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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
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Chamath @ 01:05:38Wrong
politicseconomy
For the then-upcoming Biden tax legislation (2021–2022): (1) U.S. federal capital gains tax rates will not be increased; (2) the U.S. federal corporate tax rate will be raised to 25% but not to 28%; and (3) U.S. tax law will be changed to significantly tighten IP-related tax loopholes, making it effectively impossible for American companies to shift intellectual property to low-tax jurisdictions such as Ireland or to execute tax inversions for the purpose of reducing U.S. tax liability.
They're not going to at best, they're going to get the cap gains. Uh, sorry, no movement on cap gains. They don't think it can happen at all. So that's not going to move. Oh, good. Uh, number one, number two is that corporate will go to 25 but not to 28. And then number three they're going to really tighten the IP loophole, um, which will prevent American companies from shipping IP to places like Ireland to not pay tax. They're going to make it impossible to do things like inversions, all this kind of stuff, and then scope that down.View on YouTube
Explanation

Evaluation is against what actually happened with U.S. federal tax law in the 2021–2022 Biden period.

  1. Capital gains tax rates
    Chamath predicted no movement on capital gains. Federal long‑term capital gains rates in 2021 and 2022 remained at 0%, 15%, and 20%, with only normal inflation adjustments to the income thresholds; Biden’s proposals to sharply raise the top rate on high earners never passed Congress. (seekingalpha.com)
    This sub‑prediction was essentially correct.

  2. Corporate tax rate to 25% (not 28%)
    He predicted the regular federal corporate income tax rate would be increased from 21% to 25%, but not to 28%. In reality, the statutory federal corporate rate has stayed at 21% ever since the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act; neither the Build Back Better effort nor the Inflation Reduction Act changed that rate. (en.wikipedia.org)
    The Inflation Reduction Act did add a separate 15% corporate minimum tax on certain very large corporations, but that is layered on top of, and does not replace or raise, the 21% statutory rate. (en.wikipedia.org)
    This directly contradicts his prediction that the headline corporate rate would go to 25%.

  3. “Really tighten the IP loophole” and make inversions/IP shifting to places like Ireland effectively impossible
    Biden and House Democrats proposed major international tax changes (e.g., higher and country‑by‑country GILTI, SHIELD, stronger anti–profit‑shifting rules) in early Build Back Better drafts, but those provisions were stripped out during negotiations. Multiple professional summaries of the final Inflation Reduction Act note that it omitted the international tax reforms needed to align U.S. rules with the 15% OECD global minimum tax and to more tightly police profit shifting. (withum.com)
    Separately, the United States never implemented the agreed OECD Pillar Two global minimum tax, and even later (in 2025) explicitly pulled back from that agreement, underscoring that no sweeping new regime was put in place to end use of low‑tax jurisdictions. (reuters.com)
    Existing post‑2017 rules (GILTI, BEAT, anti‑inversion provisions) already constrained some structures, but there was no 2021–2022 Biden legislation that made it “impossible” to move IP to low‑tax jurisdictions or to execute inversions in the strong sense Chamath described.

Overall judgment

  • One narrow element (no federal capital gains hike in 2021–2022) was accurate.
  • Two central elements—the predicted increase of the statutory corporate tax rate to 25% and the enactment of sweeping new IP/inversion‑blocking rules—did not occur.

Given that the main structural tax‑law changes he foresaw did not happen, the overall prediction is best classified as wrong.