Home Affordability Crisis, Palantir's Advantage, Big Short on AI, H-1B Abuse, Solar Storm Hits Earth

Watch on YouTube ↗ | November 14, 2025 at 21:16 | 55:05 | All-In Podcast

Speakers

David Friedberg — CEO, The Production Board

Chamath Palihapitiya — CEO, Social Capital

Jason Calacanis — Angel Investor / Founder, LAUNCH

Summary

Jason Calacanis, Chamath Palihapitiya and David Friedberg (David Sacks is absent) open on Michael Burry's bet against AI, and both Friedberg and Chamath reject his claim that hyperscalers inflate earnings by stretching data-center depreciation, arguing that seven- and eight-year-old TPUs and GPUs still run at 100% utilization. Chamath then defends Palantir's premium multiple as a function of its uniqueness and the absence of any substitute, in contrast to Snowflake or MongoDB. The longest segment is the US housing affordability crisis, where LA's new rent cap, decades of building regulation and roughly $8 trillion of Fannie and Freddie credit are blamed for constraining supply and inflating prices. The back half covers the H-1B fight after Trump's Fox News interview, a science corner on the week's record G5 geomagnetic storm, and wealthy Americans buying second states and second passports.

Michael Burry accuses Meta and Oracle of hiding $176 billion of depreciation to inflate future earnings.
Friedberg says longer server useful lives are justified because data centers shifted from storage to processing and old TPUs still run at full utilization.
Chamath says hyperscaler business models are too good to require cooking the books, and chip design iteration keeps raising utilization.
Palantir trades near 137 times sales against roughly 13 times for Datadog, Snowflake and Microsoft.
Chamath calls the Palantir short stupid: uniqueness and no viable substitute justify a durable premium multiple.
LA's 12-2 vote caps annual rent increases near CPI, which Friedberg says removes the incentive to own, upgrade or build apartments.
Friedberg blames Fannie and Freddie's roughly $8 trillion of loans plus building restrictions for pushing US home prices higher.
Other topics: H-1B lottery abuse and the $100,000 fee, a record G5 solar storm, and tech wealth relocating to Texas and Japan.

Ideas

David Friedberg CEO, The Production Board 6:18

Longer depreciation is justified, not fraud.

Friedberg rejects Michael Burry's claim that the hyperscalers are cooking the books by stretching data-center depreciation schedules. Under GAAP, capex is expensed over an assumed useful life: Google earned about $120 billion of operating profit in the last twelve months against roughly $70 billion of capex, so a three-year versus six-year life moves reported operating profit by on the order of 10%. But Google's changes were the output of a real internal review, not a trick: servers went from 3 to 4 years in Q1 2021, networking equipment from 3 to 5 years in 2021 and from 5 to 6 years in 2023. The economic reason is that data centers shifted from storage and transfer boxes, built on hard drives and memory that turn over every 18 to 36 months, into AI processing centers where most of the dollars and energy go into processors. Google's own head of AI infrastructure says seven- and eight-year-old TPUs still run at 100% utilization, which validates a longer useful life rather than proving fraud.

Chamath Palihapitiya CEO, Social Capital 9:06

AI hardware utilization is rising, not falling.

Chamath argues the AI accounting short is baseless on two grounds. First, incentives: the business models of these companies are far too good for them to exhaust every other operational tactic and then resort to cooking the books, so the mega-cap AI buildout names are not the ones that would falsify earnings. Second, technology: Burry is not technical enough to see what is actually happening in the hardware. Kernels are being rewritten, the attention mechanisms of the models are changing, designers are swapping HBM for SRAM, and silicon is splitting between very large dies and much smaller chiplets. All of that keeps raising utilization, so deployed AI hardware both lasts longer and creates demand for more of it, which is the opposite of the accelerated-obsolescence premise behind the short.

Chamath Palihapitiya CEO, Social Capital 15:05

Palantir's uniqueness justifies its premium multiple.

Chamath says the Palantir short is stupid and the people shorting it will lose money. His framework inverts the bear case: a low multiple to sales reflects high churn risk, because every other name on the comparison chart has a viable competitor a customer can switch to. MongoDB carries the lowest multiple precisely because there are ninety versions of what it does, even though it is a genuinely good and extremely well-run business, and Snowflake is well-run but not unique either. Palantir is both unique and well-run with no clear alternative in the market, so the duration and durability of its cash flows are far longer than peers', and that is what a premium multiple to sales is paying for. He notes he is neither long nor short today, having been a Series B investor in the private rounds, so he has no position at stake in the call.

David Friedberg CEO, The Production Board 25:39

Rent caps kill LA landlord returns.

The Los Angeles City Council voted 12-2 to limit annual rent increases to 90% of CPI, with a 1% floor and a 4% cap. Friedberg's read as an investor is that this caps the equity upside on an apartment building: the cash flows the asset can generate are now limited by statute, which removes the incentive to buy buildings, to spend money upgrading them, or to build new ones, leaving only small-yielding investments with no upside. Layered on top are decades of city, state and federal rules that make housing slower, costlier and harder to build, plus Prop 13, which discourages owners from selling and drains liquidity from the market. His conclusion is that every time government intervenes in this market it distorts it and blocks capital from flowing into new supply.

David Friedberg CEO, The Production Board 27:29

Government credit keeps pushing home prices up.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together have issued or supported about $8 trillion of home loans. Friedberg argues that in the liquid, well-capitalized market that exists today this agency credit is excess liquidity that drives prices up rather than making housing accessible: a buyer uses an agency loan for a first home and can then buy a second or third, or simply afford a more expensive house than they otherwise would. He sees the identical pattern in education with student loans and in healthcare with Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare: wherever government supplies capital to support a market, prices skyrocket. Combined with restrictions on new building and caps on what landlords can charge, the doom loop means that the more government does, the higher home prices go.

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This All-In Podcast video, published November 14, 2025, features David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya discussing GOOGL, AI-SECTOR, PLTR, Los Angeles rental housing, ITB. 5 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.

Speakers: David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya · Tickers: GOOGL, AI-SECTOR, PLTR, Los Angeles rental housing, ITB