Influencer and tech stock investor Chamath Palihapitiya appeared on CNBC on Tuesday, where he confessed he’s gone from a wealthy hater of President Donald Trump to his biggest champion.
In an appearance on “Squawk Box,” Palihapitiya cheered on Joe Kernen, “You’re 100 percent right on Trump. He’s fantastic. Unbelievable person. Very smart on top of it. Open-minded … great president, so far.”
He began by explaining that most people are merely too dumb to formulate their own opinions on the matter because they’re already too siloed.
“You know what’s so funny? I mean, like, people can be lazy and reductive. There’s enough people that I — that I hear that are lazy and reductive, and they’re going to end up where they’re supposed to end up in a little cul-de-sac of their own making,” said Palihapitiya.
While he once opposed Trump, the billionaire said that the way the media treats the president made him change because they were simply too mean.
“The reality is that most of us were lied to by the media about President Trump,” Palihapitiya said. “And if you just go back to the source material, you should take away two things — one, he didn’t say half the things he said, and two, why did these other people just fabricate what they wanted to say so that they could essentially assassinate his character?”
He didn’t give specifics about which major press outlets were claiming Trump said, which turned out not to be true. He wants to see some kind of punishment for it.
He continued, noting, “I think that that second thing is completely unacceptable in America and there’s still been no repercussions, really.”
After he changed his position on Trump, Palihapitiya said that the two quickly struck up a friendship.
Andrew Ross Sorkin agreed that he, too, finds Trump to be charismatic. His question for Palihapitiya was about where he disagrees with Trump on the issues.
Palihapitiya named the DOGE cuts as the first issue he takes with the administration. Another he named was the way in which research was funded at universities. Trump got into lawsuits with several universities, claiming that if they didn’t kill the diversity policies, he’d withhold millions in research funding.
He further walked through his agreement with Trump over the Iran war, saying that Trump’s repeated phrase “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon” has hit home for him. Prior to Trump’s tearing up the denuclearization treaty, Iran did not have a nuclear weapon.
Palihapitiya then claimed that most of the people who hate Trump are those with “Trump derangement syndrome.” If they could look beyond the accusations of assault and slow withdrawal of human rights and reproductive freedom, then they could see how “right” Trump is.
The conversation was part of a larger debate over Palihapitiya’s promotion of SPACs, a Special Purpose Acquisition Company. Viewers sent in hate posts on social media accusing him of making money off of “the game” when investors lost. But Palihapitiya maintained that not all were losers. The CEOs and the company’s employees scored big, he said.
Sorkin called them “the investor class,” which Palihapitiya found to be offensive.
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