Chamath Palihapitiya: the social savant leading the Spac revolution

Chamath Palihapitiya is credited with sparking the current market mania for Spacs and mob investing. He says his aim is to bring down the establishment from within.

Chamath Palihapitiya
(Image credit: © Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

“Wall Street has always had its rock stars,” noted The Wall Street Journal in March. But no one has marshalled the twin forces reshaping markets – the “blank-cheque” boom and the retail-trading surge – quite like Chamath Palihapitiya. The former Facebook executive belongs to “a new class of market influencers – social-media savants who’ve figured out how to take shots at the establishment while taking its money”. Amateur traders hang on his every word for clues about his next target “and for the insults he hurls at the high-finance elite”.

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Jane writes profiles for MoneyWeek and is city editor of The Week. A former British Society of Magazine Editors editor of the year, she cut her teeth in journalism editing The Daily Telegraph’s Letters page and writing gossip for the London Evening Standard – while contributing to a kaleidoscopic range of business magazines including Personnel Today, Edge, Microscope, Computing, PC Business World, and Business & Finance.

She has edited corporate publications for accountants BDO, business psychologists YSC Consulting, and the law firm Stephenson Harwood – also enjoying a stint as a researcher for the due diligence department of a global risk advisory firm.

Her sole book to date, Stay or Go? (2016), rehearsed the arguments on both sides of the EU referendum.

She lives in north London, has a degree in modern history from Trinity College, Oxford, and is currently learning to play the drums.