Silicon Valley Won’t Own Up to Its China Problem
In the tech world, Chamath Palihapitiya, the billionaire venture capitalist and investor, is what some like to call a “bomb thrower”—someone who loves to say provocative, incendiary things, no matter the target. In 2017, for example, he said Facebook created “dopamine-driven feedback loops,” even though he’d been an executive at Facebook from 2007 to 2011 and was close with Mark Zuckerberg. Years later, when GameStop’s stock took off like a rocket ship thanks to the WallStreetBets Reddit forum, most investors called the chaos infantile and dangerous. Palihapitiya, however, went on CNBC and Twitter to defend it, saying the shake-up was a much-needed wake-up call to the financial establishment—even though he’s part of that establishment (he’s now worth over a billion dollars and counting, and he’s become a prime example of getting rich via SPAC, the flashy new form of going public).
Photo credit: MICHAEL NAGLE/BLOOMBERG/GETTY
