Chamath’s Social Capital gets back into SPAC game with “American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp.”
But all the SPAC King touches has not turned to gold.
Chamath Palihapitiya is back in the arena trying stuff.
The same stuff that didn’t work for most investors who followed his lead, but did very well for his venture capital firm Social Capital.
With SPACs back on the menu, the former Facebook exec, SoFi founder, and “All-In” podcaster is raising at least $250 million for a new special purpose acquisition vehicle called the American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp., according to a filing released on Monday evening.
Per the preliminary prospectus, the industries that excite Palihapitiya the most (and presumably the kind of companies he’s targeting to take public) are energy production, AI, decentralized finance, and defense.
The so-called “SPAC King” once favorably compared his fund’s early returns to those of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. But with the exception of SoFi Technologies, Social Capital-led SPACs are down substantially since the completion of their mergers with the blank-check companies.
Virgin Galactic and Clover Health got off to hot starts, but cratered as inflationary pressures and the ensuing aggressive rate-hiking campaign from the Federal Reserve weighed acutely on more speculative pockets of the market. And online real estate company Opendoor Technologies has enjoyed a run as a meme stock as of late, but has yet to show concrete signs of an operational turnaround.
Perhaps in light of this track record, Palihapitiya said in the filing that he has “dramatically reshaped and restructured the sponsor’s economics” in order “to provide greater alignment with my investors.”
