In conversation with Vivek Ramaswamy

Chamath Palihapitiya and Natalie married in Portofino, with Jason Calacanis secretly serving as officiant and the gathering doubling as a high-stakes poker week. Chamath said he won a $1.2 million pot, an unusually candid glimpse of the wealth surrounding the event.

David Sacks said Craft Ventures requires investment-team members to have operating experience, ideally as founders, because downturns expose the weakness of passive “cheerleader” VCs. He expects many bull-market entrants without a real value proposition to lose LP money and fail to raise again.

Chamath said his venture business entered the downturn with roughly 31–32% gross IRR, then saw IRR “fall off a cliff” as distributions dried up. The lack of cash returns pushed him toward selling holdings earlier than he otherwise would, illustrating the liquidity pressure hidden by paper valuations.

Calacanis said Jon Favreau told him he received zero Disney equity for The Mandalorian and Disney+, while Todd Phillips reportedly waived his Joker fee for equity. Their contrast made the ownership gap between corporate executives and valuable creative talent unusually concrete.

Chamath said a major reason he sold his Golden State Warriors stake was the valuation reaching about $5.2 billion; he also worried that players were not sharing sufficiently in equity creation. He argued unions should seek ownership-like upside while allowing more flexibility when businesses weaken.

Friedberg treated the South Korean LK-99 room-temperature-superconductor paper as potentially enormous but explicitly unverified, noting condensed-matter physicists had already emailed him skepticism. He said successful replication at ambient pressure would rank among the century’s most important physics discoveries.

Chamath disclosed that he and three others had spent roughly two-and-a-half years using machine learning to search materials space for better low-cost LFP battery chemistry. He said the project had just raised substantial funding and had a breakthrough they expected to announce within weeks.