Trump Rally or Bessent Put? Elon Back at Tesla, Google's Gemini Problem, China's Thorium Discovery

after we spoke about Nvidia, the Nvidia team reached out to me. And they were like, hey, Chamath, here's a bunch of stuff that will help you unpack what you spoke about in a little bit more detail. ... And what these guys educated me on is that they've been trying to refine how this is described, but it's not what it seems, meaning they report revenue on what's called the billing or the invoicing address. ... So it turns out that that's actually not where the silicon gets shipped. So there's a Singaporean office that handles the invoicing. So then I said, well, who are these companies that are using these places? And it turns out that it's a bunch of major US companies, including US OEMs and Clouds, that use Singapore for invoicing their suppliers.

The minuses or the risks that I think now will get uncovered is, are the clouds doing enough to make sure that China and other folks aren't getting access to compute that they should not get access to? And that could have an impact on some of their revenue. So that's a GCP problem. I think it's an Azure problem. It's a AWS problem. And that's going to need to get sorted out in the next couple of quarters because if Western governments basically say to the clouds, hey, you need to KYC your customers so that it's not somebody distilling the best of our models into a place we don't agree with, I think there could be some blowback.

Yeah, they should do it. But I'm just saying that's a... It's very smart. It's not going to get done in 18 months.

I don't think the Apple deal is from a standstill. My understanding is Foxconn and others have been working with Apple to actually stand up manufacturing capacity in India for some time now. And I do believe that they probably have one or two model runs already active in the country. ... It's not often that Tim Cook will stand up and say, I'm going to do something in 18 months and then be delayed by yours. He's not Elon. He's going to come out. He's going to be very clear.

part of the art of the deal here, so to speak, is an opening salvo, which is bold. And some people would say maybe it's too extreme, but it's basically an opening bid to shift the conversation completely. That would create tremendous leverage to get deals done. And isn't that exactly what's happened? Isn't that the way it's played out?

set your anchor point as far away as you possibly can, if you want to get maximal leverage in a negotiation. I don't know what's farther away than 145% tariff. So it's clearly a point, as Sacks said, for negotiating to a deal that seems like one that would have been impossible or implausible if you started from a 0% tariff beginning point in negotiating.

we've gone from minus two to maybe plus one, and China's gone from plus four billion a day to maybe zero or minus one. And I think that's what instills the leverage that is required to get the deal done.

my biggest concern is not something that Doge is going to do or not. It's not up to Doge to do that. It's up to, frankly, these old bulls in Congress who control the appropriations process. Are they going to basically backslide and just put the spending back in?

Polymarket showing an 84% chance of less than $50 billion being cut in 2025

I think there's $100 billion of hidden value called Waymo in this business.

And the Waymo. 250,000 rides a week now. Growing like crazy. And they're only like four cities. It's crazy.

This was an area that China chose, and now, you know, the US finds itself years behind on a technology that we invented, right? So this was research that happened at Oak Ridge National Lab.

So the regulatory constraints need to be addressed first and foremost. That's, in my opinion, the number one mission critical strategic comparative for the United States right now.

They have identified strategically certain industries that are choke points in the global supply chain, and they have taken them over. And the best example of this is rare earths. ... And they're responsible today for over 90% of the processing of rare earths. ... Well, by the way, this issue still has not been resolved. China has now cut off the United States. And so as part of this trade negotiation, we're going to have to resolve that issue.

I have a large rare earth mine in India. Yeah, it's one of the largest supplies of rare earths outside the United States. We negotiated that deal with the PMO, and they gave us a great deal to compete with the Chinese. Our specialty chemicals processing is on the ground there, and then the idea is then to import all of that specialty chemical into the United States

I think it's going to hold up. I mean, look, I just think that this investment in CapEx and the data center build outs is so strategic right now. I mean, I think that the hyperscalers, it's only good for their businesses, but I think they see it as so strategic to their survival that they just have to do it no matter what. In other words, I think they're totally inelastic on this.

The same is true, by the way, in pharmaceutical companies, in software companies, in hardware companies. If you want to go do business in China today, you have to set up a 51% JV, where some local company owns 51% of your equity and your IP. ... They can come in and take your IP. And so I think that this is like a really important part of the trade discussions and negotiations that a lot of people miss, that American businesses will see massive revenue growth and massive market adoption if we can get regulatory parity in some of these key trade deals.

Number one, I think Ken is massively long packs America. I mean, he's built a $42 billion empire. He owns a billion dollars of American real estate. So I don't see him investing in Ecuador anytime soon, relative to the opportunity set in the United States. ... Europe is roughly uninvestable. So the more generalized answer is on a relative basis, the United States is still the shining beacon on a hill. There is no investible alternative for scaled capital except the US.

I've been talking to a whole number of multinational CEOs who do business in China. I'm talking about the McDonald's of the world, the Starbucks of the world, the Nikes of the world, and so many of them now talk about, not just how consumers aren't going necessarily in their stores the way they used to, but really about the American dream, the American brand ... So many of these companies are even trying to reestablish how they market and advertise their companies, almost as if they're a local business, not an American brand.

Oh, yeah. I mean, right now, my car is effectively a robo-taxi. ... That's the worst part about the experience because it is so good.

there's a lot of videos getting posted on Twitter of FSD being on and then the car drives into the sunlight and at a certain angle, when the sun hits the cameras, the car goes into an emergency disconnect on FSD. I've had that happen. I know it's true. I know it's real. So, it is a bit of a risk with the camera-only mode on how Tesla operates FSD if they can actually run a full, you know, never to disengage RoboTaxi service like Waymo does.

China, ultimately, if they can make new energy systems cheaper than the United States, scale them faster, they will ultimately have much cheaper, much higher volumes of electricity, which gives them the advantage of manufacturing and production and transportation and everything. And that's where the economic advantage will ultimately accrue to them.

So the question is, is there a put here? I mean, my honest answer is no. And the simple reason is, if you look at where we are, the stock market is back to where we were in like May or August of last year. And if you had said that we would have upended 50 years of economic policy and the markets would only be off 500 or 600 basis points, I would have been shocked. So there's no reason for a put.

It was the fact that everyone realized that Bessent, Trump are not going to let trade come to a standstill. They're not going to let the whole global economy grind to a halt. That they're going to have to do something. And I think that the read is that they're making the indications that they're going to get deals done, which means that their intention is to make sure that the market doesn't tank.

So it seems to me trading at 18 times free cash flow, which is where this thing's at right now, plus the 4% yield on dividends and buybacks, plus the kind of seemingly pretty significant gap between the downside and the upside here. It's just such a powerful business. It just seems like it highlighted that this is not a business that's in decline and is about to die, as everyone's been kind of proclaiming. There's enough growth engines here and there's enough resilience. And the price is so good. I feel quite good about the price.

I think the Google business is profoundly amazing. I think they need to do something with the subscriptions that they have and put Gemini right in front and really do a head-on attack against ChatGPT.

I mean, I think the problem that Google has with respect to ChatGPT is that Gemini is not getting the usage, and ChatGPT is just growing like crazy. ... So I do think Google is in a really tough spot, and the longer they wait to make Gemini front and center, the worse this usage problem gets. I mean, what's basically happening right now is users are learning a new habit.