Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir and founder and general partner of the firm 8VC, spoke to Brian Kilmeade about his disagreement with President Trump over TikTok. Lonsdale explained that while he is celebrating the executive orders from the President, he does not know where Trump is coming from by supporting TikTok. Lonsdale feels TikTok is giving China the ability to decide trends in the U.S., which is way too much power for China and should be standard not to allow our adversaries control our media. Lonsdale is willing to give President Trump the 75 days left before the law banning TikTok takes effect and hopes he will do the right thing. Lonsdale does say that President Trump has a point that China manufactured phones, computers and other gadgets are also security issues because they can plant hardware inside of them to monitor. Lonsdale points to China hacking into our telecommunications systems on our phones and spying on us in a lot of ways we should be careful about.
When asked his stance on the MAGA internal debate about H-1B visas, Lonsdale understands both sides, the tech portion of MAGA who want to bring in all sorts of talent to work at their companies and the populist side of MAGA, the people who feel like they’ve been discriminated against, left behind and have had lots of unfair things happen to them. Lonsdale says he comes down on side of the people who were treated unfairly and how they’re right to be angry.
Lonsdale weighed in on the feud between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the joint venture with OpenAI, Oracle and Softbank investing up to $500 billion dollars working to improve AI infrastructure in the U.S. Lonsdale says it is a good thing for President Trump getting everyone to circle around him and invest more in AI infrastructure because it will raise productivity in our society and be the key solution to give us growth.
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