Trump's market impact: Bitcoin, M&A, IPOs + transition picks; Polymarket CEO raided by FBI

And then separately, with Bobby Kennedy's nomination to HHS, one of the things that he has said that he wants to put an end to is the advertising that pharma does on these broadcast stations. If you put these two things together where you deprive these folks of their largest revenue source, and at the same time, they have to sort of like answer for censorship or manipulating content, do you think that that changes the landscape of how all these companies behave in the future, or how do you think that that plays out?

In any event, I think that there's a very strong argument that the broadcasters have not been fair. That's a violation of their licensed requirements and we should be re-evaluating their spectrum, especially because it's not the highest best use spectrum anyway.

And if they lose all that advertising from Pharma, which I think in some of these networks is a third or a half, and that's all networks, that's from Fox to CNN and MSNBC, everybody combined, if they lose advertising from Pharma, it's over. Like those news networks are going to lose half their revenue overnight. That would be a death blow, Chamath, to your question.

So I think there are a few of these companies, Google being one of them, that are very much handicapped right now with respect to what kind of M&A they can do without dealing with the regulatory sledgehammer coming down on them. So I don't think that those guys are buyers, Jay Cal. I don't think that Google is in a place right now where they can go out and make a bunch of acquisitions. They're going to do everything they can to avoid the regulatory sledgehammer that's coming their way. First it was coming from the Dems. Now it's coming from the new administration.

I completely agree. I think that these big tech companies will need to pay a pound of flesh for the deplatforming and the censorship that they did.

But I hope that whoever replaces Lina Khan will continue to apply pressure to big tech because they are monopolies and they will abuse their power if they're allowed to and they need to be controlled.

I'm bullish on the San Francisco turnaround because I think Daniel Lurie getting elected mayor was huge. And this doesn't get really as much attention, but it's very important.

And this budget needs to get put under control. San Francisco spends 1.5x per capita of what New York City spends. And that's something that Daniel and his team have said they're going to address sort of like their own doge. And there's a team going in there to address this. So I'm really bullish on what's going to happen with the city.

For example, Tesla, it's gone from roughly $250 to $320 a share since the election. And you could call that the lawfare discount. I mean, that basically is the discount on Tesla stock because the market was pricing in the risk of retaliation and if the Republicans lost, there's a widespread belief that the Democrats would go after Elon and his company. So you can actually measure the lawfare discount based on Tesla stock.

It's a very narrow part of the economy. If you look on a broad-based basis, the tens and tens of trillions of dollars of market cap that exist, I do agree with you that deregulation benefits a bunch of those companies, but it benefits the non-tech businesses more than the tech businesses. The tech businesses right now are relatively lightly regulated.

Then there's also this element of kind of things being inflationary, the feature of tariffs. If we don't get spending cut fast enough, there's an effect on markets. We're still seeing 10-year treasury sit at about 4.5%, up from 3.5%, which is where we were right around the rate cut beginning in September.

I think the way that this trade turns around is when something actually breaks in terms of the inflation picture or in terms of the deficit picture. And if those things look like going into 2025, that President Trump's actions are not going to be able to course correct it, then I think you're going to see people go massively risk off, which I think will not be great for markets, obviously.

And I think Bobby Kennedy has a very strong argument that it would serve the public interest not to allow this. We don't allow advertisements for tobacco, right?

The reason the cost of drugs has gone way up is because so much of the government insurance programs don't negotiate drug prices and there are all these middlemen and all these people that sit in between that have been regulated through regulatory capture into the system that has allowed an incredible inflation in the cost of drug prices.

I am fascinated by Bobby Kennedy going in and trying to make the country healthier, and the country is the most sick country, I think, of all of the Western countries, and I think our food system has massive problems, so I'm very excited to see what he does inside of the Health and Human Services Department.

The deregulatory nature on its own benefits markets that have been encumbered by regulatory oversight and regulatory challenges like crypto, finance and fintech. Those types of businesses are clearly going to benefit or expected to benefit significantly by being able to launch products more quickly and have features and ways that they can generate revenue that they might be challenged to do under the current regulatory schemas.

So look, the bottom line here is that I think that we are close to having clear rules of the road codified by Congress, which is what the crypto industry has been asking for. And the days of Gensler terrorizing crypto companies by issuing Wells notices without clarifying what the rules are that he is prosecuting, those days are about to be over. So I think this is why the crypto markets are rallying.

So, my view is that Google should be broken up. There's abundant reasons for that. There's at least three monopolies in that company. There's the search business, the advertising business and YouTube. I think they should be busted up. What are the odds that that happens? It's hard to say, but what are the odds that that is pursued in the next administration in some capacity or at least investigated? I'd say hi. I'd say Facebook or Metta, less so.

You know, the great irony of this though, Sacks, is that they have already been demolished. I don't know if you saw, but a bunch of the anchors at CNN are not renewing because their advertising is so far off that, like Chris Wallace, I think was making 8 million a year, 9 million a year, and he just said, I'm going to go do podcasts because I think they lowballed his offer.

So just on CNN and MSNBC, you're absolutely right that they're announcing a bunch of layoffs, their ratings are destroyed. I think MSNBC ratings are down like 50% since the election.

I mean, I feel like there's some market correction that takes place here, which we're already seeing, which is the consumers are moving away. We just talked about moving away from cable news, moving away from legacy media. They don't trust it. The trust is at an all-time low.

No, it's a totally correlated asset. I mean, there will be a point, and it's probably in our lifetime where it is an independent asset and a non-speculative store of value. There will be that day, but that day is not now.

I'm saying this is going to bring in the most disruptive force that federal agencies have ever seen. And the intention with Trump isn't to find some person to keep running things the way they have been run in the past. His mandate from the people who elected him based on the message he put out there is to do the opposite, which is to go in and be as disruptive and damaging and destructive as possible.

Vivek put out a very compelling post on X where he basically said, like, look, when you, on the one hand, there's going to be radical transparency, but on the other hand, there's a lot of case law that we can use to kind of try to really dismantle the government apparatus and they're putting themselves on a shot clock to do it by 2026 for the 250th anniversary. So I think I'm really predisposed to this idea that it'll force the government to be very resilient at the end of this process, and I think that's a good thing.

I would also just say that with respect to the other picks, there's obviously a lot of hysteria going on, a lot of hyperbole about the downsides. I don't think it's going to be like a meteor hitting the earth. I don't think it's that destructive. I think that it's more like, will some eggs be broken up to make an omelette, right?

If under Trump and the Republican control of the House and Senate, laws don't pass and regulations get reduced, theoretically, earnings are going to rip and you should pay a higher multiple today because you're actually buying these things at eight to ten times earnings five years from now.

Well, there's no question that in general, President Trump wants to have the most vibrant economy we can have. And I think to that end, you're going to see the end of this era of deceleration, and of regulatory capture, and lawfare. I think all those things are over. I think that equities that have been straining or tamped down under the weight of these abuses, you see them ripping now.

So the backroom buzz is that Donnie from Queens is going to make M&A great again. Couple of reasons there, Sacks, the wrath of Lena Cohn's coming to an end, Mag-7 sitting on massive amounts of cash, and that cash is growing as people have laid people off and they're focused on getting fit.

Then on the M&A side, if all you're doing is waiting for Lina Khan to not be there, to me, I think that that betrays what M&A is supposed to be, which is you're supposed to underwrite some industrial logic from first principles where things are very accretive and very accretive things should not hang by a thread on the emotional regulation or dysregulation of the FTC Commission.

I think that we've talked about on previous pods that perhaps there was not as targeted and surgical an approach was used. And as a result of that, it did have a chilling effect on M&A. And so it hurt the small tech environment. And so I think that we need to fix that part of it.

if you're going to run 8% of GDP level deficits for the next four or five or six years, you're going to have the 10 year at 7 to 8%. That's just mathematical.

I don't think that you're going to see these crazy M&A deals that I think everybody is expecting. I also don't anticipate a lot of these big companies going public, at least in the first half of the year. And the only reason I say that is I just think that like this year and the first half of next year, what's the difference? The IPO market is what the IPO market is. And if the 10 year is back to 4.5%, 5%, that's not a compelling strategy for some SaaS company or some internet business that didn't take an opportunity to go public when rates were at zero.

So I think those two things, the capitulation of all these boards and founders are going to say, you know what, let's take the haircut, let's go public, and let's tell our story and see if we can make it work as a public company. And then the people who feel one step weaker than that, I think they want to cash their chips in.

What does 4.5% mean? I mean, if you're going to run 8% of GDP level deficits for the next four or five or six years, you're going to have the 10 year at 7 to 8%. That's just mathematical.