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Chamath Palihapitiya has told investors in his company Social Capital that a collapse in share prices put pressure on a stock-backed line of credit that made him question “the purpose of leverage” altogether.
“What initially seemed like access to free money became a liability that we managed carefully so we could continue to do business as usual,” Palihapitiya wrote in his annual letter to investors. The collateral that backed the loan facility had declined in value by 70 per cent, he added.
The Financial Times last year revealed that Palihapitiya had borrowed money from Credit Suisse to finance $200mn of his initial share purchases in two signature blank-cheque deals, and pledged his stock in the companies as collateral, something he had previously denied.
The founder of Social Capital, who used his annual letter to opine on how the end of zero-interest rate policy had affected the market, told investors that last year was “akin to getting cold water thrown in our faces” with higher interest rates hitting some of his most beloved sectors.
“The amount of absolute value destruction, not just in companies, but entire sectors including crypto, SaaS [Software as a Service], Spacs [Special purpose acquisition companies], and biotech was alarming,” he wrote. “This has created a wave of destruction with many unintended consequences.”
Palihapitiya, once the biggest promoter of Spacs, which boomed in 2021 but have floundered in a higher interest rate environment, said the US Federal Reserve’s hawkish monetary policy had ended “the best party in town”.
The former Facebook executive, who became a popular figure among meme-stock investors during the pandemic and often increased interest in his deals with tweets such as “Im [sic] about to really fuck some shit up”, said he has always considered himself a “sober” and “risk-averse” person.
Palihapitiya told attendees at an Axios conference last year that he blamed Fed chair Jay Powell for investment bubbles that had built up in the market during a decade or more of record-low interest rates, while acknowledging that this had also benefited his investing.
“If [zero interest-rate policy] was the drug, the high it created is now obvious — growth at all costs, unsubstantiated funding rounds, overhiring, and corporate glut,” he wrote in his letter, urging venture capitalists to “face reality”.
Palihapitiya did not touch on the fall of start-up focused lender Silicon Valley Bank in his letter, despite the collapse testing many venture capital groups and their portfolio companies. His advice to founders, however, is that “profits and cash flows matter again” in the new financial regime where there is no longer reward for “growth at all cost”.
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