Chamath Palihapitiya, the billionaire venture capitalist and co-host of the “All-In” podcast, went on CNBC Tuesday and offered one of the more complete Trump reversals of the moment.
“You’re 100% right on Trump. He’s fantastic,” Palihapitiya told “Squawk Box” host Joe Kernen.
“Unbelievable person, very smart on top of it, open-minded… great president, so far.”
This was not the language of grudging acceptance. It was admiration, plainly stated.
Palihapitiya said he had once opposed Trump because he believed a portrait of the president constructed by the press. He now thinks that portrait was false.
“The reality is that most of us were lied to by the media about President Trump,” he said.
“And if you just go back to the source material, you should take away two things, one, he didn’t say half the things he said, and two, why did these other people just fabricate what they wanted to say so that they could essentially assassinate his character?”
“I think that that second thing is completely unacceptable in America and there’s still been no repercussions, really,” he said.
The old quotations make the conversion more striking.
Two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, Palihapitiya spoke about Trump on the “All-In” podcast with fury. He shredded the POTUS and argued that he should face legal punishment for what happened.
(The remarks can be heard in the Jan. 8, 2021, episode of “All-In.”)
There is nothing subtle about the distance between those words and “He’s fantastic.”
Palihapitiya has previously acknowledged on “All-In” that he was “totally wrong” about Trump. He told CNBC that the admission reached the president, who called him.
The two got to know each other. Personal contact replaced the mediated image.
“I got to know him and he is fantastic,” Palihapitiya said.
There is an old political truth in that. Public figures are abstractions until they become acquaintances.
But Palihapitiya is making a larger argument than simply saying he likes Trump after meeting him. He is saying the information system through which he first judged Trump could not be trusted.
Palihapitiya built his career in venture capital, where the stated ideal is to find the original data, resist conventional wisdom, and recognize value before the crowd does. His CNBC confession amounts to an admission that, in politics, he failed his own due-diligence test.
"I took the time to learn, I admitted on my podcast that I got it totally wrong," says @chamath of changing his mind on @realDonaldTrump. pic.twitter.com/f7VGdsz2Oo
— Squawk Box (@SquawkCNBC) July 14, 2026
