All-In · 3 min instead of 25 min · Oct 12, 2026
Quantum computing has one real trick and no business case
Martin Shkreli
Chamath PalihapitiyaHost · Founder & CEO, Social Capital
Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.
Jason CalacanisHost · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH
Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.
David SacksHost · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures
PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.
David FriedbergHost · CEO, Ohalo
Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.
About this segment
Shkreli argues quantum computers are fast at only one class of problem, factoring-style math, and lose to GPUs elsewhere. Slow clocks and no quantum RAM limit them, which is his case for shorting the sector.
From “Martin Shkreli: Big Pharma's Blind Spot, Betting Against Quantum & What Prison Taught Him”, Oct 12, 2026. Watch the full episode
“The modern quantum computers run at a clock speed of hundreds of hertz or thousands of hertz, not at the gigahertz that we're used to.”
Takeaways
- Quantum's edge is exponential-to-polynomial speedups like factoring, not general speed
- Clock speeds are hundreds to thousands of hertz, single-threaded, with no quantum RAM
- Problems must have tiny inputs, so they can't absorb the world's compute
In this episode
Full episode1:45Quantum computing has one real trick and no business case2:41
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