OpenAI's Code Red, Sacks vs New York Times, New Poverty Line?

All right, everybody. Welcome back to the number one podcast in the world, the All-In podcast. In the news, in your feed. We've got the original quartet here. The band's back together.

1. OpenAI Calls Code Red

First up on the docket: A code red has been called by Sam Altman. He sent a memo on Monday, telling employees to stop working on side quests—ads, et cetera—and focus on the core ChatGPT experience: make it faster, make it better. I think we all know why: Gemini, Grok, and Claude from Anthropic have been crushing it. ChatGPT-5, let's call it what it is, was a bit of a flop. It didn't perform to expectations. We discussed that a couple of weeks ago or months ago.

Anthropic is beating OpenAI in enterprise revenue starting this summer. In previous episodes, I've talked about how, on the streets, I'm seeing more startups wanting to use the Anthropic API and also Google's Gemini API. They don't essentially trust OpenAI not to steal their business. So, there are big changes right now.

Here is a chart based on data from July. Most of Anthropic's revenue here is corporate. Most of OpenAI's, as everybody knows, is consumer. Here's another chart: OpenAI's new infrastructure deals versus revenue, and this is just for 2025 alone. A lot of deals are being made, but competition is fierce.

Chamath, your thoughts here on the game on the field? Code red, for people who don't know, in our industry is when everybody reports to the office and gets focused on one thing. That's apparently what Sam's doing. How do you interpret it?

Look, I think there are two things. Let's do the strategic lens and then the tactical lens. The strategic lens is that this is an incredibly vibrant and dynamic market, and I think it's too difficult and too early to pick winners, other than at the silicon layer, where largely that die has been cast.

I think that it's going to grow. We can talk about how there'll be more competition, but it's roughly NVIDIA plus AMD plus Google plus a bunch of inference silicon. That's that market. But above it, at the model market, it reminds me, frankly, a lot of when we were building Facebook. I remember sitting around our senior executive team—six of us—looking at MySpace, which was an order of magnitude bigger than us. At some point, we were like, "You know what? Our product is just fundamentally better than theirs." They had 100 million-plus users, and we had sort of 15 million. But we knew that we were eventually going to beat them. Nobody else knew.

I feel like this market is similarly evolving. You have these early winners, but there's still so much work to do. There are still so many consumer expectations to define that it's too early to know who's going to win. Ultimately, what we are learning, especially as all these markets converge, is that distribution still matters a ton. That favors Google. It favors Meta, although Meta's quite behind. It will still favor OpenAI because they have 800 million monthly active users.

2. Code Red Focuses OpenAI

The tactical thing is: What do you do knowing that this dynamic is set up to have a lot of competition? I think what you have to do is streamline the focus and try to make a crisis out of every opportunity. Companies tend to grow. This positive entropy tends to cause people to hire at every level, and you look around and there are thousands of people you didn't even know six months ago.

If Sam can use different points in time to tighten the core focus, they'll be better off. I think that is what Google did a while back. If you remember the whole Black George Washington thing, they were able to use that as a rallying cry to streamline the organization, focus, and get their best and smartest people to work on the most highly leveraged tasks. What you see now is incredible overperformance from where they were. I've said this before, but Gemini is incredible.

I think that's what's happening. It's too early to call. It's a three- or four-horse race, and Sam needs to batten down the hatches. I think he used this opportunity to stop a bunch of peripheral activities.

As we saw, Sergey called a personal code red. He said, "I have to get in the office. I have to inspire everybody because this is existential for us if we lose the search franchise," which they haven't. The code red works.

David Friedberg, maybe you could discuss code red as a management technique. You were at Google. I don't know if they were calling code reds back then because you didn't have any competition, but we're in a much different world here. This is the most competitive thing we've ever seen in our lifetimes.

I think Google had an early lead in search, and then Microsoft launched. It formed a code red model at Google that was called Project Canada, the code word for Microsoft. There was a weekly war room meeting, and a whole bunch of strategy and product decision-making was driven around the impending threat from Microsoft because Microsoft was such a big behemoth, so well capitalized, and had incredible engineering talent.

Part of the response was to set up an office in Kirkland to recruit engineers up in Seattle and aggressively grow that base. A whole bunch of tactics emerged from the strategic lens of Project Canada. It is a very powerful method. It is how the United States got to the moon in a race with Russia. It is how we are now in a race for supremacy in technology and AI against China.

Having an impending threat is a very strong motivational tactic. It is a very focusing setting, and it drives innovation. We'll see what happens.

ChatGPT was basically the market monopoly in AI, or the LLM chat interface, and it only had one way to go, which was down. Google, I think, at this point has roughly 14%. Here you can see OpenAI is on the decline. Obviously, a little over a year ago they were at 90%-plus market share in generative AI traffic, and today Gemini is at 14–15%. The depth, the flywheel that Google has built, gives them such an extraordinary advantage.

Okay, let's go to Emperor Palpatine. This is coming together exactly as you orchestrated it—you as the czar of AI and crypto. Thank you for your service, civil servant David Sacks. You wanted to see vibrant competition. Well, here we have it. Assess the playing field as you see it from D.C.

First of all, let me give credit to Sam for calling this code red, breaking the glass, and pulling the alarm. I think it's so easy for CEOs in general to engage in happy talk and ignore problems, especially when discussing them is going to create a PR story that they don't like.

One of the things that's unique about Silicon Valley is that founders and CEOs do treat the situation of their companies in a more existential way because we actually do have tremendous competition. Any time a CEO is willing to take a bad PR story in order to focus their troops on a real business problem, I think they deserve credit for it. When you look at the rest of the Fortune 500, these CEOs are just managing PR all the time.

3. Five Companies Enter the Race

With respect to the ecosystem as a whole, it is very competitive, and I think we've got five major companies that all have their strengths. ChatGPT is the leader in consumer. They have something like 80% market share in consumer use of LLM chatbots. But then Google came out with its new Gemini 3, and they were starting to take share based on the strength of Gemini 3 and the integration it obviously has within Google Search, because it's very easy for people to discover it when they do a Google search, and now they're seeing that it's actually pretty good.

They were starting to take share from ChatGPT, and I think that's why Sam issued the code red. Then you've got Anthropic, like you mentioned. I don't particularly love what I've called their regulatory capture strategy, but I have to acknowledge that their products are very good. Everybody seems to say that they have the best coding assistant, and they're carving out a very lucrative niche in enterprise.

Then you've got xAI, which I think is the best at current events because of its integration with X. Elon also seems to be able to scale his data center, his training cluster, the fastest. He had Colossus 1, now he's got Colossus 2, and that portends good things for Grok 5. It's going to be trained on the largest cluster of Blackwells.

In any event, you've got all these companies that are doing pretty well. I guess Meta has hit some headwinds, but they're going to continue investing tremendously in AI, and they've got deep pockets to do it. I think they'll come back.

What you see is that all these companies are leapfrogging each other. You get a new version, and then they sort of leapfrog each other in terms of—

The leaderboards are showing that. Yes, Sacks, when you look at the leaderboard, Grok is constantly coming above Gemini.

There's a lot of leapfrogging going on. There's also, I'd say, a lot of specialization now going on in the ways that I just mentioned. All these companies are developing strengths. There are sort of verticals happening.

Yes.

I've described this as sort of a Goldilocks scenario, where you're making a lot of progress in AI but the market is remaining very competitive. Ideally, it does not consolidate to just 1 monopoly player, like we've seen in other tech markets, because then you end up with a big tech company that's got too much power and control. That's not generally a great thing for consumers.

Versus China? What does it say versus us versus China? That was the dialogue a year ago: "Oh my God, China. Oh my God, China." Where are we at today? Because this is impressive, this vibrant competition.

Competition brings out the best in the American system. I think that is what creates the most progress, and that's what's going to allow us to win the AI race against China.

China has a lot of competition, too, but they do tend to anoint national champions more. I guess they usually do it more after a competition stage. Maybe it doesn't prevent competition, but look, China is formidable. They have a lot of good AI companies, too.

This is going to be a horse race, but again, there's no question that the system—

For sure. But look, there's no question that in the American system, it's competition that brings out the best. That's what we're seeing right now. Jason, what do you think?

4. ChatGPT Versus the World

Interestingly, I just want to build a little bit on what Friedberg showed. The way I'm seeing this is ChatGPT versus the world. 36 months ago, ChatGPT—OpenAI—had 100%, right? They started the category, as you pointed out correctly, David. Their decline in market share is increasing in velocity. Just 12 months ago, they had 84% of the space, and now they're at 68%. This is accelerating.

You pointed that out correctly, Chamath: distribution matters. We've talked about it countless times here. Meta is forcing you to use its AI search, which is pretty bad, I'll be honest. Every time you do a search on Instagram, it's annoying, but those all count as users using the product, just like Slack faced competition from Microsoft Teams when it was bundled.

I tracked this out, and this is what I think is going to happen over the next 4 years. I think we're going to see OpenAI go down to about 1/3 of the market, and I think the other players are going to take 2/3. The reason I think this is because, to Sacks's point, specialization is happening.

If you look at Nano Banana, the image-generation product over at Google, it's fantastic. Grok Imagine is fantastic. You're going to have 4 or 5 different choices for images. You're going to have 4 or 5 different, really credible choices.

You also have to look at the competition and what Sam is facing. I've known Sam for 20 years now. He is a consummate dealmaker, perhaps too good at dealmaking. He was incredible at recruiting, and his PR game was very strong. Everybody realizes that.

Look at who he's facing: Friedberg, Elon, Dario, Sergey and Sundar at Google, Zuckerberg at Meta, and Satya at Microsoft, who's his partner and now his competitor. Elon was his benefactor and is now his competitor. You have the open-source projects, DeepSeek, and so on. You have Sacks in China. And then his former employees are trying to kill him as well.

You have Ilya doing Safe Superintelligence, which hasn't launched yet, and Mira doing Thinking Machines. She was obviously doing all the video stuff. I think that what we're going to see here, if we're sitting here next year, is that they're going to be under 50% in the next 12 to 24 months.

These companies are explicitly trying to kill OpenAI. The amount of bad will that Sam has built is colossal, and I think it's from doing too many deals. Look at what he did to NVIDIA. NVIDIA put out a statement recently that they have the option to invest.

We were sitting here 2 months ago, and I know people in the industry were staying up late at night worrying about all these deals Sam was doing. Apparently, all those deals are coming out as options. These weren't real deals. A lot of them were options. Jensen came out and said, “Hey, we have the opportunity to invest in OpenAI.”

But remember, Sam did that AMD deal a week or 2 after he did the OpenAI deal. A lot of this is creating bad feelings. I think we're at peak OpenAI right now. I said it on the show a couple of weeks ago: I think the pair trade is to bet against ChatGPT versus the world. I think the world wins 2/3.

They can still be in a good place. I think you're right that this market probably gets split up 3 or 4 ways, and so the winner probably gets 1/3 of the market. Most other markets that end up in a 3- or 4-person race end up in that space.

But 1/3 of a market can still be very valuable if that market has 5 or 6 billion people using it.

Absolutely. It's going to be tremendous.

That can still support a multitrillion-dollar market cap. I don't think it's by any means a death knell for OpenAI, but it does mean that a lot of these projects probably need to get shuttered because you need to do just a few things very, very well.

Consumers will start to split their purchasing decisions, if you will, or their usage decisions, across verticals for specific purposes. I may use Grok Imagine because I love that and it's just much better. Then I may use Anthropic for code generation, while I use Gemini for deep research, and then I use ChatGPT for conversational search.

Yes.

Now, all of a sudden, I'm using all 4. That's a highly realistic outcome. In fact, I look at my phone now. I try to limit the number of apps on the phone, but I have Gemini and Grok as the 2 anchor apps because I'm so reliant on both of them, and I just keep going back and forth between them.

Mhm.

Interestingly, I have 4. I have Claude and Perplexity also on my desktop, and I go through all 4 of them.

Here's what Google and other folks are planning. They're going to take the main revenue stream of OpenAI, suck the oxygen out of the room, and try to strangle Sam and the team over there by making it free. So right now, if 75% of that—

Metaphor.

Very, very vital, but this is war. They're going to make Gemini free for life for the best models. That's my prediction for Google, and I think Meta will be right behind them.

Why? They already have the ad network built, and they know, in that fierce competition—which you were part of, Chamath, and Friedberg—how fierce that competition was. That duopoly does not want to become a triple with Sam.

I think this is going to be very analogous to what happened with Netscape. People used to pay $50 for a Netscape browser, and then Microsoft came in and made it free. Chrome became free, Dolphin Browser became free, and a million other providers followed. The same thing is going to happen to ChatGPT.

Right now, 80% of the revenue comes from $20 subscriptions. That's going to get decimated to zero. I don't think consumers are going to pay for this product, just like they won't pay for search and they won't pay for a browser, because Google and Meta will make it free.

I think it's a different reason, actually. The reason why they will do it is because they have such an inordinate amount of cash, and that cash is valueless on the balance sheet. So, you might as well just rip it in. If you look at the companies that have a need to spend money right now, it's Google, it's Microsoft, it's Meta, it's Nvidia, and maybe Broadcom, but let's just keep Broadcom out of it. But Apple's there, too.

And Apple.

Yeah. All of those companies have so much cash. If you actually look at the DCF of the enterprise value of these businesses, it gets very little credit for that cash, almost to the point where it's worthless. And so you either need to spend it on M&A, spend it on buybacks, or spend it to subsidize a product so that you can maintain your leadership in the broader market. And so what you're going to see is these big companies do this capital allocation model in a much more aggressive way. So there's only so many share buybacks that these guys can do. They approve 50, 60, 70, 80 billion dollars in buybacks. It just doesn't lift the stock price the same way it does when you actually show leadership in a product category.

So, to your point, if you're going to underwrite a decision, just look at the last 3 weeks of Google's stock performance. It basically doubled once we thought that Gemini was incredible.

If you want to make Gemini even more incredible, just pour another billion users into it. If that costs you $50 billion, it's okay, because you'll make $1 trillion of market cap. It's a no-brainer.

Yeah. Think about all the reinforcement learning that those big players have at scale.

By the way, the other thing is, if we're playing conspiracy theorist, I think the reason Sam did those deals—to your point, he is a consummate, very talented dealmaker—is probably because he needed to continue to generate the type of momentum required to raise the quantum of capital that he needs.

If you're silent, it's much harder to raise $100 billion. You're shucking and jiving and putting a lot of things out there that could convince people there's a level of momentum worth underwriting at a much higher valuation. You have to keep that in mind, too.

Yes.

I think that is his high-level, you know, 4D chess. I think NVIDIA is predicting it now. I think NVIDIA is not going to take its option to invest in OpenAI, or it's going to really downgrade it by 70% or 80% and allocate it to other players.

Jason, any final thoughts here as we wrap up on this?

What is your basis for that prediction?

I think NVIDIA wants to own more of the other players. I do actually have a basis for this. I think they were very pissed off at the other support he gave to their competitors.

How do you know they closed that deal? I know a lot of people in the industry.

You sound like The New York Times.

Okay. Well, great segue.

Everybody knows. What's your source?

I can't reveal my sources.

Sources say.

Open secret.

Sources say—sorry.

Let me just wrap up on that. I'll just echo a little bit of what Jason said.

5. AI Moves Beyond Chatbots

I don't think the battle is going to be won and lost on LLMs. I think there are several fronts, and we're so early in AI. It's not necessarily going to be just about text-based token production. These non-text-based models—the non-LLM models—the complexity to them and the differentiation is so much wider than it is in LLMs.

I think about it in terms of a Hold'em versus Omaha game. The difference between the median and the best player in an Omaha game is so significant compared to the median and the best player in a Hold'em game because it's just so much more complex. I don't know if you remember this guy, Chris Ferguson. He used to win every Omaha tournament back in the day because he was one of the first guys to figure it out. So everyone that knew Hold'em thought that they could just step into Omaha, and because he figured out how to do Omaha, he just wrecked everyone consistently.

Anyway, in video, for example, they use diffusion models, and then they also use a transformer architecture. Then they use these convolutional neural networks to create structure within the frame and continue structure between frames in video. There are multiple models that have to interact and work together to render video.

So you have to have good training. You also have to have unique architecture. The amount of differentiation that's possible in video AI is, I would say, at this point today, so much wider than the differentiation in text-based AI, like what we see with LLMs.

As those things start to become more mainstream, I think that applications that we are not necessarily thinking about today are going to become a bigger use case for how we spend our time. That is really when you'll start to see this horse race play out a little differently than it does today, where everything is all about usage on a chat interface.

We're going to look back at that one day. It's going to be the equivalent of everyone being on AOL Instant Messenger or Yahoo Instant Messenger. Who gives a shit? That's not really where the game is going to be played.

While we're speaking, Gemini just released Gemini 3. Deep Think is here, so the race is continuing even as we're taping the show.

Let me add one more thing. I don't know, just a few months ago on this show—maybe it was 3 months ago, maybe it was 6 months ago—we were all giving eulogies for Google.

I wasn't. I was not. I took the other side.

Well, I mean, I don't know. There were a lot of people who were, and I was definitely—

I think the majority of the industry was. I did take the other side of it, yeah.

I think Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley were—

Brad Gerstner—the BG2 Pod.

BG2 Pod.

It's one person.

Brad Gerstner definitely was. Look, the argument made a lot of sense, which was this: Even if you believe that Google is going to come back and have a credible AI product, remember, they were caught completely flat-footed by this. They figured out the transformer architecture back in 2017, but then they didn't really do anything with it. OpenAI grabbed onto that and, like you showed on that chart, they basically had a 2-year head start on LLMs.

A lot of people were basically saying that this was it for Google because, obviously, LLMs are so much better at web search than the 10 blue links. Moreover, for monetization, why would you need to have ad links or paid links in an LLM world?

I think the point that Brad and Bill were making is, again, even if Google catches up, they'll never have the dominant position in AI that they have in search. It still might be true. Who knows? But the point is, everyone was saying that Google was in deep trouble just 6 months ago. Then, like you said, I think Sergey came back, and that gave them a major shot in the arm. They got more focused, and now they've launched what appears to be the best, or one of the best, models.

A competitive—

But look, these other companies—there's a lot of leapfrogging going on.

I think, really importantly, it's not just about Sergey coming back. It's about giving themselves permission to take risk. The reason Google didn't lean into AI for years, even though they had the technology, Sacks, is because they were nervous about cannibalization of search. They were nervous about the quality of the product. They didn't want to release things too early.

Then they changed their posture, and they adopted a more risk-taking posture. That gave them permission to run, which, by the way, I would argue is the opposite of OpenAI in the last couple of months.

I used to use Advanced Voice on ChatGPT all the time. I cannot stand it anymore. I do not use it. It has basically hedged away all of the value because it tries to be polite. It tries to make sure that it's giving you warnings all the time. It doesn't want to give you data because it's scared that it might give you the wrong data.

You can see it used to give you data all the time. I cannot get it to give me numbers anymore. I'm like, "Give me the numbers," and it just says these high-level statements. I'm like, "That's not what I want." I went over to Gemini. It gave me the numbers.

I think Google's willingness to take risk has really highlighted the difference in posture in the last year. ChatGPT is now acting—and OpenAI has been acting—like an incumbent, fearful of losing market share and fearful of getting attacked in the media and attacked by consumers for saying the wrong thing.

They've taken this defensive posture that I think has fundamentally damaged the product and the brand.

I'm just having a great time thinking about Friedberg yelling at his AI assistant in his car. We need to make a short out of that. Keep going.

Yeah, and the pie is growing. The number of searches, the number of queries, is increasing dramatically. I think we'll have 20–30 times the amount of queries being done because the answers are better.

It's not just queries. This is my point. It's more than that. You're not using it to do search anymore, right? You're using it to watch video. You're using it to book flights.

Yeah, the agentic stuff. I'm putting that all together. The amount of utility that you can get from it is so great that it's going to go 20x. The same thing's happening with ride-sharing.

It's more than just search. That's the whole point. This has now become such an instrumental part of everything we do in our lives, and it's going to take over more of how we spend our time in our lives. It's not just about search anymore. It's a whole new paradigm.

The pie will be 20 times bigger.

Let me ask you a basic question. Do you think that OpenAI's more conservative risk posture is a function of the fact that, whether by luck or design, they decided that the consumer market was their core market? Whereas you look at something like Anthropic, they've carved out enterprise. But if you're a consumer product, there are so many more things you have to address—

—and you're going to be attacked in so many more different ways.

Yeah. And by being the market incumbent, it actually ended up creating a fantastic foil for Google because they started getting all of the arrows and slings from the media about health advice, suicides, hallucinations, sending wrong information, and all the risks and damage that that causes. Meanwhile, everyone was just laughing and joking about Google and ignoring them.

It was more than that. Remember, last summer there was the court case where the judge said that they were guilty of having a monopoly, and then he was going to rule on what the remedies were going to be. I think that was in—what was it—September?

The judge said that during the summer, and then whenever it was that he ruled on the remedy, they were existentially threatened in their search business, so everything had changed.

Yeah, I mean—

So the company didn't get broken up. Remember, they were thinking about whether to spin out—

Chrome, YouTube. Yeah, all these kinds of—

In a way—

No greater blessing has ever happened to Alphabet than OpenAI's rise. I think that rise not only created the foil for Google in the monopoly sense, but it also took the attention away from Google and focused it on OpenAI. That attention fundamentally damaged OpenAI's strategic product capabilities because they had to start being so much more careful about what they said and how they said it, and it fundamentally damaged the product.

The opposite was happening at Google at the same time, which is Larry, Sergey, and Sundar being given permission by the board to take risk, to go hard, and to figure this out. Boom. It's amazing how the horse race has changed.

6. Sacks Versus The New York Times

All right, there's another thing that went on this weekend: a big tech story. At the risk of being a little navel-gazing here, we're going to cover it: The New York Times versus Mr. David Sacks.

On Sunday, The New York Times published an article titled “Silicon Valley’s Man in the White House Is Benefiting Himself and His Friends.” Sacks is obviously the man they're referring to. Five reporters worked on this story for approximately 5 months, is what we hear, and the story attempted to frame you, Sacks, as conflicted.

The New York Times’ key claim was: “Mr. Sacks has positioned himself to personally benefit. He has 78 tech investments, including at least 49 stakes in companies with ties to artificial intelligence.” For background, Sacks, Elon, and you all joined as special government employees, or SGEs. These are different from cabinet members in a bunch of different ways. Basically, they can't work more than 130 days, they're allowed to split time between their day jobs and D.C., they don't have to be approved by the Senate, and they provide special expertise, as Mr. Sacks is doing as the czar of crypto and AI.

The second major claim was raising the profile of All-In. Quote: “Mr. Sacks has raised the profile of his weekly podcast, All-In, through his government role and expanded the business,” which is super hilarious because they think our traffic peaked right before the election. But, Sacks, obviously you got a ton of air cover. People thought the story was biased and a hit job, and it fell pretty flat. What's your take on this? Maybe take us behind the story.

Well, I think maybe a good place to start is with the reaction to it. Like you said, there was this huge outpouring of people in Silicon Valley who reacted in a way that showed that they understood that this story was a hit piece, that it was biased, and, I'd say most importantly, it didn't even live up to its own headline. It didn't prove the thing that they were asserting in the headline.

Everyone could just see on its face that it was a hatchet job, and everyone started reacting that way. It was nice to get that outpouring of support from so many different people in Silicon Valley, including many of the companies we just talked about, which are so vigorously competing with each other. I mean, I think this might be the only thing that Sam and Elon have agreed on in the last year.

Yeah. Didn't you tell everyone to put these tweets out?

So that was the next big lie the media tried to perpetrate: that somehow this response was coordinated by me.

By the way, the reality was crazy because you told me explicitly, “Stand down. I don't need you to do it.” And I was like, “Leroy Jenkins.” I just went in and I was like, “I'm tweeting about this bullshit.”

No, I never told anyone to do anything except for you guys. I told you guys not to react to it because I didn't want to spread the story, where you basically draw even more attention to it. That was my media plan.

What happened is the story just went viral anyway because all of Silicon Valley reacted on their own in a grassroots and authentic way. I think they were genuinely offended by how bad the story was and how ridiculous it was on its face. They reacted, and then that became the story. This whole coordinated narrative became, in a way, part of the media industry's cover-up for itself—its attempt to explain away why everybody thought the story was so bad.

Let me just say, I do think that this outpouring of support illustrates something important, which is just how much power and respect The New York Times has lost. Ten years ago, if The New York Times ran a hit piece on somebody, even if other people didn't like it, they wouldn't want to say anything because they'd be afraid that they would be the next target. That mystique and that fear have completely broken down.

People can see The New York Times for what it is, which is basically a bunch of political activists pretending to be reporters. Essentially, they just launder the point of view of their anonymous sources, who are basically left-wing Democrats, and try to portray those viewpoints as somehow being neutral or objective truth, right? They're presenting themselves as these neutral arbiters of the truth, and I think everyone can see through that sham at this point.

Yes. The thing they started with was the headline.

And that was the one thing they refused to change, no matter how many times we refuted their narrative. What they would do is, every couple of weeks, they'd send us a new fact-check, and we would basically debunk it. We can show you some of those fact-checks if you want to see them, to see where the story started and what they were trying to prove.

Yeah, let's do that.

And what would happen is, every time we would debunk one of their accusations, they would just come back to us with a new one every couple of weeks. The only fixed point in their reporting was this idea that I had to have these conflicts of interest that were benefiting me.

Let me ask you a question. One of the statements that was made, and then Governor Newsom repeated it at Andrew Ross Sorkin's DealBook conference yesterday, is that you did not put all of your investments into a blind trust. “You should have done that,” is what Newsom said onstage. Can you just address that—what actions you actually took when you chose to take the office? What were you legally required to take, and maybe why didn't you do a blind trust? Or maybe you did; I don't know.

Well, no, we looked at that.

Sorry, Sacks. Just give me a second. I just want to say this because you're not going to say this yourself, but I remember when you were going through this, you were so concerned about the perception of a conflict of interest that you took such extraordinary measures about the degree to which you were selling things and getting rid of things to make sure that you could do the job cleanly and wholly.

I watched you do this, and I watched you do something that I thought was so over the top. I'm like, “Holy shit, you really are doing this for the country.” I was so shocked and surprised by it. I just want to say that because I've observed it, and they still came out with this piece, which was so shocking to me given what you did.

So you guys know what I went through because I was an LP in some of your funds, and you know that I divested them, which you could argue was above and beyond the call of duty. But I was just trying to avoid any potential conflict, and that, I think, is the central lie of this piece. Not only is the piece not true, it's the anti-truth.

Because the truth is that I divested hundreds of millions of dollars of positions in promising technology ventures at a substantial cost to my net worth. So not only is this job not benefiting me, it's actually cost me a lot of money to serve. But I did it because it's an honor to be asked by the president to serve, and it's something I wanted to do. I thought I could make a difference.

The whole premise here is just false. The New York Times, through its 5 months of investigations, knew this, but they just refused to budge on the premise of their story.

Now, to your question, one of the key paragraphs that, Jason, you mentioned is where they try to claim that I have 449 investments tied to AI. They say their investigation uncovered this, and some of their reporters on podcasts have tried to portray themselves as Woodward and Bernstein, having uncovered it.

How did they get this crazy list of companies? I wonder.

I disclosed them. They didn't uncover them. I disclosed them. They're in my ethics letter.

Available to everyone.

They're on the White House website in my ethics letter. Every government employee, whether you're full-time or an SG, files disclosures with the government, and my ethics letter basically contained these pages and pages of all these different positions.

In that ethics letter, they said that I had divested—I had initiated or completed divestment of over 99% of the positions that could pose a conflict for AI. It's in there. This is where I think, again, they were very deceptive: it was the OGE, the Office of Government Ethics, the career civil servants, the lawyers, and the accountants at OGE who approved that letter and all the contents of that letter, who reviewed all those disclosures. They're the ones who concluded that I did not have any conflicts.

So really, what The New York Times’ beef is with is the career civil servants at OGE.

Maybe walk us through what you actually did. Why didn't you do the blind trust, and help us get the context there?

On the blind trust, it's kind of funny. One of The New York Times reporters was talking about this on a podcast, which is where I think Newsom picked it up from. My ethics lawyer, who teaches a course on conflicts of interest at Harvard, said that reporter should really take his course because he would actually learn something about the conflicts laws.

The blind trust idea is rarely used, and in my case it would not have worked because I have minor children. You can only use the blind trust to have your kids be beneficiaries if they're adults. That's the way the conflict laws work. It just wasn't even applicable in my case.

What I did instead of creating a blind trust is I divested the positions that were a conflict, at great cost, at a discount to their fair market value in the case of my LP interests in all these funds.

I divested almost 100 funds that I had invested in—venture funds, things like that, angel funds.

At roughly a 50% discount to their fair market value?

Well, they're private investments, right? Selling an LP interest in a fund—there's no liquid market for that. So, in order to even find a buyer, you have to make it super attractive for them.

That's insane.

And then I sold xAI. I sold my interest in Grok, and those were all at substantial discounts to the next round, which has now taken place. So joining the government is not a money-making scheme. The simplest way for me to make more money would have just been to keep doing what I was doing.

God.

Let's go back to the 449. Again, they're kind of pretending like they did this unbelievable investigation and found the 449. Can you just put up this paragraph on the screen here? Really, every sentence in this paragraph reveals the sham of this story.

“Mr. Sacks has positioned himself to personally benefit.” Not true. I was already an investor in all these companies, and I positioned myself to divest. Then it says I had 449 stakes in companies with ties to artificial intelligence. By the way, that whole phrase “ties to” is total journalism weasel words, because “ties to” can mean anything, and every company in the economy is going to have ties to artificial intelligence.

And then they said they could be aided directly or indirectly. That is not what a conflict of interest is. The standard is having a direct and predictable effect on an interest—not an indirect effect. There's nothing in that story that shows that I had a direct benefit.

This article has nothing to do with everything you guys just spent all this time talking about.

Okay?

There is nothing here. There was no crime here. There's no smoke here. There's no fire here.

What you did get right, though, is that the headline was the goal. And what is the goal of that headline? The goal of that headline is to insinuate and to pressure Sacks, but subtly, it's to pressure everyone else who looks like Sacks.

Now, what does it mean to look like Sacks? It's not just about Republicans. This could be a Democrat as well in the future. You're in industry. You know something very specific. You've done very well applying that knowledge. Now, all of a sudden, you're in a position where you could go and positively impact the trajectory of the United States. You're asked by the sitting president of the United States to do something.

What this article does is try to intimidate those kinds of people into saying, “Wow, this is not worth it. This is just too much of a headache.” The whole point was the headline, and the whole point was to get enough chatter about the headline so that people like Sacks—and then other people in the future—just say, “You know what? I'm not going to try this.”

And what do they want instead? What they want instead are people that they can work with very closely and ultimately co-opt. If you look at people like Zohran Mamdani, who's beloved by The New York Times, or Lina Khan, who's beloved by The New York Times as well, what's the through line? It's a total and complete lack of experience.

And so what you're creating is essentially a very simple litmus test: If you have experience, we're going to paint you as conflicted, so stay away. But if you're completely inexperienced and have no experience whatsoever, have never done anything, and you're probably going to screw it up, at least you'll be in our pocket. We'll work with you, and so we will leave you alone.

That is the point of this article, and that is what is on trial here. I think what we all need to do is understand that simple thing and push back on it—not just if you're a Republican, but also if you're a Democrat. There are tons of really smart people on both sides who will eventually be asked to do something for the United States, and you need to ignore the idiots at the New York Times and do it.

Yeah, this is well said, and this literally was going to be the point I was going to make as well: We're setting up 2 worlds.

Otherwise, you'll only have inexperienced morons in the government.

Exactly. You'll only have inexperienced morons in the government. We have a choice right now. Do we want to have lawyers and academics with no experience in the real world setting policy in Washington, D.C., or do you want to have experts?

Do you want more Mike Bloombergs? Do you want more Jeff Bezoses, more David Sackses, more Scott Bessents, who is also a Democrat? Howard Lutnick, also previously a Democrat? We want the smartest people in Washington, D.C. That's what the founders wanted.

The founding fathers of this country wanted people to do short stints. We want short stints. We don't want career politicians like Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell in there for 30, 40, or 60 years. These people literally look like zombies in Washington, D.C. They're glitching out.

We want people in the prime of their careers to go in there, Chamath, like you're saying, and kick ass for us for 4 or 8 years and then come back. By the way, everybody benefits when you go to Washington, D.C., and make some connections. Of course, when the Clintons left office, what did they do? Clinton Foundation, book deals. Obama's book deals, Netflix deals. Everybody gets a little shine when they come out. That's natural when you come out.

But we want the best and brightest there. It's a gift that you went there, Sacks. It's a gift.

Yeah, we can debate all these issues. And yes, civil servants should be under scrutiny. Whether it's Lina Khan or USAID, people should be held to account for anything they're doing. You did it right. You went above and beyond. And now they're trying to punish you, and they're trying to dissuade the next group of great Americans from going there.

Yeah. Well, thank you. Go ahead.

There are 2 quotes from Thomas Jefferson I'll just read, because I think they're actually very important. He said in a letter in 1788, “I apprehend that the total abandonment of the principle of rotation in the elected offices will end in abuse.”

And then he also later said in 1809, “Nature intended me for the tranquil pursuits of science, by rendering them my supreme delight. But the enormities of the times in which I have lived have forced me to take a part in resisting them and to commit myself on the boisterous ocean of political passions.”

The founding fathers, to your point, JCal and Chamath, were vehemently committed to the United States being a free market—a place where people could pursue with absolute liberty their interests in business, in science, and in life. The act of holding political office, of getting elected to political office, was a requirement to serve: civil service to this country, service to the nation, and service to the enablement of the freedoms that allow us to do the things that we choose and want to do.

And if you look at the wealth that's been accumulated by these career politicians, it is no surprise that they are attacking Sacks, Bessent, Lutnick, Kelly Loeffler, and all of these other elected or appointed officials in this government who have had success in private life and who have chosen, out of a commitment to patriotism, to spend their time rather than making money in private life. They have enough money, but they're trying to get the government and the country on the track that they hope it will go on.

I think that is the key difference between those who see this article for what it is and those who read it to reaffirm their, I would say, violent opposition to this current administration and the challenge that's ahead. It's a real Rorschach test when you read these articles and look at Sacks and others in this administration and the choices they've made: Are they doing it to grift, or are they doing it because they don't need to grift?

Let me also say this: The proof is in the pudding. If we send experts to Washington, D.C., and you look at Sacks's early track record, he got the stablecoin stuff done. We just talked about how competitive the AI market is. We talked about building more energy. Again, I disagree with a lot of the things in the Trump administration. The thing I don't disagree with and fully endorse is the experts and the great job they're doing.

Howard Lutnick's crushing it. You're crushing it. All these regulations that you've gotten done early and often are making crypto legal—a legal framework for crypto—which, by the way, the last 2 administrations, the 45th and the 46th, didn't get done. You got it done in 6 months, right? There's already a track record here. If you send experts, they'll get expert stuff done on time, at startup speed. So let's talk about the results as well.

They don't want the results. They consider the results to be a negative. What they're trying to do is criminalize policy disagreements. That's really what's going on.

At one point, my comms person, who was dealing with the New York Times, asked them, “What friends are you talking about? What friends did he benefit from?” They couldn't name a specific one.

I think this is why they mentioned All-In Tequila and the All-In Summit. Maybe they're trying to portray you guys as the friends who benefited somehow. We sold more SAI Summit.

Let me just say one thing on All-In. We can't get speakers to come on the show because of the association with the Trump administration. We lost money on that event in June, which I spent 12 days of my life working on. It was a pain in my ass. There was no personal benefit to us for any of this. There's no grifting going on.

It's honestly a pain in the ass. We do it for Sacks because he wanted us to help him put that event on. Sacks, now you're part-time on the show. We have you here.

From the get-go, it was a nonprofit event. We did not sell tickets. We gave them all away for free. If we wanted to make money, we'd sell tickets. We didn't do that.

There were 2 sponsors that put money in to help defray the cost because we spent like $1 million-plus on this thing. They got their logo on the video, not even in the live event. It was just on the video when we put it on YouTube.

Let's move on. Let's get to the New York Times.

But there's no benefit to All-In.

There's no benefit to All-In, and the fact that they had to throw that in kind of shows it, if you ask me. But, yeah, I concur.

It's because they kitchen-sinked this thing to try to create the illusion that there was something there.

All right. So we knew this would take over the show because we're all hot under the collar, and we all know you're doing a great job there. We want more experts. The job description is to have us win AI.

Yes, that's what they're accusing me of: basically doing my job.

Congratulations. You did a great job, and now we're going to lie about you in The New York Times. But you're friends with Jensen Huang, and now Jensen can sell chips.

Oh my God.

Do you want to show the fact check? It's so crazy.

It's crazy. The fact check.

This guy has been the CEO of the largest company in the world for years. He's been meticulously designing these chips for 30 years. Before Sacks could even spell H100, he had made them for gamers. He was making video game cards decades ago.

I've got to show this as an example of how dishonest they are. They would send us these fact checks every couple of weeks.

Okay, so here's the real email, Sacks. They were sending you bullet point after bullet point. This section starts at bullet point number 33. It's obviously one of many emails you got.

What they do in these fact checks is they basically take the story that they're planning to write and break it up into chunks. Then they give you about 24 hours to respond to each sentence or paragraph, say whether you agree or disagree with it, and give you the chance to make a statement.

That's what a fact check is. This is the story they were planning to write: In the spring, Sacks had dinner with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang in Washington. They discussed several foreign export issues. During the dinner, Sacks heard a convincing counterargument that selling American chips to rivals, including China, will get those nations hooked on U.S. technology. Sacks then took that argument to the White House and pushed officials to eliminate Biden-era restrictions, et cetera, et cetera.

There's just one problem with this narrative: There was no such dinner. [laughter] We checked my schedule. They made up the dinner.

No, we checked everyone's schedules. There is no dinner. So they've got a source who's just making this up. And how does The New York Times respond? They just delete the dinner, but they don't delete any other part of this.

If your source has already been caught fabricating a dinner at which this conversation supposedly took place, it's totally discredited.

They're trying to intimidate you.

They kind of create this insinuation that somehow I'm being influenced through friendships.

But then it turns out that those friendships don't even exist. I mean, they're just people I met after I joined the administration in a lot of cases.

So in any event, look, I think the audience of the show knows my views on AI because I've been publicly advocating for them for the past year.

And you've had scrutiny. We ask you hard questions every week here. We bust your chops and force you to explain these positions, and we stress-test them with you. The audience stress-tests them. That's like a gift to the American people.

I think it's very hard for people to contemplate the idea that folks who are significantly wealthy don't actually need to self-deal. They just don't need it. And the truth is, the folks who are trying to build a career in politics are the ones who are necessarily going to self-deal because that's the path to wealth for them. If you've already found your path to wealth, you don't need to self-deal. I think it's just so hard for people to grasp that.

Yeah.

It's hard to understand that somebody is losing a massive amount of money serving their country. I, for one, thank you for losing all of your money and going and serving the country. I'm very proud.

Even if people don't agree with your politics, even if I don't agree with everything you say or do, Sacks, again, I never doubt your integrity and your intentions. I never once thought that you would be someone who would ever self-deal or engage in any sort of grift or corruption. I'll say that just personally, having known you for a very long time.

Great.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

I'm mad at you because you didn't sell me everything at a 50% discount.

Yeah. Where was the first time I heard it? I was—

I've been so angry this whole clip, thinking, what—

Where was my call?

Oh my God. I would have given you 55%. Give it to me. Hey, I would have bought it.

Another story that's been trending is the new poverty line and some of these incoming tax laws. Mike Green, an investor and fund manager, went viral last week for claiming the U.S. poverty-line math is very wrong.

Historically, the poverty line has been measured as 3 times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation. Based on that measure, the poverty line for a family is set at $31,000 in 2025. Green says the real number is over 4 times higher, at $140,000. He gets that number by factoring in the cost of childcare, which has surpassed housing as the largest average expense.

He says measuring this number for decades has quietly broken America, and it could explain why America's middle class feels poorer despite healthy GDP and historically low unemployment—4.x, which we've talked about here. Chamath, your thoughts?

I read this, and I found his claim to be pretty shocking. I wanted to dig into it, which is why I asked that we talk about it. Nick, you can probably link to it, but, yeah, this thing went viral.

Basically, it's exactly what you said, Jason. Food costs used to be a third of living costs. Food used to cost $10,000. You would multiply it by 3 and say, well, the total cost of living is $33,000. That's the poverty line.

Then what the government did was create a whole bunch of staircase incentives to get people from about $33,000 to about 2 times that number, or about $65,000. After that, you were mostly on your own, where there were no real benefits like SNAP or other things.

But what this person was saying is, hey, hold on a second: Food costs are now 5% or 6%. If you gross it up for the other components, shouldn't the poverty line be something closer to $140,000? That's a shocking claim.

I spent a little bit of time looking into it. He has subsequently come back and refined some of the things he said. I think he may have written it in a heated moment.

For example, when he looked at that number, he wasn't looking at national averages. He was looking at a bunch of data from a high-cost suburb of New York City. I think it was Essex County.

If you look at food costs, transportation, energy, housing, and childcare in other places that are more like a median American city—the example that I think other people were using was Lynchburg, Virginia, just as an example—it does change pretty drastically.

You can use this thing called the MIT Living Wage Calculator, which we did. If you're in Lynchburg, Virginia, the income required for a family of 4 to meet all expenses there is not $140,000, but about $93,000. That's still quite a big difference.

When you double-click into where these variances come from, a lot of it looks like it's around housing and childcare. I didn't appreciate how much and how expensive childcare has actually become, anywhere between $1,000 and $3,000 per month, which is obviously a lot of money.

The other thing is that his original article was claiming that if you're above $33,000 but under $65,000, you're actually better off staying at $33,000 because every time you go up, you actually lose a benefit. So the net effect is that you are becoming poorer.

It turns out that math was actually false. When you calculate the net resources—meaning income plus benefits minus taxes and expenses—a family actually does earn more in disposable resources as it steps up the staircase than a family that's earning less.

There is a very specific part of what he said, though, which I think we should focus on. There is an area between $45,000 a year and $63,000 a year that actually looks like a bit of a stagnation zone.

To the extent that one is to read this article, take away the buzzy title and whatnot. The important thing is to narrowly focus on this one issue: We do have some policy failures in this zone, where earning an extra dollar often results in losing a dollar of benefits like SNAP and other things.

But that's a good thing to know, because now we can narrowly say, okay, what can states and the federal government do for people in just this part of the valley, this sort of death valley?

The last thing is, the article was saying, look, there is no real middle class. There are the people who are above $140,000, and then there's everybody else in poverty. If you look at the census data and the percentage of Americans who are struggling, the percentage of those who earn between 100% and 200% of poverty has actually fallen.

The good news is that the American economy seems to be doing a good job of not just getting people out of poverty, but getting people out of that struggling bracket, out of that death valley, and into a place where they're making 200% of the poverty line. So they're moving up.

The article was important because I do think it starts to say, look, this affordability thing has become a buzzword. A lot of people on the left and the right are using it to try to implement and affect policy. It's really important for us to be grounded in the facts of it.

The facts are that child care costs have become an overwhelming burden for many families. We probably need to figure out a way to deal with that. Housing costs are out of control. For younger people, student debt is problematic. But on the other side, the American economy still does an incredible job of getting people from those lower rungs to multiple hundreds of percent of that poverty line and getting them on their way.

We just need to figure out how to push people up that staircase faster. It feels like this dovetails, Cham, with a discussion we had a couple of weeks ago, when a viral clip of Ben Shapiro was talking about, hey, just opt out of New York City, opt out of San Francisco, and this whole thing looks completely different.

The idea of somebody who is up-and-coming living in Manhattan or San Francisco is a bit crazy. In other countries, we don't look at living in Paris, Hong Kong, or Dubai as where you start your career and live in the city center.

Yeah, Friedberg, you're saying people like us would move. I'm not sure.

The point I'm making is that defining a poverty line for San Francisco versus Austin or Houston is incredibly different because the cost of living is dramatically different—2x, 3x, 4x. The cost of a nanny in San Francisco or New York is dramatically different than if you live 30 minutes outside of a city center.

One of the challenges America faces is that government programs create an anchor. They are a shackle. They hold people back, even though they were supposed to be support payments. The problem with this, which this article highlights, is that the supposed support payments actually create an incentive or a challenge in moving up the rung, or up the ladder.

It's probably the case that it is a lot easier to move up the income ladder if you're in certain parts of the country than if you're in most of the country. Most of the country is seeing stagnating wages, but people still feel the effects of inflation. These government programs keep them stuck in the position that they're in.

This is the spiral of socialism. The government programs that are meant to provide support to people require an increase in taxation. That revenue has to come from somewhere. That taxation ultimately leads to an attrition of economic value in that region, and then you have to increase taxation more. Then you end up in this spiral, and we're seeing this now not just in New York, where Mamdani is proposing to increase taxes, but across the entire West Coast.

We talked about the 5% billionaire tax that's being proposed as a constitutional amendment to go on the ballot in November. There's also a major challenge underway in Oregon, where the governor is now trying to figure out how to keep businesses in the state. The CEO of Columbia Sportswear, one of the biggest employers in the state, came out this week saying that his advisors have recommended that he leave the state.

In Washington, there is a proposed bill right now to implement a 5% tax on the payroll of employees making over $125,000 per year. Microsoft, Amazon, Costco, and some of the other big employers in that state are now trying to figure out what they should do.

In California, as you guys know, in the last couple of quarters, Tesla, Chevron, McKesson, Oracle, Charles Schwab, CBRE, and Hewlett Packard have all left the state. Palantir and SpaceX—I could go down this list. As the tax burden becomes too high on those companies and there's an alternative to them in the country, they'll leave.

Then you have this spiral that happens where the people who are in that state say, “Wait a second. There's no jobs. There's no income gain. We need to increase taxation.” The tax bills get passed.

Norway passed a wealth tax in 2022. The wealth tax was supposed to raise $146 million of incremental revenue per year. Instead, what happened? $54 billion of net worth left the country, and they actually had a $448 million tax loss. The taxes declined rather than—

Did they reverse it afterward, or—

No, I'm actually not sure about the state of Norway. Microsoft's president, Brad Smith, has said that tech jobs are going to leave Washington State if this payroll tax gets passed.

This is the cycle that's underway. It starts with the government spending. If we didn't have the government spending the way it does, with the government running a deficit—California is now expected to have a $50 billion-plus deficit—then they wouldn't need to increase taxes.

This is the core motivation: once you're hooked on the government for some sort of benefit, it's very hard to unhook yourself. It's very hard for a company, a union, or an organization to unhook itself. It definitionally becomes a spiral. You will not give up that benefit, so you have to spend incrementally more and more and more. As you raise taxes, you end up losing the tax base, and it becomes a deficit spiral.

That's what leads to socialism. We have seen it time and again. It's not a big revolution. It's not like you go from socialism to democratic capitalism with a revolution in the streets. Socialism emerges slowly. It's like a quiet sort of hum, and then it becomes a roar. All of a sudden, you're a frog in a pot and you don't realize you're being boiled.

Pull this up. This clip is from Episode 7 of All-In:

“I don't think democracies end with a bang. I think they end with a whimper. I think that's been the case historically. No democracy has lasted forever; our democracy in the U.S. has lasted longer than many.

“Democracies ultimately enable freedom of operation and free markets that result in greater progress than any other governing system. The problem with progress is that progress is asymmetric. You have some people who progress at a much greater rate than most, and it is that delta that motivates the end of that system ultimately.

“While everyone in the United States—or the average, and even the bottom quartile, of the population in the U.S.—is better off than they were 50 years ago in terms of income, health care, shelter, access to food, and access to all these things, the top 1% of the U.S. is further ahead than the median. It is that delta that motivates the end of democracy. That is what is then perceived to be unfair about this governing system, and that ultimately results in fascism or socialism.

“Fascism results in socialism, and socialism ultimately restricts anyone from progressing. That's why fascism and socialism ultimately end up in some sort of democratic outcome. It is a cycle. We're in this awkward phase of trying to figure out what the hell we're going to be next.

“I don't think that awkward phase is realized in the next presidential term, but it is going to be realized in our lifetime. I think that's where we're headed.”

Midterms are probably going to go to the Democrats in the House. I think you're seeing Ro Khanna and Gavin Newsom—yesterday, on stage at DealBook, Newsom talked about redistributing wealth. Ro Khanna is talking about redistributing wealth.

This is becoming the Democratic Party line, and they're going to end up trying to seize this moment to take these socialist principles because everyone is feeling the burn. They're feeling the loss of benefits. They're feeling the lack of progress. They're having a tough time moving up the income ladder, and they're having a tough time paying their bills.

This is the moment where this democratic socialist movement takes root. Probably by 2028, the presidential nominee is going to be not necessarily a self-declared, but probably a referenceable, socialist.

Best advice: have 2 plans. One, a state that is committed to capitalism—Texas comes to mind. Number 2, you kind of have to have a country as a backup plan in case this goes across the whole country.

7. The Wealth Tax Spiral

Have you guys been tracking the California wealth tax? As a former California resident, I'm curious how you're interpreting these recent moves.

I think we're all seriously thinking about moving out. I mean, it's kind of crazy.

But did you see—I think Newsom came out and said that he was going to oppose it. Is that right?

But it doesn't matter, because if California voters vote it in, it goes immediately into effect.

Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth here. I think this is a moment to thank Governor Newsom for representing the interests of tech oligarchs like us. We really appreciate you coming out against this wealth tax.

Thank you.

So, thank you.

We really appreciate it, on behalf of all the tech oligarchs. Thank you for opposing this wealth tax.

In fact, the All-In podcast endorses Gavin Newsom's support of billionaires and centimillionaires everywhere. He supports all of us equally—even the poor centimillionaires, as well as the billionaires, and even the decabillionaires.

Thank you for standing up against the Bernie Sanders–AOC wing of the party.

Yes. If somebody has to stand up against this democratic socialism, Gavin Newsom is the guy.

What do you think happens if they just tax 5% of all net worth and you have a bunch of illiquid private assets? What are you supposed to do?

Chaos.

Yeah. It's going to be a mess. By the way, what that bill says is that you can have a deferral. So you can actually defer the tax payment, but you have to have it booked that year. You can defer it into 1/5th, payable per year for 5 years. That's not really a deferral; that's just installments, and I think they said at 5% to 7% interest.

Let's just say that we could do a financing for something that we've started, but all of a sudden, what is a financing? It's nothing. It's somebody's guess about future value. It has nothing to do with today's value. But if a financing for a company all of a sudden would trigger a bunch of phantom tax that's due—

Right.

That—I mean, I'll be honest, I don't have money sitting around to pay 5% of an imputed valuation of a company that I'm in the midst of building.

Look at what Sacks just talked about. He had to sell his private assets at a 50% discount.

Oh, I would have to. Exactly. So you create this negative, reflexive downward spiral.

And it doesn't stop there. Think about where this goes. Yes, that's a problem for rich people. Great. No one gives a shit about us. No one gives a shit about people who have to sell highly valued private stock. But where does this go?

In the proposed billionaire tax, it actually gives power and authority to the California state legislature to redo this wealth tax at a different level and a different rate in the future. Think about what that does. It now gives property-seizure rights to the California state legislature to set a value level. So anyone now who's got over $100 million in net worth, then it becomes over $10 million, and then anyone with a $1 million net worth—the state can take 5% of your assets every year. Very quickly, it becomes the process by which socialism and the socialization of assets seized by the government is realized.

So what's the bulwark on this? How—

This is why I've been saying for years this is the direction we're headed, because the—

I give you the victory. Congrats.

But the root cause of it is government spending.

I think it's pretty straightforward. You just move to a state that is committed to capitalism and—

But then it becomes a federal decision.

And then, if that doesn't work, you're going to need to have an escape hatch to Dubai. We have a problem in this country, and the problem is too much progress.

Too much progress too fast has led to a distribution of capital that is so asymmetric that Gavin Newsom said onstage yesterday that 10% of the population own 2/3 of the assets. That may or may not seem right to you, but that is the reality of what happens when you have progress, when you build technology companies, when you build car companies, when you build—when America wins globally.

You say America, but it's not all Americans. And this is the point. This is what's going on.

Those of us who are on this Zoom and our cohort of friends—

—are the ones who have mostly benefited from America, quote-unquote, winning.

The rest of America has been left behind.

True.

And the mechanism for recapture, the mechanism for restoration of equality, as everyone views it, is these measures, these voting measures, these elected officials.

Let me give it to you. I understand that's how people feel, and it is true that we have this disparity in wealth. I think the counterargument that most people would make is, well, what is our unemployment rate? How many people around the world are trying to get into this country? And what is the status of folks coming up in this country?

If we didn't have the problem with housing, education, and health care—those are the big 3. That's what I think this is really about. If you solve housing, which was solved in Texas, Florida, and Nevada because they let you build supply, people don't feel as bad about their lot in life. They don't feel as bad about their progress.

If we solved tuition and paired it, like we've talked about countless times here, with loans that matched the outcomes, we would not have this. And if people didn't feel the fear of going bankrupt from health care, I think we would have a much different country.

I think that's what the referendum is going to be in 2028: those 3 issues. If you're going to be president, you've got to solve housing, get people out of the way, and build housing stock. Number 2, you've got to give people some basic health care so they don't feel they're going to go bankrupt. Number 3, you've got to fix education. Those are the 3 horsemen of the apocalypse and socialism.

In my opinion, we will solve this problem.

I think you're too rational. The way politics works is you find a group to blame, and you blame them, and that's how you get elected.

The group runs for fucking president.

The group to blame is going to be tech and the elite.

Well, I got a kitchen cabinet, by the way. We'll just run it as the Fantastic Four. I'll be the figurehead, and then we'll just sit there and solve these 3 problems.

If and when I run for president, I'm going to start 10 new cities with 1 million houses in each. That's going to be the number 1 priority. Number 2 priority is universal health care for everybody using technology: GLP-1s, DEXA, 3D scanners, Prenuvo, whatever.

And then number 3—I mean, just trade schools. Let's make trade schools free. We just talked about electricians. We talked about Generation T and Toolbelt. Let's make trade schools free, or make them $20,000. You can pay it back over 20 years—$1,000 a year, no interest. Come up with that. That's the platform that wins versus, “Let's raise taxes to 60%.”

Because if you raise taxes to 60%, I'll tell you what's going to happen: people are going to retire and stop investing in companies. It's not worth it to go to work and give 60% or 70% of your income to the government. People will just stop working, which is what happened in Europe. People are just like, “Screw it. I'll just be rich. I'll stop investing.”

It sucks, man. I think it sucks.

I think there's a clear path out. There is a clear path out. Solve the 3 big—

I think AI is a path if we get that leverage into the hands of every person in the United States and the world. If we get abundant free energy through new energy systems, and if we can extend human lifespan and healthspan, I think those are the 3 abundance vectors.

And if those 3 vectors hit, I think all bets are off, and we can get out of this nasty spiral. But I do think we have the choice every day: do we want to go into the Enlightenment, or do we want to go into the Dark Ages? I keep saying that.

Let's solve those 3 big problems.

I think Jason just announced he's running for president.

Is Jeff Bezos going to be your running mate?

Go ahead.

JCal is running.

He did say—

Bezos could be your VP.

Oh.

Oh, no, wait—Jamie Dimon and Bezos.

Go to boosted.com if you want to buy merch. I got this great pink hat on.

The pink hat. Oh, man.

We're also vested in your success when you didn't allow any of us to invest in your company. Thanks, bestie.

Yeah, we all feel so vested. I supported Friedberg for the last 5 years, made him famous, and all I got was an Ohalo hat. How about you, Chamath?

You got a quarter of the equity?

You got a hat?

I got a hat. And I invested in his 3 companies that failed. I got a hat, but I have no Ohalo. Can you just give us 10 bips each in Ohalo so we can end this?

No, I'll take a hat. I'll take a free hat.

You'll take the hat or 10 bips? How about 5 bips and a hat?

I'll take a hat. I'll take some advice.

Don't tell people you're running for president. That's my tip for you.

I'm being facetious. Parker, do you have a mug?

Gentlemen, I have to go. Love you. Take care.

All right, everybody. Love you, besties. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Besties are gone.

That is my dog taking your driveways.

Oh, man. My Asher will eat.

We should all just get a room and have one big, huge orgy, because they're all just useless. It's like this sexual tension that you just need to release somehow.

Your feet.

That's going to be good.