Trump Rally or Bessent Put? Elon Back at Tesla, Google's Gemini Problem, China's Thorium Discovery

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
Okay. Welcome back to The All-In Podcast. Jay Cal is not here this week. He is off in Detroit at the Knicks game. Congrats to the Knicks. Here's a photo of our boy, Jay Cal hanging out with, who's that? Ben Stiller?

**David Sacks** (0:16)
Yeah. Well, I'm going to Ben Stiller.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (0:17)
That looks like a Chalamet right next to him.

**David Friedberg** (0:20)
Timothée Chalamet.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (0:21)
Is that Chalamet?

**David Friedberg** (0:22)
Chalamet, Chalamet, Chalamet.

**David Sacks** (0:25)
You know, Ben Stiller was once referred to as the Jewish Tom Cruise. But he has not held up like Tom Cruise. I got to say that.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:34)
He should have joined the Church of Scientology. Come on, man.

**David Sacks** (0:36)
Keep it up. You got to represent for us a little better.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:57)
Sitting in this week is our boy, Andrew Ross Sorkin, journalist, author, extraordinaire. Andrew, welcome to the show.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (1:06)
Long time listener, first time caller. Thank you for having me.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:09)
Andrew, I'm going to do just a couple of quick plugs and I'm going to give it over to the pro to do his work. Take us through the docket today. I think this is going to be really fun. The world's greatest moderator, the world's greatest moderator is here today.

**David Friedberg** (1:22)
That's fighting words.

**David Sacks** (1:24)
Shots fired.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (1:25)
We'll see. Hold your tongue. You can tell me when it's over.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (1:28)
Before we kick it off, I just want to give a quick plug. The All-In Summit, if you haven't seen the video, check it out on YouTube and Twitter.
Going into our fourth year, the 2024 recap will give you a set of highlights from last year. It's September 7th through 9th in LA. Trying to have the world's most important conversations. Andrew, I know it probably competes with one or two of your conferences, but let me just tell you, this one's way better. We're going to be blowing it out this year with parties, allin.com/summit to apply to join us at the summit this year. Awesome. Andrew, thanks for being here. We're excited to have you.

**Andrew Ross Sorkin** (2:04)
Okay, boys, here we go. I'm curious. I want to get your take on all this stuff because I'm fascinated by what's going on in these markets this week. Let's start on the markets because we got a rally. The question I think behind the rally is, is this a Bessent put? Is this a Jay Pal is in the job? He's got to put on this thing. I don't know what you think is going on. We're up three to 7% for the week. There's been a she loves me, she loves me not situation with what Trump's been saying about China and whether there's a deal or not a deal. China is saying nobody's talking. He says everybody's talking. What do you guys think is really happening? And then we got to get into alphabet. We got Tesla got a lot of earnings here that's also moving this around.

**David Friedberg** (2:42)
I think that the most important piece of financial logic that we have to break is this idea that there is always a put. The put is this weird thing just for the folks that don't understand it is that when the market goes down, somebody can belly ache and cry and somebody in the government will say, okay, we'll buy your security at your bad prices. So that's what the put is. So typically what's happened is you can cry to the White House and they'll call the Federal Reserve and they will buy it. That's the Fed put. And in some very rare cases when things get really calamitous, like in 2008, Treasury will set up a program and start to buy things. That's what was called TARP back in the GFC. So the question is, is there a put here? I mean, my honest answer is no.
And the simple reason is, if you look at where we are, the stock market is back to where we were in like May or August of last year. And if you had said that we would have upended 50 years of economic policy and the markets would only be off 500 or 600 basis points, I would have been shocked. So there's no reason for a put. Maybe the more interesting question is, who's asking for the put? The ones that have suffered from the volatility. And a lot of those are the active market traders. So if you trace the feedback, who has been the most negative? Hackman's been negative. Ken Griffin recently turned negative. And that probably comes from the fact that they're not monetizing the vol, the way that they used to monetize the vol, more than the market has speared down to such a degree that the world is coming to an end because it isn't.