The Real Chamath: The Insecure Child of Refugees Turned SPAC Fraudster
Wouldn't it be nice if all the Silicon Valley immigrants were just a tiny bit more grateful?
“I want the fucking money,” Chamath told students at Stanford’s business school, in 2017. “I will play the goddam game, and I will win.” (Narrator’s voice: He may have won but they didn’t.)
After the crime there is a cover up.
So says René Girard, the Catholic thinker who influenced Peter Thiel and much of Silicon Valley.
Girard might have been speaking about Chamath Palihapitiya, who made millions addicting us and untold millions more gauging the retail investors with fake SPACs.
Chamath is one of the owners of the Golden State Warriors — the San Francisco basketball team — so he’s no stranger to how his words carry tremendous weight.
He essentially said that he doesn’t care about human rights in China because, in his telling, America mistreats blacks.
It’s savvy politics for Chamath, at least one of whose SPACed out companies is under investigation by the DOJ.
You can almost see him making the calculus. Criticize your white co-host Jason Calcanis for not doing anything about the problems of black America while ingratiating yourself to black basketball fans and Chinese slave holders who sew the very sneakers that those fans buy.
Here’s what he said.
“Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs. … You bring it up because you care and I think it’s nice that you care,” is what he told fellow venture capitalist and podcast co-host Jason Calacanis. “The rest of us don’t care. I’m just telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line.”
It wasn’t below Canada’s line when all those years ago young Chamath and his family were allowed to stay in Canada after his dad, a Sri Lanka official, simply decided that he wasn’t going to go back home. His family went to public schools and Chamath hustled his way.
Later America welcomed the refugee-immigrant with open arms, something he failed to note in his false moral equivalence comparing the human rights record of China and America.
“As a refugee, my family fled a country with its own set of human rights issues so this is something that is very much part of my lived experience,” he said. “To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere."
Hey Chamath. Here’s an idea: How about showing some gratitude to the country which took you in?
Maybe you and all the other immigrant (or children of immigrant) tech executives could be, you know, thankful that the U.S. has created this land of opportunity that you’re now enjoying?
When your father had a choice he chose to seek refugee status in Canada, and not China.
You went to the very best Canadian schools and that deep state of deep state projects — AOL — offered Chamath a role as a vice president when he was in his twenties!
Does he say thank you? Nope.
You can learn a lot from the obituaries. Here’s the obit of Chamath’s father.
In his All In podcast Chamath argued that he’s not going to focus on human rights elsewhere.
But his father, Gamage, discussed what was going on in Sri Lanka often. He wrote letters to the editor and was a sort of eminence gris of the Southeast Asian ex-pat community.
Gamage also appreciate the freedoms of the country he was proud to call his new home.
“This is a compassionate society that I am living in now,” he said in July 1986 when he decided to stay with his family in Canada.
He supported teaching Buddhism and wanted to encourage everyone to be more civilized. He singled out greed, desire, anger, cruelty, hatred and ignorance as major problems.
But greed, desire, and ignorance are his son Chamath’s business practices.
Indeed Chamath is a poster child for dumping poor performing SPACs onto the retail investor. It’s so bad that there’s even an urban dictionary — “a dirty Chamath” — which you can peruse once you’ve drawn the shades. You were warned and this is a family-friendly Substack. Do remember to clear your browser afterward.
There’s so much fraud it’s absurd.
There’s Metromile.
And Clover.
And Open Door.
He promised the retail investor riches but made them worse off!
By his own admission he was obsessed with the billionaires list. He wanted to be among them and now he is. But what sort of billionaire will he be? The kind that takes? Or the kind that gives back?
Both the NBA and Silicon Valley are going to have to make a choice: America and human rights or compromised, Chinese-induced slavery.
I used to feel good about going to cheer on my local teams but now it feels awful.
When billionaire venture capitalist (and part owner of the Warriors) Mark Stevens shoved NBA player Kyle Lowry during the finals there were calls to divest his shares.
But with Chamath? There’s a simple statement from the Warriors PR department that Chamath doesn’t reflect their views.
OK then!