Founder & CEO, Social Capital
Chamath Palihapitiya founded and runs Social Capital, now a family office investing his own money, and co-hosts the All-In podcast. He has backed Groq and sponsored a string of SPACs, the latest launched in September 2025.
Palihapitiya was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Canada at age 5. He took a job at Burger King at 14, attended Lisgar Collegiate Institute, and graduated from the University of Waterloo in 1999 with a degree in electrical engineering. He worked as a derivatives trader at BMO Nesbitt Burns, then moved to California in 2001 to join Winamp. At AOL he became the youngest vice president and led instant messaging in 2004, before a short stint at Mayfield Fund.
He joined Facebook in 2007 and led the rollout of Beacon, an ad system that tracked purchases on other websites; after privacy complaints it was shut down in 2009. He then led Facebook's growth work in the period when the platform reached one billion users, and left in 2011.
Palihapitiya founded Social Capital in 2011, backing companies including Slack, Box and Groq; by 2015 it reported more than $1.1 billion under management. In 2018 it became a family office investing his own wealth. From 2019 his Social Capital Hedosophia SPACs took Virgin Galactic, Opendoor, Clover Health and SoFi public, and all four shares fell steeply in 2021–2022. In January 2024 he announced 8090, an incubator rebuilding enterprise software with AI tools, and in September 2025 he launched American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp. A, which raised $345 million to target energy, AI, decentralized finance and defense.
In October 2026 Palihapitiya posted a chart of CoreWeave's 2032 notes hitting a record 14.5% yield, drawing a "Yikes" from Elon Musk. Earlier, in September 2026, he joined Bill Gurley in urging calm after an Anthropic researcher resigned over warnings about self-improving AI. He co-hosts All-In, launched in 2021 with Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and David Friedberg.
Sources · written 16 October 2026