>> he is a modern-day silicon valley renegade. unafraid of breaking the conventional rules of engagement . vowing to take bigger risks, solve the biggest problems, and make big-time money from putting chips in our clothes to starting a university from scratch. he is perhaps best known for supercharging facebook from 50 million to 750 million users. the tech legend started on an unlikely path, and a country grip by civil war. joining me today on "studio

1.0," the incendiary investor and founder of the social network partnership. how do you feel about that word, incendiary. >> i love that word. at least people will remember you, good or bad. the want to start at beginning. your story is so fascinating. you were born in sri lanka. what was the state of the country of the time? >> the civil war broke out in the early 1980's between the minority and buddhist majority. dad was in the civil service. my mom was a nurse. he was able to kind of insinuate highlf into the commission. six when myself, my sister, and my parents emigrated. >> had the or started? started.r had he was a communist organizer.

when he spoke out about that, there was huge pushback from the government said that you cannot talk like this. there was a lot of pressure on my father to the point where he just could not reasonably returned to sri lanka without his life for our light being some sort of jeopardy. .o, we filed for refugee status the canadian government out of the goodness of their hearts gave us refugee status. we stayed and literally life as we knew it abrupt stop if we had to start all over again. no house, no clothes, no nothing. fast-forward and i am here sitting with you. it was probably not supposed to turn out this way, but it did. >> did you go from being well-off to having almost nothing? >> my first job out of college, i made $55,000. i remember a show that my parents -- they complained when i took this job, but i took a

job in finance because i saw this number and i told them afterwards -- you have to realize that i remember what it was like. i know for a fact that when i saw your joint tax returns the most amount of money that they had made was $32,000 combined. >> three kids. >> three kids in a two-bedroom apartment. living above a lodge matt, they grounded out. they did everything, putting us into good schools, gave us music lessons. how do you do that on $32,000? >> my mother was a housekeeper. she was always trying to better her english so that she could take the equivalency exams to become a nurse. that never happened for her. at she was able to become nurse's aide. my dad finally got a job as a civil servant where the best thing that we could do was escape a difficult situation and try to set a good example.

hopefully they will learn and do the same thing. motivation. of my the reality is that silicon valley trades on two things, right? one of them is lower, the other is success. more -- moreore -- , i was at thee foot of three large businesses, so i don't care what people think anymore. what trouble do i have? relatively healthy, knock on wood. why am i not saying what i believe? my father had nothing. he stood up and was able to say that this war should not happen? >> what is the myth of chamath what is the and reality? >> the reality is that i am a deeply insecure person the got

more lucky than i deserved, and i am trying very hard to lead a reasonably positive legacy so that i you like i did the right thing. there are way more people way more talented than me. the myth is that i am aloof and can be arrogant. i say what is on my mind. at some level maybe all of those things are true. is just thei know same guy that feels like my parents gave up a lot and i feel that i should really be doing something important with it. >> were you like this when you were young? so courageous? >> what is that phrase? orohol is a great truths him? money is a great amplifier of courage. what do i have to be afraid of it this point? i have an obligation to do what i think is right, helping people and building things that i think are interesting and making more

of i make more i will have a better sense of what to do with it. i feel that in this long and drawn out battle to figure out whether we could launch a $100 breast-cancer test review in the united states, what i wanted to do was subsidize the whole thing. it would have cost $150 million to do this right. >> you are saying that you could create a $100 breast-cancer test? >> i could bring it to the market and pay for a lot of women to do it. my point is that all those things are possible because money amplifies your ability to do it. >> as a kid? >> all i wanted to do was be rich. i would assess about the orbs list. no context for anything other than i hated being poor. it just sucks to report. i did not even have a car until i was 17 years old. i remember for two or three years i would explicitly lie

about where i lived and it was because i was ashamed. of that hase start a code name for your. are you a crazy f'er? >> yes. ♪

emily: how did you end up in silicon valley? chamath: it was very accidental. when i graduated, i took a job in finance to relieve the immediate pressure i felt on my family. very quickly, i thought it was boring. my girlfriend at the time had -- who is now my wife -- had moved down here. that is how i came down here. i applied for a bunch of jobs. that's how it all started. emily: how did you get the job at facebook? chamath: i had known sean parker. emily: he was president at that time? chamath: he said that he was going to be in washington, d.c. where aol's offices were. i'll be with mark zuckerberg, do you want to meet? we had a meeting and i thought this was super interesting.

these guys are onto something. i did a deal with facebook. we integrated aim into pages of facebook. in that process, that's how i got to meet them. emily: what was he like at that time? chamath: high potential, but still very young. emily: did you know? did you have a feeling that it was going to be huge? emily: i don't think we knew until about mid-2008. then we could say to ourselves, there is a formula here. by formula i mean that we understood the psychology of why people wanted to be a part of this. once you understand the psychology, that is just a matter of building features and software that bring that psychology to life.

people loved this emotional and responsiveness that facebook could give them. the formula was to figure out how these early behaviors could then drive the ability for you and me to pull other people, and because you wanted more of that psychological feedback. emily: you are legendary when it comes to growing facebook. what did you do? how did you do it? how much of it was you and how much of it was facebook? chamath: 99.95% was facebook and 50 basis points to me. in my job, i inherited an unbelievable leader who had an unbelievable vision. and i was lucky to have a group of people who wanted to tolerate me for 4-5 years. emily: i know for a fact that startups today are consciously looking for their chamath. i know one startup that has a codename for you, charlie foxtrot. it also stands for crazy effer. are you a crazy effer? chamath: yeah. emily: tell me something you did that was crazy.

chamath: the typical thing that people would do, you go and talk to google, yahoo!, ebay and ask how they expanded internationally. it was always the same answer. we take some really white mba and they go out on a package. i was like, eff that. so, we went and hired in brazil, only brazilians. prerequisite, they should not be able to speak english very well. we would do this and all these markets. for example, in russia, i thought about it. we didn't do this. i thought about it. you can buy a list from a russian hacking group with every single person's name in russia. and for a while, i was like wow. we should just buy this list of every single person's name and we will run google ads so that when they search for themselves, they see links to a fake profile. we didn't do it. i want to be clear.

the point is you have to be able to figure out where is that line. emily: what are facebook's biggest challenges today? chamath: it is the challenge of any successful company. the internal inability to disrupt yourself. think about what happens in a company, not just facebook, google, apple. extreme wealth creation. all of the distraction that creates. extreme amounts of incremental focus, attention, press, adulation. the acolytes come out of every single part of the woodwork. oh, my god you are -- it takes a really, really special person to not be able to be affected by that. emily: google and facebook are trying to do the same thing.

who wins? chamath: i think they both win, but in different ways. i think what happens is that google wins with respect to the entry point. they own the front door to the internet, and they own the front door to the 90% of the mobile apps. facebook owns the experience once you're there. emily: speaking of another big company that you're not fond of, you once wrote that tim cook has created a milquetoast, say-nothing, uninspiring, margin tweaking image for himself. you also said that apple should bypass tesla and make elon musk the ceo. do you still believe that? chamath: yes. emily: why? chamath: i think that he is very good at what he does. i think he is probably an exceptional operationally minded ceo. the question is can that person inspire the type of creative types to build the next lily pad? my intuition on this is no. you go to a company like apple, death marching to a trillion

dollar market cap. think of the amount of wealth that is created in a place like that. think of what that means for that individual engineer who has the next great idea. if you're trying to build the next great thing, where the person at the top is not necessarily optimized for thinking that way and being as maybe as disruptive, and rather wants to create a holistic, communal work environment, i'm not sure greatness comes from those boundary conditions. emily: can apple only get there if they have a new leader? chamath: it's a multitrillion dollar category. tesla is a good one to me. it is something we would all love, an apple experience in our car. there are many other areas, home automation. if apple built your house, they would sell more houses than anybody in the world. emily: how much longevity do they have? chamath: they have a lot of longevity. if there was any way we could wind back the clock, that's the one thing i wish would have never happened.

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emily: what is the social capital partnership? where did the idea come from? chamath: i started it with a larger ambition. hopefully, a much more important mission than just investing and generating returns. basically what i saw in 2011, when i was leaving facebook, i saw three massive trends. the first was that everything was moving to mobile. the second was there was a massive amount of regulatory change that we had never seen before. the third was that things were getting democratized at a rapid pace. if i took those three trends and apply them to markets, where i thought they would be most disruptive, what would they be? those three trends in my opinion will disproportionately affect health care, education, and financial services.

and i was like, wait a minute. those things matter. then i was thinking this is it. we need to create a platform that over the next 20-30 years can rewrite the rules of those things in a way where we can affect outcomes for people. and i am like, that is my life's mission. that will feel like i did everything i was supposed to. emily: you do have social in the name. chamath: social comes from society. i want to help society. i want to build things for people. emily: some people would say you have had big exits from companies. are those world-changing companies? chamath: when we find people that are doing their own version of things that will create value, we get behind those guys in a big way. and so things like tinder allow me to do breast cancer, c.o.p., chronic heart failure, starting

a university for kids. emily: how is social capital different from andreasen horvitz? chamath: phase one, phase two. phase one is the same thing. and i think phase two is completely different. emily: what phase are you in? you are giving them the chamath secrets? chamath: it is hard to find these people. we give it to them in a box. emily: chamath in a box. chamath: as we become successful, our goal is to have a pool of capital to reframe these things.

and that is the end game. emily: a few years ago, you called out airbnb's founders for taking money off the table and not giving employees an opportunity. what did you take away from that? chamath: i took a lot away from that. if there is any way where we could wind back the clock, that's the one thing i wish would never have happened. it wasn't fair to the team. it wasn't fair to me. i said what i said. i wanted them to hear what i said. that's all i wanted. emily: do you wish you didn't say it? chamath: no, but i wish we did not have to deal with it in a public way. emily: more bridges burned there? chamath: no bridges burned. but it's like -- well, probably, yes. it's a bad thing all the way around. emily: this is my question. you had a problem with how they were taking money off the table. is silicon valley ethical? is silicon valley loyal? chamath: i think it's deeply moral and ethically gray.

it's not 100 years old. emily: what do you mean by gray? chamath: there aren't defined ways of doing things. we are inventing things every day. and in things that are new, people are going to try a bunch of different things. some things will work, some things won't. no one is acting criminal. they are deeply moral. people care to do the right thing. emily: the tech community is being blamed for the rising inequality. you don't require your companies to donate 1% of their time equity to philanthropy. chamath: no. my companies are for-profit companies. that's not their job. their job is to educate people.

emily: you are personally invested in this fund? chamath: i am personally the largest investor. emily: how much? chamath: $120 million. and counting. emily: do you think you can beat the returns of other vc funds? or the absolute distributions? chamath: we are obliterating the market. 30 points of alpha above the nasdaq. the private side are roughly the same. i mean it is really good. we are involved in $10 billion, $15 billion unicorn companies in meaningful ways. emily: i want to know about your poker hobby. you don't just enjoy poker, you are in the world series of poker. chamath: it would be great if one day we were able to film this. there are 20 extremely successful businessmen. we play regularly in an unbelievable game in los angeles. since then, i started my own version of that here. emily: who is the best poker player in silicon valley? chamath: if i had to name, i could name a couple who i think are exceptional.

david sachs, dave goldberg, my wife. she is a really, really good player. i have been on a two-year downturn. i've lost for two straight years. emily: you and your wife have been together before you were very, very rich. how do you manage that transition? you have kids. chamath: we've made a decision that we are giving it all away. emily: how do you want to be remembered? chamath: i want to be a person who people say generally did what he felt was the right thing, lived a life that was morally true to his beliefs, and in a small way, paid off the debt to his parents. emily: chamath palihapitiya, thank you for joining us today on studio 1.0. ♪

♪ emily: founder, ceo, mad scientist. max levchin is one of silicon valley's most iconic and serial entrepreneurs. he has played a role in some of tech's biggest successes, from paypal to yahoo! to yelp. today, you can find him in his innovation lab, tackling issues like fertility, health care, and banking. but many years ago, le