FTC chair Lina Khan ‘is not a rational human being’  – Vinod Khosla’s scathing attack on US and EU regulators

Billionaire investor Vinod Khosla has launched a scathing attack on antitrust regulators in the US and Europe.

Speaking at Collision conference in Toronto on Tuesday evening, Vinod said that Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan should not be in the position – where she is in charge of enforcing antitrust and consumer protection laws.

The FTC has been widely described in the US as leading a “crusade against Big Tech”, especially in aiming to break up what it considers tech monopolies – and has even been accused of “declaring war on entrepreneurs”.

Asked about Khan’s view that she did not see her role as being the “nation’s champion”, Vinod said of the FTC chair: “She’s not a rational human being. She doesn’t understand business: she shouldn’t be in that role.”

Vinod, whose firm has more than US$15 billion of assets under management across numerous areas of tech, was then asked if he had a message for the FTC or for the US Department of Justice, which is investigating Microsoft and Nvidia. And he replied by suggesting that the regulators were going too far – and that this was the wrong approach for the US economy.

“Look, antitrust is a good thing to have in any country – any economic system,” he said, before adding his rebuttal: “Antitrust over-enforced, or over-executed, is bad economic policy.”

However Vinod then turned his fire on European regulators – claiming they had “regulated themselves out of leading in any technology area” and that talented European entrepreneurs were forced to come to North America as a result.

“One thing the US has over its European rivals is much more rational business environments,’ he said. “And that’s why the Europeans have regulated themselves out of leading in any technology area.”

Vinod – whose firm has backed DoorDash, OpenAI, Square and Stripe among many other major tech successes – argued that this over-regulation was the reason that Europe is not home to any of the leading AI, social media or other global internet startup leaders. “They just basically have regulated themselves out of AI, out of all social media, out of all internet startups,” he said. “It’s a no-op, relative to the amount of talent in Europe: so they all come to the US or Canada, which is great! Good for us, bad for them. I wish they’d get smarter.”

Vinod also suggested that this over-regulation was happening at a time when the world needed to be aware of what he perceives as the risks emerging from China.

“I do believe the largest risks we face with AI is China, and powerful Chinese AI competing with what we call liberal values,” he said. “And in fact, President Qi has said – in Chinese, not in English! – that the next large battlefield will be for the mind… and will be fought on the internet.”

He added: “That’s why the champion Chinese Communist Party made the TikTok algorithm a state secret! As one of TikTok’s arguments for not forcing its sale is that it can’t be sold because its algorithm is a Chinese state secret. Think about it. Why would it be a state secret unless it was a tool for the Chinese Communist Party? It’s almost ridiculous.”

Vinod then went on to warn: “I think we are in a massive techno economic war with China for the best technology over the next 20 years. And I think we need to make sure we do everything to win. And we have to make sure that China stays behind us because they’ll provide free doctors and free oncologists to the rest of the world and export both the economic power that comes with AI to the rest of the world with their political philosophy, which is not one I want to win globally.”

In terms of the impact of AI on society, Vinod added: “AI will cause great abundance, great GDP growth, great productivity, growth, all the things economists measure…. I would say in conclusion, I think 25 years from now…the need to work will mostly disappear!” 

Vinod’s comments were made as part of a wider discussion on AI at Collision, which is returning to Toronto for its sixth year. Global founders, CEOs, investors and members of the media have come to the city to make deals and experience North America’s thriving tech ecosystem.

More than 1,600 startups are taking part in Collision 2024 – the highest number of startups ever at a Collision event. 45 percent of these are women-founded, and startups have travelled to Toronto from countries including Nigeria, the Republic of Korea, Uruguay, Japan, Italy, Ghana, Pakistan and beyond.

In total, more than 37,800 attendees have gathered at the event, as well as 570 speakers and 1,003 members of the media, to explore business opportunities with an international audience.

739 investors are attending Collision, including Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures; Wesley Chan, co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures; and Nigel Morris, co-founder and managing partner of QED Investors, as well as nine companies on the Forbes Midas List, and 12 investors from those firms.

Top speakers at Collision include:

• Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
• Maria Sharapova, entrepreneur and tennis legend
• Aidan Gomez, founder and CEO of Cohere (an AI for enterprise and large language model company, which raised US$450 million at a US$5 billion valuation in June 2024)
• Raquel Urtasun, founder and CEO of Waabi (a Canadian autonomous trucking company)
• Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password (a cloud-based password management tool)
• Dali Rajic, president and COO of Wiz (a cloud security platform)
• Alex Israel, co-founder and CEO of Metropolis (an AI and computer vision platform)
• Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (an AI chip startup)
• Keily Blair, CEO of OnlyFans
• Autumn Peltier, Indigenous rights activist

About Web Summit: 

Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Half a million people have attended Web Summit events – Web Summit in Europe, Web Summit Rio in South America, Collision in North America, Web Summit Qatar in the Middle East, and RISE in Asia – since the company’s beginnings as a 150-person conference in Dublin in 2009.

This year alone, Web Summit has hosted sold-out events in Qatar, which welcomed more than 15,000 attendees, and in Rio, where more than 34,000 people took part. Our events have been supported by partners including the Qatar Investment Authority, Snap, Deloitte, TikTok, Huawei, Microsoft, Shell, Palo Alto Networks, EY, Builder.ai and Qatar Airways. 

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Useful links:
Collision website: https://collisionconf.com/ 
Collision media kit: https://collisionconf.com/media/media-kit  
Collision images: https://flickr.com/photos/collisionconf 
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