E100: Reflecting on the first 100 shows, fan questions, nuclear threat, markets, Amazon & more

Chamath’s normalized prediction was that between roughly October 2022 and October 2023, the large U.S. Big Tech firms (Google/Alphabet, Meta, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft) would see significant declines in market cap, employee headcount, and compensation/perks, ending the “big tech put” for talent.

1. Market cap outcome (core part of his claim) was the opposite of what happened.

• After bottoming in late 2022, the major Big Tech names led a huge 2023 rally: a Goldman‑tracked “Magnificent Seven” basket (Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Tesla) showed 2023 gains of about +48% (Apple), +59% (Alphabet), +81% (Amazon), +194% (Meta), and +57% (Microsoft). (visualcapitalist.com)
• Alphabet’s Class A market cap was about $1.24T around October 14, 2022, and roughly $1.72T around October 13, 2023—up ~40%, not down. (statmuse.com)
• Apple’s market cap was about $2.4T on October 31, 2022 and about $2.6T on October 31, 2023, again a clear increase over the period Chamath referenced. (statmuse.com)
• Amazon’s total market cap roughly doubled from the 2022 bear‑market low to year‑end 2023; data from StockAnalysis show Amazon at about $857B at end‑2022 and about $1.57T at end‑2023 (+83%). (stockanalysis.com) Taken together, Big Tech was not “shot” in public markets over the following 8–12 months; instead it drove most of the S&P 500’s gains in 2023.

2. Employment and perks did get hit hard.

• Alphabet/Google announced layoffs of about 12,000 employees (≈6% of its workforce) in January 2023. (cnbc.com)
• Meta cut around 11,000 jobs in November 2022 (≈13% of staff) and then announced a further 10,000 layoffs in March 2023, totaling more than 20,000 jobs cut in that period. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Amazon disclosed plans to lay off about 18,000 employees between November 2022 and January 2023, then announced another 9,000 layoffs in March 2023, the largest job reductions in its history at that time. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Microsoft similarly announced around 10,000 layoffs in January 2023 (~5% of its workforce). (en.wikipedia.org)
• Perks and comp were scaled back: Google’s CFO detailed a multi‑year cost‑cutting plan in April 2023 that reduced employee services (fitness classes, laptop refresh cycles, some office amenities like certain cafe/micro‑kitchen hours, and desk perks such as staplers and tape) after the January layoffs. (cnbc.com) Apple delayed bonuses, tightened travel budgets, and otherwise emphasized cost‑cutting in 2023, and Meta had already begun rolling back some lavish on‑site perks (like free laundry and dry cleaning) earlier in 2022. (reddit.com) These developments match his expectation that Big Tech employment and perks would be meaningfully worse than in 2021–early 2022.

3. Net judgment. Chamath’s statement explicitly bundled together market cap, employment, and perks (“about to get shot… in the public markets in terms of market cap and employment and perks”). The employment/perks part was broadly right, but the market‑cap part—the largest and most quantifiable element—was decisively wrong: Big Tech valuations were much higher by late 2023 than in October 2022 and were again propping up the entire market. Given that the normalized prediction requires significant declines across all three dimensions, and one of them moved strongly in the opposite direction, the overall prediction is best classified as wrong.

Evidence shows that the All-In podcast did in fact hold a second All-In Summit in 2023. The All-In podcast’s Wikipedia entry explicitly notes that “The second summit took place in Los Angeles from September 10 to 12, 2023,” describing it as the follow-up to the inaugural 2022 Miami summit. (en.wikipedia.org) Additional references, such as posts and talks labeled as recorded at “All-In Summit 2023 at Royce Hall on UCLA's campus in Los Angeles,” further confirm that the 2023 event occurred. (podcasts.apple.com) Since the prediction was that there would be a second All-In Summit in 2023, and such a summit did occur, the prediction is right.

Multiple independent market commentaries identify mid‑October 2022 as the bear‑market low for U.S. equities, with the S&P 500’s trough around October 12–13, 2022. LPL Research and others explicitly mark October 12–13, 2022 as the end of the 2022 bear market and the start of a new bull market, with the S&P 500 bottoming near 3,577–3,490 at that time.(lpl.com) Subsequent retrospectives in 2024–2025 likewise describe that October 2022 low as the bottom of the last bear market and note that the major U.S. indices have risen substantially—on the order of 60–90% total return—from those levels, without undercutting the October 2022 lows.(ameriprise.com)

Regarding how markets handled later inflation data: there were several hotter‑than‑expected reports after October 2022. For example, January 2023 PCE inflation came in above expectations and triggered a selloff, but the S&P 500’s decline was modest and far above the October 2022 bottom.(cnbc.com) Similarly, the August 2023 CPI report showed a larger‑than‑expected jump in headline inflation, yet equities were broadly flat to slightly positive by the close, with investors “largely shrugging off” the upside surprise.(forbes.com) Across 2023–2024, the pattern around such data releases was choppy trading and occasional pullbacks, but not a new bear‑market leg that broke the October 2022 lows; instead, the broader trend was a grinding recovery / bull market off that base.(lpl.com)

Chamath’s claim had two parts: (1) that by mid‑October 2022 the equity market had already put in a near‑term bottom and was in consolidation, and (2) that subsequent bad inflation news would tend to be treated as “already priced in,” leading more to dip‑buying and volatile consolidation than to fresh lows. Given that the major U.S. indices have not broken their October 2022 lows through late 2025 and that hotter inflation prints produced volatility and short‑term setbacks rather than a new bear‑market bottom, the prediction matches what actually happened.

Chamath’s prediction has two parts, both of which broadly came true:

1. Fed funds rate at ~4–5% by end of Q1 2023
   Historical data for the Federal Reserve’s target federal funds upper bound show: it was 4.50% after the December 14, 2022 meeting, then raised to 4.75% on February 1, 2023, and to 5.00% on March 22, 2023. (ycharts.com)
   So by March 31, 2023 (end of Q1), short‑term policy rates were indeed in the 4–5% range he specified.

2. Equity market bottom “roughly now-ish” (mid‑October 2022)
   Multiple summaries of the 2022 bear market note that the S&P 500 fell about 25% from its January 3, 2022 peak until a low on October 12, 2022, treating that October 12 close as the bear‑market bottom. (en.ajmedia.jp) Subsequent reporting describes the current bull market as having begun from that October 12, 2022 low, with the S&P 500 up dramatically since then. (reuters.com)
   The tech‑heavy Nasdaq Composite did make its ultimate bear‑market closing low later, on December 28, 2022. (statmuse.com) However, Chamath’s comment was about the equity market bottoming “roughly” around the time of the episode; for the broad U.S. market (S&P 500), that is exactly what happened, and even for the Nasdaq, October 2022 was within a couple of months of the final low and very near the bottom region.

Because the Fed rate call was accurate in level and timing, and the main U.S. equity benchmark (S&P 500) did in fact bottom in mid‑October 2022 with a sustained bull market thereafter, Chamath’s combined prediction is best classified as right (with the nuance that the Nasdaq’s absolute low came in late December 2022).

Evidence on post‑October 2022 fiscal outlays suggests that when you look at the first ~$0.5–1.0T in extra Western government spending, the dominant share went to cushioning domestic economic problems (especially energy and cost‑of‑living) rather than to Ukraine war spending.

1. Scale and focus of domestic stabilisation spending

• EU energy‑crisis measures. The European Commission reports that EU‑27 governments created large national measures to shield consumers from high energy prices, providing about €181B in 2022 alone for this purpose (≈1.12% of EU GDP), mostly targeted at households and businesses. (eumonitor.eu) A later Commission report shows total EU energy subsidies jumping from €213B in 2021 to €397B in 2022 and €354B in 2023, with crisis measures to protect consumers accounting for roughly €187B in 2022 and €145B in 2023. (energy.ec.europa.eu) These are overwhelmingly domestic bill and price supports, not foreign military spending.
• UK cost‑of‑living and energy support. The UK Office for Budget Responsibility estimates that energy‑price and cost‑of‑living support in 2022‑23 cost about £51.1B net, and that the broader UK energy‑support package across 2022‑23 and 2023‑24 was around £78.2B (about 3.1% of one year’s GDP), again almost entirely domestic subsidies to households and firms. (obr.uk)
• Broader OECD evidence. OECD/IEA data show global fossil‑fuel support measures (mostly consumer subsidies and tax breaks) nearly doubled to about US$1.48T in 2022, with around 81% of the direct fiscal cost going to consumers (households and firms) rather than producers. (oecd.org) Advanced “Western” economies account for a substantial portion of these consumer‑oriented supports.

Just combining EU (€181B + €145B) and UK (~£78B ≈ €90B) crisis and energy‑support measures from late 2022 into 2023 gets you to roughly €416B+ (≈US$450B+) of new domestic stabilisation spending. Adding similar measures in other European countries and North America (which face the same energy and cost‑of‑living shocks captured in the OECD/IEA data) easily pushes the first incremental half‑trillion dollars of Western post‑October‑2022 fiscal outlays into the “domestic subsidy/stabilisation” bucket.

2. Scale of Western spending related to the Ukraine war

• EU and member states. By late 2025, “Team Europe” (EU institutions + member states) had made available about €177.5B total support to Ukraine since the February 2022 invasion, including all financial, humanitarian, military aid and refugee support. (europarl.europa.eu) Of this, EU and member‑state military support over 2022–24 is on the order of €60–66B. (consilium.europa.eu)
• United States. U.S. reporting indicates that by the end of 2024, total U.S. assistance to Ukraine (military, economic, humanitarian) was about $175B. (reuters.com)
• Aggregate Western aid. Compilations based on the Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker show that by March 2024, Western countries had pledged more than $380B in total aid to Ukraine since the invasion, including roughly $118B in direct military aid from individual countries. (en.wikipedia.org)

Crucially for Chamath’s timing condition, a material portion of that $380B total was committed in the first seven months of the war (Feb–Oct 2022), before his prediction date. Even if you conservatively assume that all $380B of Western aid were counted after October 2022 (which overstates the true post‑prediction figure), it is still of the same order or smaller than the clearly documented >US$450B of EU+UK domestic energy and cost‑of‑living subsidies alone over 2022–23, and much less than the broader US$1.48T in global consumer‑focused fossil‑fuel support in 2022 in which Western economies are heavily represented. (oecd.org)

3. Interpretation and verdict

• The normalised prediction you provided frames his claim as: given the next US$0.5–1.0T in incremental Western fiscal outlays after October 2022, “the bulk” would go toward subsidising or stabilising internal economic/financial problems (pensions, energy bills, credit markets, etc.) rather than financing new military adventurism in Russia.
• Empirically, the first large wave of post‑October‑2022 discretionary fiscal measures in Europe and the UK was dominated by domestic energy‑price and cost‑of‑living subsidies on the order of several hundred billion euros, which, when combined with similar measures elsewhere in the OECD, clearly exceeds $0.5T and plausibly approaches or surpasses $1T.
• While Western governments undeniably spent very large sums supporting Ukraine militarily and financially, that spending is smaller than, and lags behind, the surge of domestic crisis‑support spending when you look at the initial $0.5–1.0T of new fiscal outlays after October 2022.

Given that interpretation—that the majority of that marginal $0.5–1.0T went to domestic stabilisation, not to war‑fighting in Ukraine—Chamath’s prediction is directionally and quantitatively supported by the available data.

So, under the normalised “bulk of the money” reading, the prediction is right.

Chamath’s claim has two parts: (1) the world will experience persistently higher inflation and non‑zero (elevated) interest rates for 10–20 years, and (2) that regime will prevent a lot of wars over that horizon because it makes financing large conflicts harder.

So far, the macro environment is broadly consistent with the first part in the short run. Since late 2021, central banks have raised policy rates by hundreds of basis points, and the IMF and others explicitly describe a “higher‑for‑longer” rate environment as they battle still‑elevated inflation.

• IMF and BIS commentary from 2023 onward stress that policy rates in advanced and emerging economies have been lifted sharply, and may need to stay high for an extended period to tame inflation. (meetings.imf.org)
• The World Bank/IMF and private economists repeatedly frame the post‑COVID regime as a break from the zero‑rate 2010s, with expectations that nominal rates will not return to near‑zero quickly. (cnbc.com)
• At the same time, global inflation is projected to gradually fall toward mid‑single digits by the mid‑2020s rather than stay at the 2021–22 peaks, implying somewhat elevated but not runaway inflation. (reuters.com)

However, the war / conflict side of the prediction is, so far, moving in the opposite direction of his thesis, at least in the early years:

• The Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) and PRIO report that 2023 and 2024 saw record numbers of state‑based armed conflicts since their dataset began in 1946: 59 such conflicts in 2023 and 61 in 2024, with eleven reaching the level of “war” (≥1,000 battle‑related deaths per year). (uu.se)
• Major wars since his October 2022 statement include the continuing Russian invasion of Ukraine and the large‑scale Israel–Hamas war beginning October 2023, plus extremely deadly conflicts in Sudan and elsewhere, contributing to some of the bloodiest years since the end of the Cold War and very high civilian casualties from explosive weapons. (prio.org)

Despite this adverse early evidence, the prediction is explicitly about “the next 10 or 20 years” from 2022—i.e., roughly 2022–2032/2042. As of late 2025, we are only about three years into that window. Whether higher, non‑zero rates materially reduce the total incidence of new wars versus the prior low‑rate era is a long‑horizon, counterfactual claim that cannot yet be empirically judged.

Because:

• The specified minimum time horizon (10 years) has not elapsed, and
• The claim is comparative and causal ("prevent a lot of wars" vs. what would have happened under low rates), which requires more years of data and careful modeling,

the fairest classification today is “inconclusive (too early)”—even though current conflict data to date do not support the mechanism he proposed.

From Oct. 14, 2022 (podcast date) until the end of the Fed’s rate‑hike cycle on July 26, 2023, the Federal Reserve continued raising interest rates aggressively, from 3.0–3.25% in September 2022 up to 5.25–5.50% in July 2023. After July 2023, the Fed held rates steady and later began cutting them in December 2024 and again in 2025, so the period of “rates flexing up” effectively ended in mid‑2023. (forbes.com)

Looking at major conflicts and direct U.S./Western entry into new wars:

• The Russia–Ukraine war began Feb. 24, 2022, before the podcast, and Western involvement remained primarily via aid and arms, not as formal belligerents.
• The Israel–Hamas war (Gaza war) began with Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack and Israel’s declaration of war on October 8, 2023—months after the Fed stopped hiking. The U.S. and European allies backed Israel and provided extensive support but did not themselves declare war or become formal combatants. (loc.gov)
• Direct U.S./UK combat operations against Yemen’s Houthis (Operation Prosperity Guardian and subsequent US–UK airstrikes) began December 18, 2023 and January 12, 2024, again after the hiking phase had ended. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Large U.S. airstrikes alongside Israel on Iranian nuclear sites occurred June 22, 2025, well into an easing cycle, not during aggressive tightening. (time.com)

Under a straightforward reading of Chamath’s claim—“we will not enter a new war with rates flexing up as aggressively as they are”—the test period is when rates are actively being hiked. During that window (through July 2023) the U.S. and its Western allies did not enter a clearly new major war beyond ongoing support for Ukraine. Later new or escalated wars and direct interventions all began after the hiking phase had stopped.

Because no clear counterexample occurs while rates were still being raised aggressively, the prediction is best scored as right, though it becomes less meaningful once the hiking cycle ends and new wars start afterward.