E102: Elon closes Twitter deal, $META uncertainty, Zuck's historic bet, big tech decline & more

Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X) for about $44 billion in October 2022. (arstechnica.com)

Since then, available marks and transactions have never shown the equity value doubling to $88 billion (let alone tripling to $132 billion):

• Internal equity awards to employees in late 2023 implied a valuation around $19 billion. (arstechnica.com)
• Fidelity and related disclosures repeatedly marked X down, at one point implying a valuation around $9.4 billion (less than 25% of the purchase price) and a roughly 72% decline versus the original $44 billion. (fortune.com)
• In 2024–early 2025, new reports and secondary deals suggested a rebound, with investors valuing X back at roughly $44 billion, i.e., about what Musk originally paid, not more. (techcrunch.com)
• When xAI acquired X in an all‑stock deal in early 2025, the transaction valued X’s equity at about $33 billion (enterprise value ~$45 billion including $12 billion of debt), again far below $88 billion. (investopedia.com)

As of November 30, 2025 there is no credible report of X’s equity valuation reaching or exceeding $88 billion, so Chamath’s prediction has not come true so far. However, because he did not specify a clear time horizon beyond saying Elon would "probably" double or triple his money "over time," it remains possible (in principle) that the valuation could rise that much in the more distant future. Given the open‑ended timeframe, the prediction cannot yet be definitively labeled right or wrong, so “inconclusive (too early)” is the most appropriate assessment.

Available evidence shows that, nearly three years after Musk’s October 2022 acquisition, X (formerly Twitter) has not become “massively profitable,” nor has its bot problem been “cleaned up very quickly.”

Profitability and financial turnaround

• Musk financed the $44 billion Twitter deal with about $13 billion of debt, leaving X with annual interest payments estimated around $1–1.5 billion, a heavy drag on profits. (ndtv.com)
• In July 2023, Musk publicly stated that Twitter’s cash flow was still negative due to a roughly 50% drop in ad revenue plus the heavy debt load, contradicting earlier hopes for near‑term profitability. (cnbc.com)
• CEO Linda Yaccarino said in September 2023 that X was only “about break even” and merely expected to turn a profit in early 2024, underscoring that it was not yet clearly profitable, much less “massively” so. (forbes.com)
• By January 2025, Musk again acknowledged in an internal email that X was “barely breaking even,” with stagnant user growth and ongoing pressure from more than $1 billion a year in interest payments, indicating the business had not been transformed into a strongly profit‑generating operation. (theverge.com)
• External indicators are consistent with a strained, not “massively profitable,” company: Fidelity marked down its stake to imply X was worth about $15 billion as of mid‑2023 (over 70% below the $44 billion purchase price), and when Musk sold X to his own AI company xAI in March 2025, it was valued at $33 billion—still materially below what he paid. (businessinsider.com)
• Industry forecasts show X’s ad revenue only beginning to grow again in 2025 and still remaining well below 2021 pre‑Musk levels, suggesting the core business has not been transformed into a dominant profit engine. (businessinsider.com)

Overall, the best available reporting points to a platform that may be near break‑even with some improvement, but not one that has clearly become “massively profitable” within a few years of the acquisition.

Bot problem

• A peer‑reviewed PLOS One study (2025) analyzing X after Musk’s acquisition found that hate‑speech levels remained about 50% higher than pre‑takeover for many months, and that the prevalence of bot and bot‑like accounts did not decrease and may have increased, directly contradicting the notion that bots were quickly “cleaned up.” (phys.org)
• Broader 2024–2025 research and audits estimate that anywhere from ~15% up to 60%+ of X accounts could be bots, implying tens to hundreds of millions of automated or inauthentic accounts, with no clear consensus evidence of a substantial platform‑wide reduction relative to pre‑Musk levels. (twitter.com)
• X’s own transparency efforts show ongoing large‑scale enforcement rather than a solved problem: a 2023 report cited 5.3 million account suspensions in six months, and in 2025 X announced removal of about 1.7 million reply‑spam bots and said it was now turning its attention to DM spam. These steps indicate continued, significant bot activity requiring remediation, not a bot problem that has been “largely” resolved. (apnews.com)

Given (1) X is, by Musk’s own description, only around breakeven at best and still burdened by heavy debt and reduced valuation, and (2) independent research finds bot and inauthentic activity has not materially declined and may have worsened, Jason’s prediction that Musk would “turn [Twitter] around pretty quickly and make it massively profitable” and “clean up the bot problem very quickly” has not come true as of late 2025.

Available data show that Twitter/X’s economic value per active user has fallen substantially since Elon Musk’s 2022 acquisition, rather than doubling or tripling.

Before and around the acquisition, Twitter generated about $5 billion of revenue in 2021 and $4.4 billion in 2022, with roughly 220–260 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU), implying annual revenue per active user on the order of low‑$20s. (prioridata.com) By October 2022, mDAU was reported around 258 million. (prioridata.com)

After the acquisition, revenue dropped sharply while user counts were roughly flat. Estimates show revenue falling to about $2.9 billion in 2023 and $2.5 billion in 2024, a roughly 40–50% decline from 2021–2022 levels, while daily active users hovered in the mid‑200‑million range (e.g., ~245 million in September 2023 vs. 258 million in October 2022). (prioridata.com) This implies that revenue (a proxy for economic value) per active user has roughly halved instead of doubling or tripling.

Valuation-based measures tell the same story. Musk bought Twitter for about $44 billion in October 2022. (nasdaq.com) Fidelity’s repeated markdowns of its private stake imply that by late 2023 X was valued around $19 billion and by 2024 about $9–10 billion, i.e., roughly 20–45% of the acquisition value. (nasdaq.com) With the user base roughly stable or larger over this period, valuation per user has clearly fallen, not increased by 2–3x. Taken together, both business performance and inferred market valuation per user contradict Chamath’s prediction that the economic value per MAU would double or triple within a few years after Musk’s takeover.

Evidence since late 2022 shows Starlink has in fact become a very large, commercially successful, and profitable satellite-communications business, well above the scale of typical players.

On scale and revenue: Starlink’s customer base grew from ~1 million subscribers in December 2022 to about 8 million by November 2025, an order‑of‑magnitude jump in three years. (en.wikipedia.org) Industry analyses estimate Starlink revenue at roughly $4.2B in 2023 and about $7.7–$8.2B in 2024, with projections around $11–12.3B in 2025, making it SpaceX’s largest revenue driver. (arstechnica.com) Reports focused solely on Starlink value the business at well over $100B enterprise value, underscoring how central it has become to the company. (globenewswire.com)

On profitability: Elon Musk announced in November 2023 that Starlink had achieved breakeven cash flow, and later commentary from SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell confirmed that Starlink has since turned profitable. (cnbc.com) Independent analyst work (e.g., Quilty Space, summarized in financial media) estimates several hundred million dollars of positive free cash flow in 2024 on multi‑billion‑dollar revenue, with free cash flow expected to rise into the low single‑digit billions as revenues pass $10B+. (arstechnica.com) This is consistent with a mature, high‑margin infrastructure business rather than an early-stage loss leader.

Relative to typical satellite operators, Starlink is already dominant on commercial metrics. Established GEO/MEO operators like SES and Eutelsat report total annual revenues around €2.0B (~$2.1B) and €1.24B (~$1.3–1.4B) respectively, while their newer LEO broadband lines (e.g., OneWeb at Eutelsat) are still sub‑$0.3B businesses. (satellitetoday.com) Viasat, one of the larger traditional broadband players, generates about $4.5B in annual revenue but remains loss‑making and heavily indebted. (beyondspx.com) In contrast, Starlink alone is now bigger than any single incumbent satcom operator by revenue, is profitable, and continues to grow rapidly.

Given that (1) Starlink has scaled to many millions of customers worldwide, (2) it generates multi‑billion‑dollar revenues that exceed those of most legacy satellite‑communications firms, and (3) it has crossed into sustained profitability and positive cash flow, Sacks’s 2022 prediction that “Starlink is going to be a phenomenal business”—interpreted as a highly successful, large‑scale commercial business with substantial revenues and profits relative to typical satellite‑comms businesses—has, by late 2025, clearly come true.

As of November 30, 2025, VR/AR has grown but is not yet a really important part of our existence for a large portion of the global population, in the way smartphones or PCs are.

Key evidence:

• Headset and user base size: Global VR/AR headset shipments remain relatively small compared to major computing platforms. Estimates put annual VR/AR device shipments in the tens of millions at most, versus well over a billion smartphones shipped per year and several billion active smartphone users worldwide.
• Meta’s Reality Labs scale vs. adoption: Meta has spent tens of billions of dollars on Reality Labs, but the unit has continued to post large operating losses and has not produced a mass‑adopted platform on the scale of mobile. Public filings and earnings coverage consistently frame VR/AR as a long‑term, early‑stage bet rather than a ubiquitous platform already integrated into daily life for most people.
• Usage patterns: VR usage is still concentrated in gaming, niche professional training, design, and some enterprise/industrial contexts. AR is most pervasive in lightweight forms (e.g., smartphone AR filters, basic try‑on apps), but these are typically features inside existing platforms, not a standalone, central computing environment akin to mobile or desktop operating systems.
• Lack of mainstream daily dependency: For the majority of people, daily essential tasks—communication, work, commerce, entertainment discovery—are still dominated by smartphones, laptops, and TVs. VR/AR devices are not yet required or standard for work or social life in the way that phones and PCs are.

Because the quote is framed as "we should assume that VR and AR is going to be a really important part of our existence" (i.e., a strong, near‑inevitability claim), the best evaluation as of late 2025 is that this has not yet materialized at population scale. It might still occur in the longer‑term future, but judging today, the prediction about VR/AR becoming a pervasive, major computing platform for a large share of humanity is not yet true, so the outcome is assessed as wrong (as of now) rather than inconclusive.

Sacks predicted that the U.S. would enter a major, second‑leg (“double‑dip”) recession in 2023 caused by the cumulative effect of Federal Reserve rate hikes.

By standard macroeconomic and official U.S. definitions, that did not happen:

• Real U.S. GDP grew in 2023 rather than contracted. Estimates show full‑year real GDP growth around 2.8–2.9% in 2023, similar to or slightly above 2022, not a large downturn. (tradingeconomics.com)
• IMF data likewise report positive real GDP growth for 2023 and a low unemployment rate (around 3.7% in Q4 2023), consistent with continued expansion, not a deep recession. (imf.org)

On the recession / double‑dip point:

• The official arbiter of U.S. recessions, the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee, dates the most recent recession as the short COVID downturn from February–April 2020 and shows no subsequent peaks/troughs indicating another recession through and beyond 2023. (nber.org)
• NBER‑based recession indicator series (quarterly) are 0 for all quarters of 2022 and 2023, confirming that—under NBER’s definition—the economy was in expansion, not recession, throughout 2023. (ycharts.com)

On the mechanism he cited (Fed hikes): the Fed did raise the federal funds rate aggressively from near zero in early 2022 to about 5.25–5.50% by mid‑2023, one of its fastest tightening cycles. (federalreserve.gov) However, Congressional Research Service analysis notes that, as of late 2023, this tightening had so far produced falling inflation without a decline in employment or overall economic activity, i.e., a prospective soft landing rather than a hard‑landing recession. (congress.gov)

Because 2023 saw continued expansion, low unemployment, and no NBER‑defined recession, there was neither a “huge recession” nor a second (“double‑dip”) recession leg that year. The prediction, as stated, is therefore wrong.

The prediction was that from late October 2022, broad U.S. stock indices would rise in the short term and then decline again.

What happened:

• Around the podcast date (late October 2022), the S&P 500 was near the 3,800–3,900 level; it closed at 3,871.98 on October 31, 2022 after a strong +7.3% month, consistent with having just come off a major low. (statmuse.com)
• Over the following several months, the index trended upward: monthly data show mostly positive returns from January–July 2023, and the S&P 500 closed at 4,588.96 on July 31, 2023, roughly 18–19% above late‑October 2022 levels. (statmuse.com) This matches the “stock market is going up” short‑term call.
• After that rally, the S&P 500 fell about 10.2% from its July 31, 2023 close of 4,588.96 to a close of 4,117.37 on October 27, 2023, a move widely characterized as a correction and identified as the 2023 correction that bottomed in October. (statmuse.com)

So the market path was: up strongly for months after October 2022, then a notable downturn in the second half of 2023, which is qualitatively what Chamath described. Even though the later decline did not undercut the October 2022 bear‑market lows, his directional call—short‑term rise followed by another leg down—matches the realized trajectory of the broad U.S. indices. Therefore the prediction is best classified as right.

David Sacks has never served as U.S. Secretary of State. Since the podcast release on 29 Oct 2022, the office has been held by Antony Blinken, who was sworn in on January 26, 2021, under President Joe Biden and has remained in that role through at least late 2025 according to public records and news coverage. Therefore, the prediction that Sacks “will be our next Secretary of State” is incorrect as of now.

Key points:

• Current / recent Secretary of State: Antony Blinken has been the U.S. Secretary of State since January 26, 2021.
• No record of Sacks in that role: There is no official record, announcement, or news report of David Sacks ever being nominated, confirmed, or serving as U.S. Secretary of State.

Given the time elapsed and the continued tenure of Antony Blinken, the prediction must be evaluated as wrong as of November 30, 2025.

As of November 30, 2025, David Sacks has not been U.S. Secretary of State under President Biden or any subsequent administration, and there has been no reporting that he has been nominated to that role. Public lists of U.S. Secretaries of State and current cabinet officials do not include him.

However, Chamath’s prediction is explicitly about a long time horizon: "within 2 or 3 presidents" after the moment of prediction in October 2022 (i.e., by the end of the third presidential administration after Biden’s). Since the U.S. has not yet cycled through two or three full presidential administrations after Biden as of 2025, the prediction’s time window has not expired.

Therefore, it is too early to determine if this prediction will ultimately be correct, even though it is currently not on track.