Thread by @ashkan

1/ There is no honor anymore. 
I've tried to avoid chiming in on @chamath & the "man in arena" meme; via @buccocapital

but a couple of folks asked me for my thoughts... so here are my general thoughts on the broader issues.

https://twitter.com/buccocapital/status/1697725750827258008?s=20

2/ Just in case you're wondering. #Chamath Palihapitiya is a successful executive and investor who:
- was born in Sri Lanka,
- moved to Canada
- got an Education in Canada,
- parlayed that for gigs in banking (Nesbitt Burns)
- before stints at AOL and Facebook, where presumably he made a ton of money thanks to Mark Zuckerberg's "move fast and break stuff" ethos, before raising money to invest.

So for the context of the "man in the arena" theme, if Chamath became a "made man," conceivably it was at Facebook, in some mid level manager/vp role... not as founder/CEO... which is fine... but devoid of proper context in this discussion, is worth mentioning.

Eventually, if my memory serves me right, he gave some/all of the investors' money back to manage his own because he didn't want to deal with LPs. That deserves some props, and balls.

3/ But, eventually, in the ZIRP environment, he realized capital was cheap, leverage was sweet, so he came across SPACs. Wrote about SPACs here:


Essentially, SPACs allowed you to raise $ for a private company as a target buyout, and then bypass the IPO process - which was expensive and left mucho dinero in the table for founders.

In theory, during ZIRP, it wasn't the craziest of ideas.

Eventually, our boy Chamath may have regretted giving back his investors' money and conceivably realized that SPACs were an effective way to gain leverage... now if you've seen this movie, you know that the SPACs that Chamath did poorly.
contextisking.com/2021/01/20/med…

4/ But before we go the SPACs and recent banter...

The first time I re-tuned in to what #Chamath was saying was when he said Mastercard and VISA would get destroyed by fintech startups.


Both Visa and Mastercard are doing fine, to put it mildly... hitting all time highs, while fintechs have largely taken it on the chin due to a mix of crypto market meltdown, and the incumbents not being as clueless as some would have suggested.

If I may be candid, I'm surprised no one has called him on that forecast, but I digress.benzinga.com/amp/content/24…

5/ In any case, that bad call has largely gone unnoticed. Fast forward to today: @chamath 's main sin was for pimping a handful of SPACs that largely got annihilated once they hit the public markets.

Any humble person would have pointed to the general meltdown in markets, but because Chamath was casting himself as the next Warren Buffett,

invariably people smelled - and called - bullshit:

6/ Instead of admitting that he perhaps wasn't the next Oracle of O-nything, Chamath gaslit his followers by pretending that he had never made such claim...
but the web's memory isn't so forgiving...
Undeterred, Chamath double-downed by also claiming that SPACs were ultimately harmless, even though any investor that invested in his basket of SPACs would have lost their life savings... while Chamath pocketed hundreds of millions in the shill.

In case you're wondering, by luck more than smarts, the only SPAC of those I ever invested in was SOFI, though after seeing their CEO buy a ton of shares (I missed Chamath's pump early on).

https://twitter.com/chasingeureka/status/1671808954597515264?s=20

7/ Either way, instead of laying low and to paraphrase Patrick Roy - letting his millions tune out the noise - Chamath shrugged off the valid criticism by claiming he was the "man in the arena." Which takes me to my ultimate beef in this discussion.

In case you're wondering about the reference, the Man in the Arena is one of the GOAT quotes about life from Teddy Roosevelt's Citizenship in the Republic speech:

8/ I say this as someone who originally appreciated the Sri Lankan-immigrant-turned-Canadian-student-turned-banker-turned-American-executive-turned investor spiel...

But as an entrepreneur myself, Chamath hasn't actually created anything in the entrepreneurial sense which is where the Man in the Arena has become a battle cry in.

He was lucky to land at AOL and then at FB, and made his riches via Facebook stock. That's all fine. He then proceeded to launch Social Capital (notice the name, even though he eventually lambasted companies for caring about anything socially pertinent - again fine, but pointing out the non-stop gaslighting and shifting of goal posts).

Yes he earned decent returns throughout the 2010s, but history will judge that this was a period of easy returns if you weren't clueless. But if you step into an arena (Facebook) and walk away with vast riches, pretending you're some kind of "man in the arena" amongst entrepreneurs is bullshit.

9/ This is why his @theallinpod co-hosts @jason and @DavidSacks didn't seem to entertain his recent diatribe

because unlike Calacanis and Zacks, Chamath simply doesn't have the entrepreneurial bona fides he aspires to via the "man in the arena" motif.

But that's not my beef... For someone who's so listened to and revered, it would have been nice, and constructive, to hear @chamath show some intellectual honesty and say, for example  “look SPACs seemed like a good idea to raise money fast, avoid the IPO process… but in hindsight it rushed companies onto public investors that maybe weren’t ready.” But no...

https://twitter.com/theallinpod/status/1697602710101782917

10/ Instead, @chamath triples down by pretending to not just be the man in the arena, but a walking zeitgest for having created "meme moments" with assertions such as "not caring about genocide" (who does?) even though his homeland of Sri Lanka has undergone civil wars and genocies.


So this is where we are in 2023 - and not just on @elonmusk 's Twitter/X, but also LinkedIn, where increasingly those with clout and "social capital" provide zero authentic honest insights but instead dish a non-stop dose of bullshit and hyperbole.

The end.

@chamath @theallinpod @Jason @DavidSacks @threadreaderapp unroll