Chamath Palihapitiya: There’s more to investing than making money

The single biggest thing that America has right now going against it is that we have four or five companies—Facebook, Apple Amazon, Microsoft, Google—that suck up the enormity and the overwhelming majority of all talented, technical human capital ... If you are a smart young kid... how do you turn around to your family and say 'I'm going to go and work at the startup for 80 grand a year, or this nonprofit, or something else versus going and getting paid a million dollars a year at one of these big companies'? It's really impossible.

A whole bunch of services have also cropped up that allow you to find the best grade 5 math teacher, the best grade 6 algebra teacher, the best grade 7 history teacher ... I think, in the 21st century, especially in America, it stands to reason that we should be able to give these incredible teachers— We should pay them like athletes ... These guys should be making 30, 40, 50 million bucks a year, and they should be teaching all American grade 5, grade 6, grade 7 materials. And when you're in school, you should be consuming this video content with incredible local teachers that help supplement and reinforce what these best-in-class folks teach us.

I think that we all are trying our best ... When we forget that, we just act like raging dipshits, but we are all honestly trying our best, everyday. If you keep it in mind, it's amazing how much empathy you can have for other people.

The Federal Reserve has sort of, unfortunately, been derelict in their duty. They now work in this weird contorted way with the Treasury to print and introduce enormous amounts of money into the system. What that's done is financialize every part of our economy—and the problem is there are certain things that should never have been financialized. Flying a rocket should not be financialized. Finding a cure to cancer should not be financialized. Figuring out some great compellingly leap in AI and machine learning should not be financialized.

There's a humanity and an authenticity in just trying to do good by people. And look, you can get really cutthroat and all of a sudden 'make all the money'—it's not a path to happiness.

I'm driven by really trying to figure out who I am and just to have more happy days than unhappy days ... I was chasing other people's definitions of success for so long, and that's what was making me so unhappy.

This is the beginning, not the end, of airborne diseases like [the] coronavirus. COVID-19 will be followed by COVID-20, and COVID-21, and COVID-22, and COVID-35—and these will be pernicious diseases.

The pandemic has really shown to me that our education infrastructure is totally broken.

If I had to be somewhat cynical about my career trajectory, the first 25 years has been, by all measures, successful, but success has come by husbanding information. I had a knowledge edge and we didn't necessarily share that knowledge widely; I knew things that other people didn't know. I think, for the next 50 years of my career, what I would like to do is break down those barriers and share all the knowledge that I've accumulated.

We've bastardized entrepreneurship in America where people think that starting a company needs to mean you become a centibillionaire; otherwise, you failed—and that's just not true. You don't want to be as dysfunctional as it takes to make that much money.

The most important of the 'Ten Crack Commandments' from The Notorious B.I.G is never get high on your own supply, and so I've tried to live that out. The reality is that I had a lot of skills that my parents gave me, but they also burdened me with some enormous insecurities, and it kind of kept me checked.

Progressivism, I think, is a doomed experiment. It's the first initial reaction of an extremely frustrated class of people, but I think what it gets replaced with is pragmatism.

The Middle East actually has one incredible asset going for it in a world of climate change—that is sunlight. It has an enormous amount of sunlight.

I think part of being happy is being able to say things and not being attacked, and not being judged, and not being cancelled, and being able to find a pragmatic way of talking about ideas.

Think about the tens of millions of Americans who are struggling right now. Getting $600 a person—let's say that you have two folks in your household that would qualify; it could be a single mom and a child—$1,200 in January [2021] is going to be a game-changer.

I really haven't met a problem that is really one of capital, and I think that I have more than enough resources to solve all the problems that we're trying to solve except one critical one, which is human capital.

[Warren] Buffett has a saying which is that the way you make money is not timing the market; it's time in the market.