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- Venture capitalist billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya is modeling his Social Capital firm at Warren Buffett’s company.
- “My ambition is to be the Berkshire Hathaway of our generation,” said the president of Virgin Galactic in a recent Fortune interview.
- Palihapitiya hopes to make the Capital Stock public and build a technology conglomerate.
- “It will be a Berkshire, a holding company that, instead of having Gillette, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, will have technology businesses,” he said.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya wants to turn his Capital Stock company into a technology-focused successor to Warren Buffett’s $ 400 billion conglomerate.
“My ambition is to be the Berkshire Hathaway of our generation,” said the president of Virgin Galactic in a recent Fortune interview.
Palihapitiya finally hopes to go public with the Capital Stock, he said, and does not see it as a venture capital company.
“It will be a Berkshire, a holding company that, instead of having Gillette, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, will have technology businesses,” he told Fortune.
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Buffett’s Berkshire owns dozens of businesses, including Geico, Duracell, and See’s Candies, and has multi-billion dollar interests in public companies such as Apple, Bank of America, and Coca-Cola. He sold his stake in Gillette to Procter and Gamble in 2005, and cashed in his McDonald’s stock in 1998.
Palihapitiya’s investments to date include Slack, Box and SurveyMonkey. He also partnered with billionaire Richard Branson to go public with the Virgin Virginctic using a “blank check” company last year, and has raised nearly $ 1.1 billion for two other blank check companies.
The investor revealed in the interview that he has been making “highly structured, high-volume bets” on the credit markets in recent weeks.
“There has been a huge asymmetry because of what the Federal Reserve has been doing,” he said, referring to unprecedented central bank interventions during the coronavirus pandemic, which include spending hundreds of billions of dollars on bonds and buying corporate debt for the first time.
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Palihapitiya is not the first tech executive trying to emulate what Buffett has done with Berkshire:
- Google chiefs Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt came up with the idea for Alphabet, the holding company that ranks above Google, YouTube, Waymo and other companies, when they visited Buffett over a decade ago.
- SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, whose Vision Fund has invested in companies like Uber, WeWork and ByteDance, owned by TikTok, said in 2017: “Warren Buffett in the tech industry, that’s what I’d like to become.”
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