Summary
By late 2025, a large and durable slice of news and commentary has moved to bottom‑up, subscription‑driven platforms (notably Substack) with individual writers monetizing directly. On top of that, a layer of newsletter‑based media companies and bundles—effectively “next‑generation magazines”—has clearly emerged. Some details (like true cross‑creator bundles inside Substack) haven’t materialized, and legacy outlets still dominate overall news consumption, but the core direction Chamath described is playing out strongly enough to count this as right.

1. Bottom‑up subscription journalism on Substack‑like platforms

Since 2020, Substack and similar platforms have become a major channel for journalists and commentators to leave traditional newsrooms and monetize directly via paid subscribers:

• Substack reports millions of paid subscriptions and tens of millions of active subscribers, with over 50,000 publishers making money and the top 10 publishers earning tens of millions of dollars annually. (en.wikipedia.org)
• High‑profile journalists have exited legacy outlets to launch paid Substack newsletters or Substack‑based outlets, including Bari Weiss (founding Common Sense, rebranded as The Free Press), Mehdi Hasan (Zeteo), Taylor Lorenz (User Mag), and Paul Krugman (leaving the New York Times opinion section to run an independent Substack newsletter). (en.wikipedia.org)
• Entire newsrooms or collectives have formed subscription sites that mirror the Substack model even when not using Substack’s infrastructure—for example Defector Media (ex‑Deadspin staff) and Hell Gate NYC, both funded primarily by reader subscriptions rather than advertising. (en.wikipedia.org)

This is exactly the “bottom‑up” rebuild Chamath describes: individuals and small teams going direct‑to‑reader, with audiences “voting with their subscription dollars” on which writers and outlets survive.

2. Emergence of “next‑generation magazines” and bundles on top of newsletters

Chamath also predicted that aggregation tools and bundles would form on top of these individual subscriptions, creating magazine‑like products.

We now see several concrete realizations of that idea:

• Puck is explicitly built as a bundle of star‑journalist newsletters: one subscription gives access to multiple personalities and verticals (media, politics, tech, Wall Street). Readers confirm that a single Puck membership unlocks all contributing writers’ emails, functioning as a multi‑author bundle under one paywall. (axios.com)
• The Ankler, launched as a single Hollywood newsletter, has grown into a profitable mini‑network with nearly a dozen specialized newsletters authored by a team of journalists, all under one subscription/business umbrella—very close to a “next‑gen trade magazine” layered on top of the newsletter model. (axios.com)
• The Free Press, which began as Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter, scaled into a larger outlet with over 100,000+ paid subscribers and multimillion‑dollar annual revenue, then was acquired by Paramount/CBS, with Weiss installed as editor‑in‑chief of CBS News. This is a textbook case of a bottom‑up Substack newsletter evolving into a full‑fledged media brand with magazine‑like breadth and institutional influence. (en.wikipedia.org)

Outside Substack’s own ecosystem, these companies look almost exactly like the “next‑generation magazines and content subscriptions” Chamath described: bundles of multiple creator/newsletters, sold as a unified subscription product, built on direct reader revenue rather than mass‑market advertising.

On the tooling side, aggregation for consumption (versus billing) has also grown:

• The Substack app aggregates all of a reader’s subscriptions into a single feed with discovery, recommendations, and social‑style “Notes,” making it a de facto front‑end for multiple newsletters at once. (reddit.com)
• Third‑party tools like Readwise Reader integrate paid Substack emails into a single reading queue, so users can read all their paid newsletters in one interface. (reddit.com)

These don’t always handle payments as a unified bundle, but they do represent the “overlay aggregation tools” layer he foresaw, where multiple subscriptions are experienced together like a personalized magazine.

3. Where the prediction falls short

There are two meaningful caveats, but they don’t overturn the main thesis:

1. No platform‑level à‑la‑carte bundles on Substack itself (yet).
   Substack still generally sells subscriptions creator‑by‑creator. Users have explicitly complained that they cannot just choose, say, 5–10 authors for a single blended fee, and Substack has not shipped a formal bundle marketplace. (reddit.com)

2. “Where the world is going” is overstated in scope.
   While subscription newsletters and newsletter‑based bundles have grown dramatically, they coexist with (and are often overshadowed by) other dominant information channels like TikTok, YouTube, and legacy outlets’ own paywalled sites and apps. The entire world of “information and content” has not consolidated around Substack‑style products.

Those points mean the vision isn’t universally true, but they don’t negate the core directional prediction that journalism would significantly re‑form around direct, subscription‑driven, writer‑centric platforms and that bundled newsletter enterprises would arise on top.

4. Overall assessment

By 2025:

• Direct‑to‑subscriber platforms (Substack and similar) have become a major, durable part of the news and commentary ecosystem, with many prominent journalists and entire outlets funded primarily through reader subscriptions rather than ads. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Multi‑newsletter bundles and newsletter‑native media companies (Puck, The Ankler, The Free Press, Defector, etc.) function in practice as “next‑generation magazines,” validating the expected aggregation layer on top of individual creators. (axios.com)

Given how closely these developments match the structure of Chamath’s forecast—even if some implementation details differ and the trend doesn’t dominate all information consumption—the prediction is best judged as right in substance.