Throwing Stones: We’re All Flawed
For people in Silicon Valley, Chamath Palihapitiya has long been a controversial personality. A rags to riches story, & fellow Canuck come to Silicon Valley. Having made his first fortune at Facebook as the guy who led growth there, he parlayed that billion into several billion via ownership of Golden State Warriors and investing in many public and private investments via his Social Capital vehicle. Known for being outspoken, you either loved him or hated him. I admired him for his intelligence and for calling out the many hypocrisy and unspoken truths in Silicon Valley.
But perhaps what has tarnished his reputation is his flogging of SPACs during 2020 and 2021 which many saw as a pump and dump scheme.
Eric Newcomer wrote about this:
“He lent his reputation to a slew of companies going public via his special purpose acquisition companies. He was the ruinous SPAC king.
Now, almost a year after calling two SPACs quits, he’s still in denial that he was the pied piper who enticed retailed investors into betting on speculative, money-losing companies. He has said he made roughly $750 million by throwing his reputation behind the stocks, taking them public via SPACs that he helmed, and then selling shares on the public markets. He hyped the stocks, he sold his shares, and he made a profit while the retail investors who trusted him lost money.”
He has gotten much criticism of this online and offline. Some of it was very much justified.
I’ve drawn several lessons from this. One: the higher, richer and more prominent you are, the more of a higher standard you have to live and act by. Or at least pretend to follow. Either that or go “Anon” or “stealth wealth.” If you choose being well known, you better watch value your reputation over the short term money or else you will get taken down. Or at minimum attacked.
The second lesson is that most of us should look in the mirror before you cast stones. It’s so easy to attack someone online behind a keyboard. It's one of the worst things to come out of the internet.
If we are honest, everyone has made mistakes and bad calls. There are many things I regret doing myself due to bad judgment, desperation or stupidity and ignorance coming up. The point is not to make the bad calls on the big important decisions like where you live, who you marry and who you do business with and how you do it.
Why? There really is karma in the world. If you treat people badly, word gets around fast. What you put out in the world comes back to you. This is both as an individual or organization. There is direct correlation on how a company is rated on Glassdoor and how they do in the long run. There is always a reckoning.
I don’t know about you but I want to sleep well at night. I do not want to be looking over my shoulders all the time just for ill gotten gains. Most people eventually get what they deserve in the end.