CNBC Excerpts: Social Capital Founder & CEO, 8090 CEO and “All-In” Podcast Host Chamath Palihapitiya Speaks with CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Today

WHEN: Today, Tuesday, July 14, 2026

WHERE: CNBC's "Squawk Box"

Following are excerpts from the unofficial transcript of a CNBC interview with Social Capital Founder & CEO, 8090 CEO and "All-In" Podcast Host Chamath Palihapitiya on CNBC's "Squawk Box" (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) today, Tuesday, July 14. Following are links to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/14/all-in-podcast-host-chamath-palihapitiya-on-the-current-state-of-ai.html, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/14/it-was-a-huge-mistake-for-me-to-come-on-cnbc-and-talk-about-spacs-says-chamath-palihapitiya.html, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/14/chamath-palihapitiya-on-ca-wealth-tax-proposal-were-better-off-addressing-the-core-problem.html, and https://www.cnbc.com/video/2026/07/14/ai-will-create-more-opportunities-than-it-displaces-says-chamath-palihapitiya.html.

All references must be sourced to CNBC.

PALIHAPITIYA ON THE CURRENT STATE OF AI

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN: We want to bring in our special guest this morning. He is sitting on set watching all of this play out. Hasn't been here in a bit, and we're thrilled to have him back. Chamath Palihapitiya is here. He's the founder and CEO of Social Capital, CEO of 8090, and host, of course, of the "All-In" podcast.

CHAMATH PALIHAPITIYA: Hello Mr. Sorkin.

SORKIN: And you're wearing, you're wearing a suit no less for us.

PALIHAPITIYA: I am. I, my entire job is selling enterprise - that's what I do.

SORKIN: That's what you do. So actually, before we get into anything, and I want to get into all what's happening in the valley, AI, everything. I'm going to go back in time, talk SPACs because people have-

PALIHAPITIYA: Yes, yes.

SORKIN: I know your favorite topics, but but just your take on the IBM situation to the extent that you think it has ramifications in any larger way, or maybe it's just specific to IBM.

PALIHAPITIYA: I think the the thing that we know is there are a handful of companies that are compounding revenue a billion dollars a day, and at some point the downstream ecosystem has to make money as well, and then the ultimate buyer of these tokens also has to make money. And so, at some point, the question has to be asked: If two or three companies are going to generate two, three, $400 billion a year, and it's doubling and tripling every year, where is the rest of this money going to be made, and who is implementing it in such a way where these profits are to be had? And I think you're starting to see a little bit of the wheels come off. Like just at a very basic level, if you think AI is like oil, let's just use this analogy to make it simple. A barrel of crude is what 86 bucks right now.

SORKIN: Right now, unfortunately, it's gone up. Yes.

JOE KERNEN: No, no. WTI is 80.

PALIHAPITIYA: WTI is 80.

KERNEN: Yeah, 81.

PALIHAPITIYA: 81. Okay, let's say a barrel of intelligence, which is a million tokens. Okay, you could buy that barrel for 26 bucks from Anthropic's really good model. You can buy from OpenAI for 26 bucks. Anthropic's latest model costs you 56 bucks. Elon is selling you a barrel of intelligence for a buck. Zuck is about to sell it to you for a 1.50. Demis and Sundar are trying to sell it to you for $1. The Chinese will sell it to you for 50 cents. So this rationalization has to happen. We have the same input that has this crazy cost. If you've made it a bet very early, around one of these folks that are selling extremely expensive barrels of intelligence, and you try to pass through the cost, you may run into some downstream difficulty, and that has to play itself out.

SORKIN: And you think that's playing itself out-

PALIHAPITIYA: I don't know.

SORKIN: In the IBM story, or you saying that's just a broader-

PALIHAPITIYA: No, no that's just a broader comment. I think that Arvind is, he's done a great job. I mean, look, it's undeniable the trajectory of the business, and he's been able to pivot it and orient it around cloud, and I think he deserves a lot of credit for that. But the reality is, everybody that's in this ecosystem, me included, we're all struggling to figure out how do we price this stuff so that the ultimate buyer is making more money, is growing faster, and that is still a question mark.

SORKIN: I think you're getting to a point that Alex Karp, who was just here about a week and a half ago, was making about the sort of tokenmaxxing conceit-

PALIHAPITIYA: I actually-

SORKIN: Which is that some some of these companies are, this is to the Anthropic, OpenAI piece of it, where you have CEOs, and I've now talked to them too, who say the math is not mathing for us.

PALIHAPITIYA: The CEOs and the CFOs, in my opinion, probably have no idea how much tokenmaxxing is going on inside of their organizations. I suspect what will happen is one day you're going to have a miss, and EPS will be off by a few pennies, and the CEO will say to the CFO, What happened? Where did all of this incremental OpEx come from? And they'll trace it to the 50 dollar barrel of intelligence versus the one dollar or 50 cent barrel of intelligence. That hasn't happened yet.

KERNEN: This is interesting. There's a software stock, what is also interesting so it's a Dow component, IBM. So the Dow's down 500 points. Let's do the math: 50 points times whatever the divisor is. The Nasdaq was up more than 100, it is still so if it is a question mark about technology in general, you're not seeing it yet in the in the Nasdaq and that big 500 point drop in the Dow is because-

PALIHAPITIYA: I think in fairness the Nasdaq has a lot of other stuff, which is-

KERNEN: It's not software.

PALIHAPITIYA: All the hardware, all the memory, all the chips. That entire complex is still going to make a ton of money.

KERNEN: Right.

PALIHAPITIYA: The question is again, eventually, if you buy oil, you need to put it into a new engine. That engine has to make you go faster, right? It has to burn cleaner-

SORKIN: It sounds like you're suggesting that the LLM complex at the high end, which basically is Anthropic and OpenAI in terms of the pricing of whatever that is, and that's still in the private markets, is going to break. Is that what you're trying to suggest?

PALIHAPITIYA: I think that's what you're trying to get me to suggest.

SORKIN: No, I'm not.

PALIHAPITIYA: Let me be very clear. The hardware and memory complex is going to run for another couple of years because there are enormous constraints in that ecosystem. So there's tremendous scarcity. Those things are going to continue to do well. Nasdaq will probably overperform the S&P.

SORKIN: Okay.

PALIHAPITIYA: If you look at the only other pocket where there's true growth. It's the LLM complex, as you said. I don't know what the long-term valuation is, but if you see a bunch of public companies in the next few quarters miss because of an OpEx miss, and they trace that back to runaway spending that they didn't know existed inside of their organization, you're going to take a little bit of the air out of that specific-

SORKIN: Okay, so we just talked about four of the big model makers, maybe five of the model makers. We talked about OpenAI, Anthropic. You mentioned Gemini. We talked about-

PALIHAPITIYA: Grok, Meta.

SORKIN: Grok, and we talked about Meta.

PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

SORKIN: How do you see them all stacking up longer term?

PALIHAPITIYA: I think that you are seeing a convergence. It used to be the case that when a model dropped, it was so superior to everything else. You're like, oh my God, we went from kerosene to Jet A, right, to jet fuel. So of course I'm going to go to jet fuel. Instead, I think the analogy now is we've seen the nth version of the iPhone. We've all kept upgrading to it. We're still using it for roughly the same behaviors. My elbow hurts. What should I do? And you're wondering to yourself, well, why am I spending all of this money? And I think that's where we are today. So if you're going to direct all of this behavior, why don't just spend 50 cents for a $1. That's a pretty rational-

SORKIN: So, but then the question is, is the Meta model, for example, or Grok, as good as or close enough of an approximation for whatever you think you get need to get done using Anthropic?

PALIHAPITIYA: For most use cases, the answer is a screaming yes. For some very narrow use cases, no. But in those narrow use cases, I would say spend the 50-dollar barrel of oil. Spend it. It makes sense, if you're a cybersecurity company, if you're Palo Alto Networks, and you can book billions of dollars of more incremental revenue by locking down all the infrastructure of big companies. Use Fable.

SORKIN: But the freakout over the weekend, even inside of Anthropic. You know, we talked about it yesterday morning. Anthropic, as you know, was planning to end the sort of free use of Fable for some of the paid users, sort of end that extension, so that you'd actually have to upgrade or pay more to get access to.

PALIHAPITIYA: They can't afford to. They can't afford to do it.

SORKIN: And then all of a sudden they say to themselves, we can't afford to do it because if we do, people will cancel the subscription and go to OpenAI.

PALIHAPITIYA: Exactly, and the OpenAI model is excellent. Sol is excellent.

SORKIN: Right.

PALIHAPITIYA: Mythos, Fable, it's excellent when you can use it. So all of these folks are hitting the same constraint. They're massively power constrained. They're massively data center constrained, and so they are usage constrained. Meanwhile, the guys that have all of that capacity, Google, SpaceX, and Meta, are finally getting their footing, and they're starting to consistently release model after model after model. That's 80 to 95 percent is good. It's a very complicated dynamic for the leading labs.

SORKIN: Do you see a shift, by the way, you know there was, you know, for a long time, OpenAI and Sam were sort of under a lot of fire. There was big questions about trust and the like. And by the way, maybe even more questions, given this Apple situation on Friday. But there seems to be some dings taking place on the Anthropic side too, and this maybe gets to the Alex Karp at all, but people who believe that either the spending part, the math doesn't make sense of what's happening, or you look at the Figma story, for example, of them going into different businesses.

PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, those are, those are really concerning. I mean, look. Let's be clear. There are three leaders of lab companies who have been in the spotlight for 20 years. Elon, you've seen every facet of his personality, and you can judge over 20 years of behavior. Sundar and Demis, 20 years. Zuck, 20 years. And I think those folks have shown that they basically run a relatively straightforward, well-understood business, right? There aren't any rug pulling situations. Maybe Facebook had some in the past. I think they've cleaned that up, okay? But Google certainly never has, and Elon never has. You may dislike him for other things, and then all of a sudden you have these two guys who are incredible entrepreneurs, clearly. But the amount of collectible data that you can look at, behavioral instances where they've had to make hard decisions, are still relatively limited because they're only a few years into being this public and being this scrutinized. So, if you look at the first few years of Facebook, messy. I don't know about Google. Maybe the first few years.

KERNEN: We're going to talk about you and your 20, your 20 years. You're going to get to talk about-

PALIHAPITIYA: I mean, you know, like I, you know, I was caricatured as the guy at Facebook that made everybody cry. And you look back, it's a $2 trillion company. So the tears are crocodile tears-

KERNEN: Can I just, IBM is saying that, you know, we we just missed closing a couple of big deals. That that's they always say things like that, but this is interesting. The clients that they were trying to close were distracted by industry-wide cybersecurity concerns and the stuff that they were going to. Do you believe that?

PALIHAPITIYA: If you have somebody, if you have somebody-

KERNEN: And now they're going to say the weather was bad-

PALIHAPITIYA: No, I have a real issue with this, and I and I've said this a couple times, so I'll just say it again. You can look at a graph of the financing needs of these companies, and you can pinpoint when they oscillate between two different messages. Message one, we've created a super god, which then the VCs are like lemmings. They run and they're like, well, I need to be on the right side of the super god, and then they flip to other two, which is this is a complete weapon. Let's shut the world down, and why don't you regulate everything? They just go back and forth. We've had this game. Now the problem is, at the scale of a trillion dollars of market cap, that game has these ripple effects that touch everybody in the industry. This is why, by the way, I think what Alex Karp did, he deserves a medal. This is an incredible human being who had the courage to come here. Everybody watched that clip. All these S&P 500 CEOs called me after that clip, saying, Help me interpret this. And I'll tell you, he was on the right side of history because what he's showing you is that hold on a second like you need to have a much more predictable way of running your business because if you are, you know, bending to the vicissitudes of private company funding cycles, or private companies' desire to need to live up to trillion-dollar valuations, you're taking a level of risk that you probably didn't know you were taking. That's a fair critique, I think.

SORKIN: We got to take a pause for a second. Just one last question related to it, because it's on the Alex Karp topic. Effectively, what he's saying is that Palantir needs you are going to need some kind of layer, though, in the middle.

PALIHAPITIYA: I believe that too-

SORKIN: Partially to protect you. I mean, he was arguing in some ways from the LLMs ultimately.

PALIHAPITIYA: Here's the thing, the LLMs do a very good job of a very superficial form of privacy called zero data retention (ZDR) That's the term that they use, and they say enable this, and everything's hunky-dory and everything's okay. But when you look at the fine print, let's just say Joe puts in the secret formula for Kentucky Fried Chicken into the model and say help me optimize it. That part is ZDR, but then if you look at a little thing like if he just clicks the like button, is there any guarantee that that information is not stored somehow that he liked this kind of a thing? And the honest answer technically is no because we don't know how to do that. The other interesting thing that I would point out to you is that when Alex came on, I think he said something extremely legitimate. I think it applies to companies. It also applies to countries. So at some point we should talk about this. And at no point did Anthropic say, You know what? He's got it totally wrong. Here's the exact technical details, and so there's nothing to see here. And I thought to myself, why wouldn't you, the minute after that clip started to go viral, be completely specific and repudiate the claim? And I think it's funny that we're here 10 days later, and nary a word has been uttered, other than Alex's version, which the reason is because we all know is the true version.

PALIHAPITIYA ON SPACS

SORKIN: And we haven't seen him in a while. We used to see you quite a bunch.

PALIHAPITIYA: I know. I built my own distribution.

SORKIN: I know you've got your own distribution now, but you you did come on a whole bunch during the SPAC craze.

PALIHAPITIYA: I didn't have my own distribution.

SORKIN: And I want to ask you this, or maybe I want to read you this. We got a whole bunch of people tweeting at us. Pretty rich that Chamath has an issue with the game when he was the SPAC King and playing the game. So I'm curious when you go back and think about

PALIHAPITIYA: What does that mean? What do they mean when they say that?

SORKIN: I think what they're saying is there was a period of time where you sold a lot of SPACs, and-

PALIHAPITIYA: I don't know, let's-

SORKIN: Promoted a lot of SPACs as-

PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

SORKIN: As as the partner in a whole bunch of SPAC projects-

PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, totally, yeah.

SORKIN: And the truth was that a lot of those SPACs ultimately didn't work for investors-

PALIHAPITIYA: Hold on, no, no, no, they did not work for speculators, but they worked for the CEOs and they worked for the employees. They worked for the customers of those companies. I mean, like I think-

SORKIN: But for the investor class that was buying on the other end.

PALIHAPITIYA: Hold on, let's not call them an investor class. Okay, there were a ton of well-heeled hedge funds that were my partners, they made money. Who didn't make money? Speculators. Now, do I feel bad for them? Yes. Were my incentives misaligned with them? Also, yes.

SORKIN: We used to debate this.

PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah, but those are, and I can evolve and see, and I can say that's a fair critique, but it's also pretty rich for folks to just sit and chirp on the sideline without saying, Well, how much money did those companies raise? The answer is tens of billions of dollars. How many clients or patients or customers do they serve? The answer is millions to tens of millions. How have they grown revenues and traction since that happened, and the answer is in some cases doubling and tripling. So, if you want to take a fair look at it from a 360-degree view, there are some parts of it that worked, and the part that didn't work, I went out of my way to relaunch a SPAC just to show you how I can address the speculator class, because it always worked for I think for the entrepreneur.

SORKIN: Oh, there's no question that the SPAC process was was good typically for the entrepreneur, and invariably maybe even good for the company and employees. I'm not arguing about that. I'm arguing that, and I think anyone who was watching at some points when we used to talk about these things-

PALIHAPITIYA: I completely agree with the point. I agree with that.

SORKIN: And they would say, Look-

PALIHAPITIYA: It didn't work for them.

SORKIN: You you told me this would be a great thing and the stock-

PALIHAPITIYA: It may not work again. By the way, it may not work again. But at least this time, the way that I structured this second time, let me maybe just take a step back and talk about why do I do this? I'm running a tech company. I don't need to do it. Why do I do it? I think the through line for me is I don't like it when I see markets that are gatekept by a few people. I don't like it, it bothers me. And my entire working career, if you actually say what's the through line from Facebook to now, I tend to go after markets that need democratization. Whatever that's an overused jargony term, but Facebook was democratizing information, Social Capital. I democratized a lot of investment. Okay, the SPAC was I didn't like the idea that two or three banks sat as the gatekeeper between companies that should be funded and exist and their ability to actually serve customers, because what happens is, and you can see it in these banks' earnings, and I'm not saying they're doing anything wrong. They're doing something totally legitimate and right. But at the end of the day, those folks structure liquidity for companies based on their ability to embed gains to their best customers. That's the game. So if you hear that OpenAI cannot go public this year. That has nothing to do with OpenAI. That has everything to do with who is lead left and who is lead right deciding how much embedded gain they can transfer to their best clients. My point of view is find a different way. There are many different ways. Direct listings are a way. SPACs are a way. Reverse mergers are a way.

SORKIN: But if you could go back in time-

PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah.

SORKIN: Do you think you would have done the SPACs again the way you did them?

PALIHAPITIYA: The thing that I would have changed is I would have had nary a comment on Twitter. I would have not come on CNBC and talked about them at all. That was a huge mistake. And at the time, I think I was also learning about the influence that I had, and I was kind of learning to deal with it. I think six years later, seven years later, the 2021 me versus the 2026 me, the '26, 2026 version of me would say, "e don't need to say that. We don't need to say anything. In fact, let's just be very clear. Everybody stay away. I'm doing this because I have two very specific goals. One is-

SORKIN: And you're talking about your current project.

PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. Well, the SPAC that I did now has two very specific goals. One is just to create an architecture that I hope people copy, which is you cannot get paid unless the stock goes up. Do it over time. Set huge goals in the out years for performance. So now there's complete alignment. And the second-

SORKIN: And you're locked in.

PALIHAPITIYA: Yeah. And the second, which is much more practical, is I look at the United States, and there are these huge gaping holes where companies need capital to do very important things for the United States that they will not be able to get because they do not check the obvious box for the gatekeeping banks, and unless you fix that problem, you are going to have a serious problem on your hands.

KERNEN: But it just sounded like you said, look, I want to raise money for the companies, and I want the hedge funds to do good. And hey, these speculators, they're speculating, and they're, you know, they lose their money all the time. They should just, you know, buyer beware. They should have known they were going to lose their money. That's what it sounded like you said.

PALIHAPITIYA: I think that they, I think that I should have been much more circumspect and said nothing, nothing.

KERNEN: Right.

PALIHAPITIYA: And this time you'll hear me say nothing.

KERNEN: Was there a way that they could have gotten a fair shake along with the hedge funds and the companies?

PALIHAPITIYA: I think I think that that is again the structural things that need fixing. So the next version after this version that I would hope somebody does is they just post all their own money? So, like right now, the way that this SPAC works is that you post a little bit of it, and you still need to raise from outsiders. But I've talked to Paul Atkins about this. I'll post the hundreds of millions of dollars. Now it's a turnkey IPO. It's all my risk. If I find something I like, I'll just underwrite it. I'm giving that company the end, hundreds of millions that they need, and it should go public. That kind of stuff, where there's all of these folks who could then do that and copy that. All the hedge funds could do it. All of the you know the big buy side organizations could do it. That could be a really important thing for what we need to happen right now, which is more companies should be public, not less, and more money should go into critical infrastructure, not less. And right now, if you put a handful of financially motivated actors in the middle of that, you are going to-

SORKIN: Should they go public earlier?

PALIHAPITIYA: Yes.

SORKIN: Yes.

PALIHAPITIYA: Yes. Transparency is better. Yes, absolutely. Performance pressure is better. It's all better. There is no version of this example where staying private forever is rewarded over the long term. Somebody will get screwed at some point.

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