Time window
Chamath said in late Nov 2020 that “within 3 or 4 years” (i.e., by roughly late 2023–late 2024) the falling cost of wind and solar would make *“pulling the oil out of the ground economically infeasible.” We’re now past that window (late 2025), so the claim is testable.

1. Oil extraction and consumption remained economically attractive and grew

• Global oil consumption in 2024 reached about 101.8 million barrels per day, an all‑time high, slightly above 2023 levels. (forbes.com)
• The IEA’s 2025 oil outlook still expects global oil demand to rise further to ~105.5 mb/d by 2030, with only a plateau/peak near the end of the decade, not a collapse. (iea.org)
• The U.S. hit record oil production, and global production capacity is projected to exceed demand, implying oversupply risk rather than uneconomic extraction; producers are still incentivized to pump. (reuters.com)

If extracting oil had broadly become “economically infeasible” by 2023–24, we would not observe record demand, record U.S. output, and fears of future surplus capacity.

2. Large new oil projects continued to be sanctioned

• Rystad Energy projected and observed a surge in offshore greenfield oil and gas investment, with more than $214 billion in new projects lined up and annual offshore greenfield capex breaking the $100 billion mark again in 2022–24—the strongest growth in a decade. (ogj.com)
• ExxonMobil approved the $12.7 billion Uaru offshore project in Guyana in 2023, targeting about 800 million barrels and 250,000 bpd of new capacity starting 2026. (energy-analytics-institute.org)
• Additional deepwater/offshore FIDs (e.g., Shell’s Gato do Mato project in Brazil) have been taken with production expected late this decade, reflecting confidence that these barrels will be profitable. (reuters.com)

Continuing to approve multi‑billion‑dollar, high‑cost offshore projects is inconsistent with oil extraction having become uneconomic in general.

3. Wind and solar did become the cheapest new electricity, but that didn’t by itself kill oil

• Lazard’s LCOE analyses show that by the early–mid 2020s, utility‑scale solar and onshore wind were the lowest‑cost sources of new-build electricity, often well below coal and gas on an unsubsidized basis. (pv-magazine.com)
• BloombergNEF and other analyses confirm that costs for solar, wind, and storage continued to fall globally through 2024–25, with new wind and solar typically cheaper than new coal or gas plants in most markets. (reuters.com)

However, oil’s primary uses are transport fuels and petrochemical feedstocks, not power generation. Even though renewables have undercut fossil fuels in electricity, this has not yet translated into oil extraction becoming broadly uneconomic within a 3–4 year horizon. The IEA still projects oil demand growth into the late 2020s, and fossil fuels retained ~80% of global energy demand as of 2023. (iea.org)

Conclusion
By late 2023–24:

• Oil demand and production were at or near record highs, not collapsing.
• Companies were sanctioning and expanding large, often high‑cost offshore oil projects.
• While wind and solar became the cheapest new electricity sources, they did not render oil extraction generally “economically infeasible.”

Given both the timeframe and the breadth of his claim, Chamath’s prediction did not come true.