Tech David O. Sacks

Only President Trump could convene so many tech leaders in one place. We had a constructive conversation about how to grow the economy with new infrastructure spending. This will benefit not only software companies but manufacturing, energy, construction, the trades and workers.

congrats team @Polymarket @shayne_coplan !

🚨 All-In Summit Speaker Announcement: Eric Schmidt Eric will join the Besties on stage at the 2025 All-In Summit! Tickets: allin.com/summit 2024 Recap: youtu.be/7mk4URDx-2k

David Sacks: Jerome Powell has been “intensely political” as Fed Chair Sacks: “Powell has been intensely political. I think Trump is right to be frustrated.” “Let's just go back through the history. In the summer of 2021, we got that 5% shock inflation print.” “And it was Powell who played along with Biden and Yellen that this was transitory.” “And that transitory narrative they used to basically avoid any change of policy for six months.” “Now, what was the importance of that timing?” “Well, Powell was renominated for a second term by Biden on November 22nd, 2021.” “So, in other words, he went along with this whole transitory narrative to get renominated, and then a week later on November 30th, he said it was time to retire the word transitory.” Jason: “ Do you think that was incompetence, or do you think that was political, Sacks?” Sacks: “ It was obviously political because think about it, if Powell had stood up and said, ‘No, I think Biden and Yellen are wrong, and this isn't transitory,’ it would've been contradicting the Biden Administration and it probably would've cost him getting renominated for a second term.” “And it caused an asset bubble in 2021, it caused the 9% inflation that we had the following year, and it caused the crash that we saw in 2022 and 2023.” “ Let me give you another one. Powell started the rate cutting cycle last fall with a 50 basis point cut right before the election shortly after Elizabeth Warren sent him a letter demanding a cut.” “ The bottom line here is Elizabeth Warren was saying that Powell needed to cut dramatically when inflation was at 2.5%.” “ Now, Elizabeth Warren is saying that Powell needs to stand up to Trump and not cut rates.” “So you can see the hypocrisy.”

The job loss narrative is wildly overhyped. The AI boom is increasing occupancy in San Francisco.

🚨 All-In Summit Speaker Announcement: Rick Caruso Rick will join the Besties on stage at the 2025 All-In Summit! Tickets: allin.com/summit 2024 Recap: youtu.be/7mk4URDx-2k @RickCarusoLA

🚨 All-In Summit Speaker Announcement: Mark Cuban Mark will join the Besties on stage at the 2025 All-In Summit! Tickets: allin.com/summit 2024 Recap: youtu.be/7mk4URDx-2k @mcuban

“It used to be good. I don’t listen anymore.”

.@theallinpod: "The Commerce Department did something pretty exceptional. They said, 'We're going to start publishing data to the blockchain. All the GDP data is now going into a blockchain.' ... All kinds of economic measures, scrubbed for anonymity, should be published so that you can have pricing oracles that actually tell you what's happening in real time, and the markets will then react and set rates in real time."

DAVID SACKS: “[Jerome Powell] went along with this whole ‘transitory’ narrative to get re-nominated by Biden … and it's the only reason he's in the job right now. It caused an asset bubble in 2021, and it caused the 9% inflation that we had the following year.”

🚨Should the US create a Sovereign Wealth Fund? Chamath and Friedberg discuss Chamath: “I think that we should start a sovereign wealth fund right now.” “The great news is that these Trump tariff deals come with huge amounts of capital that these other countries have committed to spending inside the United States.” “We've exceeded $1T of inbound capital on the investment side. We get 90% of the upside.” “A lot of that capital should be the seed capital for a sovereign wealth fund.” Friedberg: “The concern I have is anytime we create a new income stream at the federal government, or we have some sort of growing asset that you mark up on the book, someone tends to invest ahead of the curve on that.” “Meaning someone takes that and they're like, ‘Oh, great, I can spend more now.’ I mean, we even saw this in California (with) Gavin Newsom and the budget skyrocketed as the income went up.” “Rather than take the surplus and book it for a rainy day, they went and spent ahead of it, and then all of a sudden they had a huge deficit.” “Which is what happened with Social Security is, it's like, okay, all these people are providing this income every year to the federal government, which they're supposed to be paying into their Social Security Trust Fund, which is gonna go bankrupt sometime between 2030 and 2033.” “But then what happened is we raided the coffers, we took all that money, and we started spending it on random new programs.” “And the problem is, by giving the government more assets, by giving the government more income, we set ourselves up for a circumstance where the federal government, the Congress says, ‘Great, we got more money to spend. Let's do X, Y, and Z program and let's do this. Let's build a high speed train. Let's do this. These are all good for American people.’” “And all of a sudden, you don't actually solve any real problems. And this is why my argument is that we should use it to fill the hole that we have, for example, in Social Security.” “And that needs to become an asset that's strictly used as an offset on Social Security, because if you don't put it in that box, it just becomes another spending mechanism.”

Chamath: “What does the Fed actually do in 2025?” Chamath lays out the Fed’s four core responsibilities, and if they should continue doing them in 2025: – Lender of Last Resort ❌ – Monetary Policy ❌ – Banking Regulations ✅ – Clearinghouse ✅ “We have an extremely vibrant, and complicated, and interconnected $130T global economy.” “It's moving at the speed of light.” “The Fed gets together once a month, tries to divine what monetary policy, what the money supply should look like, based on data that is often incorrect.” “We see that in the BLS data, we see that in the GDP prints, we see it in all of the inputs.” “So I think the real question is, there are certain parts of what the Fed does that they can continue to do, and I think everybody would probably say it's an okay thing.” “Could they be a lender of last resort? Personally, in my opinion, no.” ❌ “I think that Treasury does a better job, and I think that Treasury has a better mechanism to get the American taxpayer a win than the Fed does.” “Do they actually create monetary policy and price stability? I would say that the capital markets and the free markets actually do a better job of that.” ❌ “They define much more what the spread is. I think SOFR is a much better rate mechanism than the Fed funds rate at this point.” “Do they do banking supervision and regulation? Yeah, they probably do a reasonably good job of that.” ✅ “Do they do a good job as a payment system and a clearinghouse? Again, probably something that's pretty uncontroversial that they could continue to do.” ✅ “The bigger picture is the two things that are the most dynamic, they are the worst at doing.” “And so I would actually question whether that responsibility should sit with a handful of humans looking at faulty month-old data.”

POD UP! 🚨 -- trump takes on the fed -- us-intel deal -- why corporate bankruptcies are up -- openai's longevity breakthrough -- moose is loose! 🐶 (0:00) bestie intros: the moose is loose at j-cal ranch! (0:46) all-in summit updates, jason's new program (9:45) trump vs the federal reserve: is the fed partisan, what should a modern fed look like? (36:45) us-intel deal: sustainability, china comparison, could deals like this save social security? (51:37) us sovereign wealth fund (58:41) why corporate bankruptcies are trending up in 2025 (1:12:12) openai's novel llm-based approach to longevity research

Thank you @FLOTUS @MelaniaTrump for championing the Presidential AI Challenge. Your leadership is inspiring students across the country to embrace AI innovation. Grateful for your dedication to empowering students and educators to lead America in the global AI race!

Many in Washington need to update their assumptions regarding Chinese semiconductor manufacturing capacity. According to FT today, Chinese companies like Huawei, SMIC, and Cambricon are surging production. They will soon be competing with American chips globally. Fortunately, Chinese chips are still behind ours due to a far-sighted decision by the first Trump administration to prevent China from having EUV lithography. That was a wise export control. But other export controls, like the now-rescinded Biden Diffusion Rule, were not. In each case, we must ask the question, does this help the American tech stack dominate the world? What maximizes our global market share? If we look around the world in 5 years and see that the Global South is running on Huawei Cloud Matrix + DeepSeek, for example, that’s not the outcome we want. As President Trump said in his AI speech on July 23: “The last administration was obsessed with imposing restrictions on AI, including extreme restrictions on its exports. As you know, they made it very difficult to export. This alienated American partners and drove even our friends into the arms of China and other countries.” “Under my administration, we will maintain necessary protections for our national security, but we will never forget that the greatest threat of all is to forfeit the race and force our partners into rival technology. We're not going to do that.” Biden’s overzealous regulations were predicated on the assumption that China couldn’t produce enough chips for export, so it didn’t matter how much regulatory burden was imposed on American AI companies. Today’s report exposes the falsity of that view. The U.S. government should help our American AI companies win this global competition. It is time to embrace President Trump’s vision that the American tech stack should dominate the world.

Mic drop by @friedberg.

🚨David Sacks on pre-product AI startups turning down billion-dollar acquisition offers: “There's a lot of people who've never been through a bust cycle before. And if they think that this is the normal state of the world, they're going to be sorely mistaken.” Sacks: “You are seeing founders turning down multi-billion dollar acquisition offers for startups that haven’t even released a product yet.” “As if those types of offers grow on trees. And they don't.” Jason: “You think Mira should have taken the billion dollar offer from Zuck, or Ilya should have taken the $30B, Sacks? I mean, these things never happen.” Sacks: “I guess it depends how much they have in the bank account. They're both OpenAI co-founders, so…” Chamath: “They probably sold a bunch of OpenAI equity at $300B and $500B. They seem like they're free rolling, so they have no incentive to sell.” Sacks: “Which is fine, it's just that there's a lot of people who've never been through a bust cycle before.” “And if they think that this is the normal state of the world, they're going to be sorely mistaken.” “Right now, we're in a part of the cycle where you can justify that valuation based on its strategic value to a multi-trillion dollar market cap company.” “But that only lasts while those companies are in the market for strategic acceleration.” “And if you turn that down, then you have to make your company work on its own as an actual business.” “And to get to a $30B valuation based on fundamentals, that is extraordinarily difficult.” “That implies multiple billions of revenue. Actual revenue.”

Chamath: How the ‘AI Boogeyman’ will cause problems for AI businesses “Our first customer where we delivered enormous gains, we were fired.” “And the reason we were fired was not because the technology wasn't working, but it's because as it goes lower and lower from the board and the CEO into the bowels of the organization, you actually run into huge pushback.” “And I think that there's gonna be that cycle that we have to deal with as well, which is in all of these AI businesses, there's all kinds of stuff that scare people, and there are many people in decision making roles at many of these companies that will have to sort out where's their comfort level.” “That, I think, is a cycle that has yet to play itself out.” “In all of the Fortune 2000, Global 2000, I would not expect that the ‘AI Boogeyman’ that has been created doesn't have some negative ramifications over the next couple of years as well, as this stuff gets sorted.”

David Sacks on Newsom’s Trump Impression: Dems Don't Need Impressions, They Need Better Policies After surging in a couple of polls last week, CA Governor Gavin Newsom pulled ahead as the early favorite for the 2028 Democratic Nominee on Polymarket Jason: “So who gets the nomination? Is any of this even valid in your mind, or is there just too much time between now and then?” Sacks: “I think it's valid in the sense that you're seeing Democrats react positively to what Newsom is doing.” “And what Newsom is doing is mirroring Trump's style in an attempt to give Democrats what they want, which is they want a Trump of their own.” “And despite Democrats feigning objections to Trump's style, this is really what they want. They want someone who they perceive to be a fighter.” “That said, I think there are two problems with presumptively crowning Gavin as the nominee three years in advance.” “One is that what Newsom is doing here is completely performative. Everyone can see that he's acting and he is aping what he thinks is Trump's style. Gavin comes across as being synthetic or plastic, and you don't really have a sense of who the real person is. So one is authenticity.” “The other is that I think that Democrats make a huge mistake if they think that Trump's popularity is based on his style. I mean, it's true that Trump has a trillion dollar personality and that is very helpful in politics.” “But ultimately, I think the reason why Trump has done so well for a decade is because he's been on the right side of a bunch of core issues in American politics that other people just weren't focused on or weren't talking about.” “So until the Democrats confront why they really lost, and the reality is it's because of the policies and it's about the record. And until they're willing to confront those things and change their policies, then I think they're going to continue losing.”

Congrats to Joe Gebbia on becoming the first Chief Design Officer of the United States. In this newly created role, Joe will oversee the redesign of roughly 26,000 federal web portals, many of which are obsolete, so they better serve social security recipients, veterans, and all citizens. As a former cofounder of @Airbnb, @jgebbia could have done anything next but decided to volunteer his time and expertise to public service. Thank you Joe. And thank you to President Trump for creating this new function by executive order and continuing to attract the best talent from the private sector to join his administration. It’s an honor to be part of!