Trump verdict, COVID Cover-up, Crypto Corner, Salesforce drops 20%, AI correction?

David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya were personally hosting a Trump fundraiser, and Sacks said Trump wanted to appear on All-In. The podcast had already hosted or fundraised for RFK Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy and Dean Phillips, while Biden had been invited without responding.

The COVID inquiry produced unusually concrete evidence that NIH officials discussed evading public-records searches. Fauci adviser David Morens wrote that he learned how to make emails “disappear,” used Gmail and altered searchable names; HHS subsequently cut EcoHealth Alliance funding and barred its president from federal funding.

The episode itself did not establish that COVID came from a laboratory, despite several hosts speaking as though it had. Friedberg explicitly challenged Sacks’s certainty, noting published research supporting a possible natural origin for the furin-cleavage-site features and saying more investigation was required.

Trump’s 34-count New York conviction produced a genuine split over the prosecution rather than a uniform panel reaction. Sacks called the felony theory novel and politically motivated; Jason Calacanis explained the falsified-records-plus-election-crime theory as legally coherent while also saying the prosecution itself was politically motivated.

Salesforce lost roughly $40 billion in market value after missing quarterly revenue expectations by only about $40 million. Revenue was $9.1 billion and free cash flow reached $6 billion, but 7% projected quarterly growth prompted debate over whether AI is structurally commoditizing expensive enterprise software.

Chamath’s AI thesis contained an important tension: startups can become dramatically leaner, but established companies are not yet seeing comparable organization-wide gains. He said individual adopters may become 50–100% more productive, yet resistance to new workflows leaves blended productivity improvement at large incumbents in the single digits.

The panel increasingly viewed the AI boom’s immediate problem as spending outrunning monetization. After Dell fell about 20% after hours, Chamath argued enormous AI expenditures cannot continue without incremental revenue, while Friedberg warned that weaker GDP growth and near-5% long-term Treasury yields could compound pressure on technology valuations.

Wences Casares was the person Chamath credited with introducing him to Bitcoin in 2010, prompting an order for $1 million worth. Revisiting that relationship, Chamath’s team calculated that Bitcoin had risen roughly 45×, 28× and 8× eighteen months after its first three halvings.