Silicon Valley investor Chamath Palihapitiya sat on CNBC’s Squawk Box in mid-July and said, almost casually, that the press had misled him about President Trump for years.
“You’re 100 percent right on Trump. He’s fantastic,” he told co-host Joe Kernen. “Unbelievable person, very smart on top of it, open-minded… great president, so far.”
This is one of the most important moments ever aired on CNBC.
Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitiya says the media lied to millions of Americans about President Trump, and that after going back to the original source material, he realized he had been completely misled about… pic.twitter.com/8ctKSd89kW
— Overton (@overton_news) July 14, 2026
The clip has circulated again in recent days. It is not new, but the admission still lands because Palihapitiya once occupied the opposite side of the argument.
On the July 14 broadcast, he explained the shift in plain terms: “The reality is that most of us were lied to by the media about President Trump.”
He added that a closer examination revealed that Trump had not said half of what was attributed to him, and that others had fabricated material “so that they could essentially assassinate his character.”
Palihapitiya has said he first corrected the record on his own “All-In Podcast” after rewatching the Charlottesville remarks that the press had framed as a blanket defense of white nationalists.