybe the actual person is not economically illiterate, but the exact opposite, and then writes the error on purpose, knowing that whoever has to review it has absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and then they themselves are short. So I wonder if CNBC should investigate whether this person actually had a trade on.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:56)
Oh, there you go. Conspiracy corner. Let's get our tinfoil has it.

**David Friedberg** (2:58)
The individual.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:59)
You're either a complete moron and you don't know how the financial markets work, in which case you probably should be working at some other media outlet, not CNBC covering the markets, or you know how well they work and you know the people above you have no idea, and so you yourself shorts the market. You're basically copying the Burry trade, but then you rewrite the headline to look like it's two orders of magnitude bigger, which actually could have moved the market. If you saw a yard short, I mean, yeah, like that would have probably gotten my attention had I read it. A billion dollars is, you know, reasonable position to have.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:36)
He was accusing also, he's got the Palantir short, but on the AI side, he was saying, hey, Meta and Oracle have been cooking the books with 176 billion in hidden depreciation to inflate earnings by over 20% in 2028 And so here's the chart. Basically, we've talked about what is the reasonable life of an H100 of, you know, an NVIDIA chip or really an NVIDIA server, if you think of it that way. You know, do these things have a three-year lifespan, a four- or five- or six-year lifespan? CoreWeave might be putting them at six-year. And that dramatically changes your expenses, which then, of course, given the scale of the data build-out, the data center build-out could radically change your earnings because dividing the cost of a data center that cost 100 billion by six or three is, you know, 2X. So your thoughts, Friedberg?