E7: California's collapse, how SPACs are opening the markets for growth stocks & more

Evidence shows that new federal gun control legislation has been enacted in the United States since September 2020, contradicting Sacks’s prediction of “no new gun control legislation for a generation.”

Key facts:

1. Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA)

   • Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden on June 25, 2022.
   • Widely described in major outlets and by the White House as the first significant federal gun safety/gun control law in nearly 30 years.
   • Provisions include, among others:
     • Enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21.
     • Funding incentives for states to implement red-flag laws or other crisis intervention programs.
     • Closing the so‑called “boyfriend loophole” by expanding firearm prohibitions for certain domestic-violence offenders.
     • New penalties for straw purchasing and gun trafficking.
   • These measures clearly regulate the acquisition and possession of firearms and are thus treated as federal gun control/safety legislation.

   See detailed descriptions of the BSCA and its characterization as major gun safety legislation in contemporaneous reporting and government summaries.

2. Implication for the prediction

   • The prediction (September 2020) was that there would be no new gun control legislation “for a generation” (roughly 20–30 years).
   • The BSCA was enacted less than two years later (June 2022), well within that time window.
   • Because a substantial, widely recognized federal gun control law was passed, the core claim that there would be no such legislation over that period has already been falsified, even though the full 20–30 years have not elapsed.

Therefore, the prediction is wrong: at least one major piece of federal gun control legislation has in fact been enacted since the statement was made.

What was predicted

Chamath predicted that after Powell’s 2020 policy shift the Fed would:

1. Keep short‑term interest rates at (roughly) 0% for at least five years (through ~2025), maybe up to a decade.
2. Let inflation run above target before raising rates.
3. Face “no path to any near‑term inflation of any kind whatsoever,” i.e., no significant early‑2020s inflation spike that would force rapid rate hikes.

What actually happened

1. Rates did not stay near zero for five years.

   • The federal funds target range was held at 0–0.25% through 2020 and 2021 and into early 2022. (economicsummarizer.com)
   • Starting March 2022, the Fed began an aggressive tightening cycle, raising the target range repeatedly from 0.25–0.50% in March 2022 to 4.25–4.50% by December 2022, and then to 5.25–5.50% by July 2023. (forbes.com)
   • By late 2025 the policy rate is still around 4.0–4.25%, far from the near‑zero level he anticipated persisting for at least a half‑decade. (economicsummarizer.com)

2. There was a large, early‑2020s inflation spike.

   • U.S. CPI inflation, which had been subdued in 2020, surged in 2021, reaching over 5% by mid‑2021 and above 7% by late 2021. (inflationdata.com)
   • Inflation then peaked at about 9.1% year‑over‑year in June 2022, the highest reading since the early 1980s. (cnbc.com)

3. That spike clearly did force rapid rate hikes.

   • In response to the inflation surge, the Fed executed the fastest tightening cycle in decades, raising the federal funds rate by more than 5 percentage points between March 2022 and July 2023 specifically to bring inflation back down. (forbes.com)

4. Partial credit: letting inflation run above target.

   • Powell’s 2020 framework did explicitly allow inflation to run moderately above 2% after periods of undershooting, and the Fed initially held rates at zero as inflation rose. (cnbc.com)
   • However, the prediction that this would coexist with no meaningful inflation problem and no need for rapid hikes proved wrong once inflation greatly overshot expectations.

Conclusion

Because (a) rates were lifted far above zero well before five years had passed and (b) there was a pronounced early‑2020s inflation spike that led to rapid, aggressive rate hikes, Chamath’s composite prediction is wrong.

Interpretation of the prediction

The normalized prediction treats the “risk‑free rate” as a real (inflation‑adjusted) short‑term U.S. government yield, e.g., TIPS or nominal Treasuries minus inflation. The claim was that after September 2020 these real risk‑free rates would soon become negative and stay below zero for a sustained period.

What actually happened

1. TIPS real yields were negative for an extended stretch after 2020.

   • A recap of 2021 TIPS performance shows that by the end of 2021, real yields on 5‑, 10‑, and 30‑year TIPS were all firmly negative (e.g., 5‑year TIPS at about –1.6% real yield on 12/31/2021). (tipswatch.com)
   • Schwab’s analysis notes that from March 2020 through the end of April 2022, most TIPS yields were negative, meaning investors were locking in negative real yields over that entire period. (schwabassetmanagement.com)
   • This implies a roughly two‑year span (2020–2022) of broadly negative real risk‑free yields, squarely within the “next few years” after September 2020.

2. Short‑term real rates derived from nominal Treasuries were also deeply negative.

   • At the end of 2021, 4‑week Treasury bills yielded around 0.01% nominal, i.e., essentially zero. (tipswatch.com)
   • Over the same period, U.S. CPI inflation was running in the mid‑single to high‑single digits, so the ex‑post real return on Treasury bills was strongly negative (nominal ≈0% minus inflation ≫0%). This is exactly the textbook definition of a negative real interest rate. (en.wikipedia.org)

3. Consensus commentary acknowledges that real Treasury yields were negative “for quite a while.”

   • Investment and market commentaries from 2022–2023 repeatedly describe real Treasury yields as having been negative across most maturities in 2020–2021 and into early 2022, before turning positive as the Fed hiked rates. (wisdomtree.com)

Assessment vs. the prediction

• Timing (“soon”): Real TIPS yields were already negative around the time of the September 2020 podcast, and remained negative across most of the curve into at least April 2022—well within “the next few years.” (schwabassetmanagement.com)
• Level (“will be negative”): Both market‑observable real yields (TIPS) and ex‑post real yields on short Treasuries were clearly below zero for an extended period. (tipswatch.com)
• Duration (“sustained period”): Roughly two years of broadly negative real risk‑free rates qualifies as a sustained period by any reasonable interpretation.

Nominal policy rates never went meaningfully below zero, but under the normalized interpretation (real risk‑free rates), Chamath’s claim that the risk‑free rate would be negative and stay there for a while is borne out by the data.

Conclusion: The prediction about real risk‑free rates becoming and remaining negative for a sustained period after September 2020 is right.

Chamath Palihapitiya said on the All-In Podcast in 2020 that he had reserved NYSE ticker symbols IPOA through IPOZ and hoped and expected to launch SPACs for all of them over time. (benzinga.com) In practice, the Social Capital Hedosophia IPO series only produced six SPACs: IPOA (Virgin Galactic), IPOB (Opendoor), IPOC (Clover Health), IPOD, IPOE (SoFi), and IPOF. Of these, IPOA, IPOB, IPOC, and IPOE completed mergers, while IPOD and IPOF were liquidated without deals in October 2022, with Palihapitiya explicitly deciding to wind them down and return capital to investors. (seglerconsulting.com) Subsequent retrospectives note that although he had reserved tickers up to IPOZ, the SPAC boom “ran out of steam before he got there” and no IPOG–IPOZ SPACs were ever launched. (nasdaq.com) By 2025, Palihapitiya had moved on to a different SPAC structure (American Exceptionalism Acquisition Corp. A, ticker AEXA) rather than continuing the IPO alphabet series, reinforcing that the original A–Z plan was abandoned. (en.wikipedia.org) As of November 29, 2025, the full IPOA–IPOZ sequence clearly has not been realized, so his expectation that he would ultimately fulfill it has proven incorrect.

Assessment of the prediction
Chamath predicted in September 2020 that, after an initial boom, the SPAC market would consolidate so that his SPAC platform and at most “one or two other people” would dominate the space in terms of deal volume/importance.

From 2020–2025, the data show the opposite pattern:

1. The SPAC boom was large and highly fragmented, not quickly consolidated.

   • In 2020 there were 248 SPAC IPOs raising about $83–$84 billion, followed by 613 SPAC IPOs in 2021 raising about $162 billion—roughly 861 SPAC IPOs over those two years alone. (ru.wikipedia.org)
   • An industry article notes that in 2020 there were 223 SPAC sponsors and that by early 2021 “SPACs are all over the place,” with hundreds of sponsors jumping in (including politicians, celebrities, and many funds), underscoring how dispersed sponsorship was rather than concentrated in a few platforms. (investmentnews.com)
     Given this scale, Chamath’s Social Capital vehicles represented only a small single‑digit share of overall SPAC deal count.

2. Chamath’s own SPAC platform did not become a consolidating winner.

   • Chamath’s Social Capital Hedosophia SPACs took Virgin Galactic, Opendoor, Clover Health, SoFi and a couple of biotech companies public, but in total he sponsored on the order of a dozen SPACs—significant in profile but still a tiny slice of the ~860 SPAC IPOs of 2020–2021. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • By September 2022, he shut down and liquidated his remaining tech SPACs (IPOD and IPOF) after failing to find suitable targets, with coverage explicitly describing him as “throwing in the towel” and returning $1.6 billion to investors. (axios.com)
   • That wind‑down marked a retreat rather than the emergence of a durable, dominant SPAC “platform” that others would have to reckon with.

3. The market shrank instead of consolidating around a few dominant sponsors.

   • After the 2021 peak, new SPAC IPOs plunged to 86 in 2022 and 31 in 2023 as rising rates, poor post‑merger performance and tougher regulation hit the sector. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • A 2025 Reuters analysis sums up the boom‑and‑bust: around $250 billion across 860 SPAC IPOs in 2020–2021, with roughly half the vehicles later liquidated and over 90% of de‑SPACed companies trading below their $10 issue price. This is described as a classic speculative cycle rather than a normal, consolidated industry structure. (reuters.com)
   • This is not the pattern of a mature market dominated by one or two sponsor platforms; it is a boom followed by a collapse and partial reset.

4. In the later mini‑resurgence, leadership lies with various banks and sponsors—not with Chamath’s platform.

   • In the 2025 SPAC comeback, coverage highlights Cohen & Company and Cantor Fitzgerald as leading SPAC IPO underwriters, and notes a mix of experienced sponsors like Michael Klein, Alec Gores and Betsy Cohen re‑entering the field—again indicating a plural, competitive sponsor landscape. (ft.com)
   • Axios in mid‑2025 reports 74 SPACs year‑to‑date with 80% of sponsors being “experienced”, but does not identify any one sponsor platform as dominating SPAC volume or importance; Chamath appears as one high‑profile participant among many, not the central consolidator. (axios.com)

Conclusion
By late 2025, enough time has passed to evaluate “the coming years” after 2020. The empirical record shows:

• A huge, fragmented boom with hundreds of sponsors and no quick consolidation around a few players.
• Chamath’s own SPAC platform remained a minority share of deal flow, then wound down key vehicles in 2022 instead of emerging as a durable consolidator.
• The post‑bust environment features a smaller but still multi‑sponsor market, with leadership spread across different banks and sponsors rather than concentrated in Chamath plus one or two others.

Given these facts, the prediction that his platform and at most one or two other sponsors would “really dominate the space” in SPACs has not come true.

Verdict: his prediction was wrong.

Jason Calacanis said in September 2020 that for early‑stage investors, “we’re not going to count unicorns anymore. We’re going to count SPACs. We’re going to count public listings.”(podscripts.co)

What happened next contradicts this:

1. SPACs were a short‑lived boom, then a bust, not a new core metric.

   • SPAC issuance exploded in 2020–2021 (nearly 250 SPAC IPOs raising $83B in 2020; 613 SPAC IPOs raising ~$162B in 2021).(en.wikipedia.org)
   • Performance and quality problems led to sharp declines: by 2022 SPAC IPOs and completed mergers dropped dramatically, with many SPACs liquidating without deals and media describing the “SPAC boom” as a failure or bust.(spglobal.com)
   • By 2025 there is a resurgence but at far from peak dominance: SPACs account for ~38% of IPOs vs 64% in 2021 and raise about $14.7B YTD—significant, but just one listing path among others, not the central scoreboard for VCs.(axios.com)

2. Unicorn counts remain a primary success metric for VCs and ecosystems.

   • The global number of unicorns is still systematically tracked and publicized by CB Insights, Dealroom, and others; estimates rise from ~803 in 2021 to over 1,200+ by 2024–2025, showing the category is alive and central.(en.wikipedia.org)
   • Major reports explicitly rank investors by how many unicorns they’ve backed, e.g., Hurun’s 2022 "Unicorn Investors Top 100" (Sequoia, SoftBank, Tiger Global, etc., listed with their unicorn counts).(mp.hurun.co.uk)
   • Current commentary still evaluates top early‑stage and growth VCs by the number of unicorns they’ve produced (e.g., Dealroom‑based LinkedIn analyses and academic VC studies counting Y Combinator, Sequoia, a16z, etc., by unicorn tallies).(linkedin.com)
   • Media and data providers continue to highlight cities, countries, and individual firms by unicorn counts, and regional funding reports in 2024–2025 still treat “new unicorns” (or the lack of them) as a key headline metric.(en.wikipedia.org)

3. VCs have not habitually switched to “counting SPACs/public listings” instead of unicorns.

   • Industry exit reports for 2022–2024 focus on total IPO/M&A exit value and number of IPOs broadly, but they do not present rankings of early‑stage funds by SPAC count in the same way unicorn rankings do.(aeen.org)
   • The visible bragging/benchmarking in venture (press, LP marketing, analyst reports) overwhelmingly still centers on unicorn creation and valuation milestones, with SPACs treated as a (controversial) mechanism for some exits, not the primary yardstick for early‑stage fund performance.

Because unicorn counts remain a core way early‑stage VCs and observers measure and market success, while SPAC/public‑listing counts did not replace that role, Jason’s prediction that investors would “not…count unicorns anymore” and instead primarily “count SPACs” and listings has not come true.

Overall, Jason Calacanis’s scenario did not materialize, mainly because COVID deaths were far higher and the pandemic was clearly worsening by the debates.

1. Daily U.S. COVID deaths at the debates

• First debate (Sept 29, 2020): U.S. reported 879 COVID deaths that day (total deaths 205,052 → 205,931).
• Around the second debate (Oct 22, 2020): U.S. reported 880 deaths that day (total deaths 221,662 → 222,542), with surrounding days commonly in the 800–1,100 range. (indexmundi.com)
• Independent fact‑checks using Johns Hopkins/COVID Tracking Project data show the 7‑day average of daily deaths rose from about 695 on Oct 7 to 757 on Oct 21, i.e., roughly ~700–800 deaths/day, not the 200–400/day Calacanis envisioned. (politifact.com)
  → The core quantitative claim ("well under 600–700," ~400 then ~200 deaths/day, "deaths at an all‑time low") was clearly wrong.

2. Pandemic trajectory and Trump’s ability to “credibly” say he’d solved COVID

• By late October, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were all rising again, with national case counts climbing back toward (and then beyond) prior peaks. (politifact.com)
• At the Oct 22 debate, Trump repeatedly said the U.S. was “rounding the turn/corner” on coronavirus; major fact‑checkers (AP, PolitiFact, FactCheck.org) rated this false, citing those rising trends. (politifact.com)
  → Given the objective data and contemporaneous fact‑checks, the idea that he could credibly claim to have “solved” COVID by the debates was not borne out.

3. Schools in October 2020

• Burbio’s School Opening Tracker shows that for the week of Oct 4, 2020, about 28.8% of U.S. K‑12 students were in districts offering traditional in‑person school and 21.3% in hybrid, while 49.8% were still in virtual‑only districts. (about.burbio.com)
• By Oct 21 (just before Election Day), over 60% of students were in districts offering some in‑person option (35.7% traditional + 26.5% hybrid), with 37.8% still virtual‑only. (prweb.com)
  → This part of the prediction (“our kids are back in school in October”) was partly right: many—but far from all—students had returned to at least some in‑person schooling.

4. Vaccine announcements and rapid testing

• The Abbott BinaxNOW rapid antigen test (a “high‑speed testing” card giving results in ~15 minutes) received FDA emergency authorization on Aug 26, 2020, with plans to ramp production to tens of millions of tests per month and a 150‑million test purchase by the U.S. government. (prnewswire.com)
• However, the first credible Phase 3 vaccine efficacy announcements came after the debates: Pfizer‑BioNTech reported >90% efficacy on Nov 9, 2020, Moderna reported ~94.5% on Nov 16, and Pfizer’s EUA was not issued until Dec 11, 2020. (announce.today)
  → The “high‑speed testing machines” portion was broadly correct; a truly “credible vaccine announcement” in the sense of late‑stage efficacy data did not arrive until weeks after the debates.

5. Stock market and broader economy

• The stock market was indeed near record levels: the S&P 500 hit a then‑record 3,580.84 on Sept 2, 2020, and was still close to that level in late October. (de.wikipedia.org)
• The economy had a record 33.1% annualized GDP rebound in Q3 2020, but overall output remained below late‑2019 levels, and unemployment was 7.9% in September 2020, more than double the pre‑pandemic rate (3.5% in Feb). (justthenews.com)
  → “Stock market near an all‑time high” was largely right; “economy at an all‑time high” was an exaggeration, given persistent unemployment and incomplete recovery.

Bottom line The central pillars of Calacanis’s forecast—very low daily deaths (200–400/day), COVID “solved” or at an all‑time low, enabling a credibly triumphant Trump narrative at the debates—did not occur. While some auxiliary elements (partial school reopening, strong markets, emergence of rapid tests) were directionally correct, the main quantitative and qualitative claims about the pandemic’s status by late September–October 2020 were clearly wrong.

Bottom line: Some surface conditions moved in the direction Sacks described (notably partial school reopenings and deaths down from their midsummer peak), but by the late‑September and October 2020 debate period COVID was still severe and politically damaging to Trump. Polls show the environment clearly did not favor a narrative that he had handled COVID successfully.

1. COVID deaths and overall situation

• The U.S. passed 200,000 cumulative COVID deaths on September 22, 2020, just a week before the first presidential debate, with CDC projections in mid‑October expecting deaths to reach 230,000–250,000 by mid‑November. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Reuters reporting at the time noted that as of September 24, 2020, the U.S. had topped 7 million cases and was still seeing over 700 deaths per day, with a growing outbreak in the Midwest. (hurriyetdailynews.com)
• By late October, the country was described as entering a “fall surge” with nearly half a million new cases added in a single week (Oct 20–27). (wishtv.com) This is inconsistent with a broadly perceived “mission accomplished” COVID environment heading into and through the debates.

2. Schools reopening

• On this narrow point, the forecast was directionally right: a large share of districts did reopen in some form. A later synthesis of Burbio, AEI’s Return to Learn tracker, and other datasets found that about 40.3% of U.S. school districts were offering fully in‑person learning in September 2020, with many others hybrid. (arxiv.org) However, major blue‑state urban systems remained largely remote or hybrid, so the national picture was mixed rather than a clear, across‑the‑board reopening.

3. Did conditions favor Trump’s “I handled COVID successfully” narrative? Polls around the debates show the opposite:

• National job approval on COVID:
  • KFF’s late‑August/early‑September 2020 tracking poll found a majority (about 55%) disapproved of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus, despite a modest uptick from July. (kff.org)
  • A Washington Post/ABC News poll conducted Sept 21–24 (just before the Sept 29 debate) found only 40% approved vs 58% disapproved of his handling of the health crisis. (washingtonpost.com)
  • An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll Oct 8–13, 2020 found 38% approval vs 59% disapproval on his pandemic handling. (maristpoll.marist.edu)
• Who was trusted more on COVID:
  • The Sept 21–26 Washington Post/ABC News national poll found registered voters trusted Biden over Trump on handling the coronavirus, 53% to 41%. (washingtonpost.com)
  • In late‑October Washington Post/ABC battleground polling, voters in Michigan and Wisconsin trusted Biden more than Trump on the coronavirus outbreak by 14–20‑point margins. (washingtonpost.com)
• Debate context and Trump’s own infection:
  • The first presidential debate was on September 29, 2020. (en.wikipedia.org)
  • On October 2, 2020, between the first and (planned) second debates, Trump announced that he and the First Lady had tested positive for COVID‑19 and was hospitalized at Walter Reed, putting a spotlight on the ongoing uncontrolled spread rather than on a successful containment narrative. (history.com)
  • The October 15 debate was canceled due to COVID concerns, and the final debate on October 22 also occurred against the backdrop of a documented national “fall surge.” (en.wikipedia.org)

Taken together, while some of the factual predicates (partial school reopening, deaths off their July–August peak) were partially accurate, the core prediction—that these conditions, heading into the late‑September and October debates, would create an environment favorable to Trump’s claim that he had handled COVID well—was decisively falsified by contemporaneous polling, Trump’s own infection, and the worsening fall surge. Hence the prediction is best classified as wrong.

Outcome: Joe Biden won the 2020 U.S. presidential election, defeating incumbent President Donald Trump.

Multiple reputable sources (e.g., major U.S. and international news organizations and the official Electoral College results) confirm that Joe Biden secured both the popular vote and a majority of Electoral College votes and was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021.

Since Chamath Palihapitiya predicted that Joe Biden would win, and Biden indeed won, the prediction is right.

Donald Trump did not win the 2020 U.S. presidential election, so David Sacks’s prediction was incorrect.

Official and major media tallies show that Joe Biden won both the popular vote and the Electoral College, and was inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States on January 20, 2021. Trump received 232 electoral votes versus Biden’s 306, and Biden secured over 81 million popular votes to Trump’s roughly 74 million.

Because the prediction was specifically that Trump would win the 2020 election (made in early September 2020) and the final certified outcome was a Biden victory, the prediction is unambiguously wrong.

Why this is inconclusive (too early to judge overall)

Friedberg’s prediction has two parts:

1. Long‑term claim: U.S. democracy is in an “awkward phase” that will culminate in a major structural transition away from its current democratic form within his and his co‑hosts’ lifetimes.
2. Short‑term constraint: This culmination will not occur within the single four‑year presidential term following the 2020 election (i.e., the term from January 20, 2021 to January 20, 2025).

As of November 29, 2025:

• The United States remains a constitutional federal republic with regular competitive elections, separation of powers, and no fundamental replacement of its democratic system (no monarchy, military junta, one‑party system, or formal suspension/abolition of elections or Congress during 2021–2025). The Biden administration served a full term under the existing constitutional order and transferred power through the normal electoral and legal processes.
• Therefore, the short‑term part of his prediction — that the structural transition would not be realized in the next presidential term — has, so far, been accurate.
• However, the core of the prediction is that a major structural transition away from U.S. democracy will occur within the podcasters’ lifetimes. Given that they are middle‑aged and still alive, and that their remaining lifespans could easily extend several decades, we cannot yet know whether this larger claim will prove true or false.

Because the central, long‑horizon claim (democratic transition within their lifetimes) is not yet resolvable, the fairest overall classification today is:

• Result: inconclusive — too early to determine whether the prediction about a future structural end/transition of U.S. democracy within their lifetimes will occur, even though the near‑term “not in the next term” component has held so far.