The Bloomberg article about Chamath Palihapitiya making the rounds on Twitter today has the attention grabbing headline of “The King of SPACs Wants You to Know He’s the Next Warren Buffett“.
While he doesn’t explicitly say this, he makes reference to wanting to get to a Berkshire model for his holdings. He then goes on to disparage Buffett by saying no one listens to the greatest investor of all-time anymore.
“Nobody’s going to listen to Buffett,” Palihapitiya, the founder of Social Capital, said in a Bloomberg “Front Row” interview. “But there has to be other folks that take that mantle, take the baton and do it as well to this younger generation in the language they understand.”
Chamath Palihapitiya Bloomberg Interview February 12, 2021
“Do it as well to this younger generation in the language they understand” – he makes it sound like the younger generation isn’t capable of understanding anything that isn’t in a meme format or more than 140 characters.
And maybe he is right based on him YOLO’ing GME and posting shirtless selfies on Twitter.
I’m not sure being in the middle of the GME fiasco is worthy of being the “next Warren Buffett”. I guess in an ironic way Chamath taught the youngins a valuable lesson about the pain of being a bag-holder. All this being said, good on Chamath for donating all the proceeds to the Barstool Fund.
So is Chamath the next Warren Buffet?
In his 2019 Social Capital Annual Letter, Chamath closes it out by making a comparison to Social Capital’s first 8 year performance to Berkshire’s.
I’m scratching my head a bit as I’m not really sure what he’s going after here. He seems to be saying he’s had better returns than Buffett did. Sure, relative to each other. But relative to the broader market, it’s not even close. Berkshire outperformed the SandP (h/t Ross Gerber) by 3.6x and Social Capital was only 2.2x. But I forgot the young folks are really dumb according to Chamath and only see blue bar bigger than purple bar. So joke’s on me I guess.
Clearly, Chamath has been successful. He claims his net worth is between $10-15 billion, so he cares not about my opinion. I congratulate him on all his success. I’m sure he smells terrific.
