Who is Chamath Palihapitiya?
Chamath Palihapitiya is a Canadian-American venture capitalist born in Sri Lanka. He is best known for software development and venture capital. Palihapitiya is the founder and CEO of Social Capital. He was also an early senior executive at Facebook who had joined the company in 2007 and left in 2011.
Chamath is a minority stakeholder and also serves as a board member of the Golden State Warriors the professional basketball team based in San Fransico.
Chamath has also had a career as a poker player. He has three World Series of Poker (WSOP) and also two World Poker Tour (WPT) cashes for a total of $175,801. Chamath finished 101st out of 6,865 entries in the World Series of Poker’s Main Event in 2011.
How Old is Chamath Palihapitiya?
Palihapitiya is 43 years old as of 2019. He was born on September 3, 1976, in Sri Lanka.
Chamath Palihapitiya Family
Being born in Sri Lanka, Palihapitiya and his family moved to Canada as refugees when he was six years old. His father was most of the time unemployed while his mother was a housekeeper. He recalls how he had a humble upbringing sharing how he used to sleep on a mattress in the living room.
Chamath Palihapitiya Education
At Ottawa, Palihapitiya attended Lisgar Collegiate Institute. At the time, he worked part-time to assist his family. He finally graduated at the age of 17.
He later attended the University of Waterloo from where he graduated in 1999 with a degree in electrical engineering. Palihapitiya worked for a year as a derivatives trader at the investment bank BMO Nesbitt Burns.
Chamath Palihapitiya Wife – Brigette Lau
Palihapitiya was named to a woman named Brigette Lau but the couple filed for divorce in 2018.
Chamath Palihapitiya Facebook
Palihapitiya joined Facebook in 2005 when it was then a little more than a year old. He had been previously in Mayfield Fund and AOL.
Chamath Palihapitiya Social Capital
While still at Facebook, he made investments including: in Palantir, Pure Storage (NYSE: PSTG), Playdom (bought by The Walt Disney Company), and Bumptop (bought by Google).
He left Facebook in 2011 and he started his own fund, The Social+Capital Partnership, with his wife. In 2015, the company changed its name to Social Capital. This time it has a strong foundation focusing on technology in healthcare, financial services, and also education. It began investing in health and education when those fields were largely neglected by other venture capitalists.
Through this fund, Palihapitiya has been able to invest in a number of companies, including Glooko, Inc, Yammer, SecondMarket, Slack, Box, and Premise. He also became a member of the board of directors of Slack in 2017. He confirmed that his venture fund had raised more than $275 million in its second round of fundraising in March 2013. It had more than $1.1 billion in total assets as of 2015.
Finally, Palihapitiya stepped down as a member of the board of directors of Slack in 2019.
In 2020, Palihapitiya doubled down on his comments that the government shouldn’t bail out billionaires or allow buybacks amid the COVID-19 pandemic. He said, “Buybacks are the primary example of a growing strain of incompetence amongst CEOs and amongst boards.” He also predicted that companies will have a slew of layoffs in the fourth quarter of 2020 after they blow through emergency funding.
Chamath Palihapitiya Net Worth
Trough his very many investments and also a career working with major companies in the United States Palihapitiya has earned himself an estimated net worth of US$1.1 billion.
