Chamath Palihapitiya, the Sri Lanka born billionaire investor and minority owner of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, responded to criticism over comments he made on his podcast in which he said that nobody cares about China’s treatment of the Uyghur minority group.
Speaking on the latest episode of “All-In,” Mr. Palihapitiya said, “Nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uyghurs.”
“I’m telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all of the things that I care about, I’d say it is below my line,” he said.
“In re-listening to this week’s podcast, I recognize that I come across as lacking empathy,” he later tweeted.
“As a refugee, my family fled a country with its own set of human rights issues so this is something that is very much a part of my lived experience,” said Palihapitiya, who was born in Sri Lanka. “To be clear, my belief is that human rights matter, whether in China, the United States, or elsewhere. Full stop.”
Important issues deserve nuanced discussions. Some clarifying comments: pic.twitter.com/St2jccsu05
— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) January 18, 2022
The investor, who owns a minority stake in the 2018 NBA championship-winning Warriors, has 1.5 million followers on Twitter and often uses social media to challenge conventional finance.
In a statement released Monday, the Warriors said, “Mr. Palihapitiya does not speak on behalf of our franchise, and his views certainly don’t reflect those of our organization.”
Mr. Palihapitiya is a limited investor who has no day-to-day operating functions with the team, it added.
His comments on the podcast drew condemnation on Twitter. Boston Celtics center Enes Kanter Freedom wrote, “When @NBA says we stand for justice, don’t forget there are those who sell their soul for money & business like @chamath the owner of @warriors.”
Mr. Kanter has often advocated for minorities in China. In October, he led a rally in Washington, D.C., urging U.S. lawmakers to support the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which prevents companies from importing products that are made with forced labor in the Xinjiang area, or from entities associated with the government of the region.
Researchers say China’s government has detained hundreds of thousands of people from mostly Muslim minorities in a network of internment camps as part of an assimilation campaign, which they say also includes mass surveillance and stringent birth controls.
U.S. officials, along with some lawmakers from other Western countries and some human-rights activists, have said Beijing’s treatment of mostly Muslim minorities in the Xinjiang region amounts to a form of genocide.
China’s government rejects the allegation. It has described the camps as vocational training facilities designed to improve livelihoods and combat religious extremism.
Mr. Palihapitiya has made waves in the trading world, riding the blank-check boom and the retail-trading surge and gaining traction on Reddit. The founder of tech-investing firm Social Capital Holdings Inc. has charmed Wall Street to raise billions of dollars to bring startups public.
A Sri Lankan immigrant to Canada whose family got by on welfare payments when he was a child, Mr. Palihapitiya graduated from the University of Waterloo and worked at Bank of Montreal before moving to the U.S. during the dot-com era. He joined Facebook in 2007 to help grow its user base after stints at a venture-capital firm and America Online. He left Facebook in 2011 after he said Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg denied his request to start a cellphone business, and later emerged as a critic of his former employer. (With inputs from WSJ)