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All-In · 3 min · Oct 12, 2026

Quantum computing has one real trick and no business case

Martin Shkreli

Started hedge fund MSMB and drugmaker Retrophin, raised Daraprim's price 56-fold at Turing and was convicted of securities fraud in 2017.

  • 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.”
Martin Shkreliat 3:13 · All-In3:13

Takeaways

  1. Quantum's edge is exponential-to-polynomial speedups like factoring, not general speed
  2. Clock speeds are hundreds to thousands of hertz, single-threaded, with no quantum RAM
  3. Problems must have tiny inputs, so they can't absorb the world's compute
Watch 2:41 from 1:45

In this episode

Full episode

  1. 1:45Quantum computing has one real trick and no business case2:41

  2. 8:30How he bought neglected drugs cheap and repositioned them2:32Up next
  3. 22:22Why gifted people self-destruct trying to live up to an image1:39

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:49

    Yeah, so I have to shout out my wife, Chelsea. So Chelsea, very few people know her, but she's, I think, a big deal in technology. She was one of the first people at OpenAI. And her father, believe it or not, was one of the first people at NVIDIA. In my family, I was one of the first people in prison. So I thought I'd switch the gene pool, you know, shift it over a little bit. But Chelsea studied at MIT and taught quantum computing with Scott Aronson, the preeminent guy in quantum.

  2. 2:17

    And, you know, she got to teach me over many hours, you know, penetrating my thick head, you know, what exactly quantum computing even is. And I think a lot of people sort of synonymize it with faster computing, which sounds great. That's really not what it is at all. And I think the basic point of quantum computing is that there's one algorithm. In fact, the whole field was invented because of Peter Schor's thought experiment.

  3. 2:40

    Peter considered this idea that there are kinds of algorithms that you can run faster in different media. That was a revolutionary idea in computing, but it's not really a revolutionary idea for business because, and this is my thesis, of course, because there's one algorithm that runs faster in a quantum computer. And so if you ask somebody which computer can sort a deck of cards, if anybody know the famous algorithmist book, CLRS, you know, the first five pages are about sorting algorithms like bubble sort and merge sort and things like that.

  4. 3:10

    And I asked quantum fans, well, which one can sort it faster? And they said, well, of course, the quantum computer. And I said, of course not. That's not the case. 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. They're single core. And they're single threaded when it comes to doing a job like a merge sort or something like that.

  5. 3:29

    So the only thing it's really good at, which indeed is a magic trick, is going from exponential time algorithm, which is integer factorization or elliptic curve discrete log problem, which I want to mention a little later. Shout out to the ECDLP problem. The quantum computers can do those in polynomial time, which is remarkable. And to a nerd, that's the greatest, coolest magic trick ever. But to a business person, unless you were in the business of factoring numbers, there's not a whole lot to be excited about here.

  6. 3:55

    So the other algorithms that Quantum could do are not much faster. So they'll never beat an NVIDIA machine. They'll never beat a million NVIDIA machines. And Quantum doesn't have storage. There's no such thing as Quantum RAM. So you have to design a problem that has a really, really small input. You cannot put the world's compute into it. Every time somebody pitches open AI, from what I've heard, about quantum computer, they say, no, we're not interested.

  7. 4:18

    I think I'm closer to you in my perspectives on quantum. But let me take the other side. Let's just take the other side.