E172: SBF gets 25 years, Trump's meme stock, RFK Jr picks VP, Biden's 2025 budget & more

Evidence strongly supports that typical retail investors who bought DJT around late March 2024 have since suffered large losses.

Around the podcast date, DJT closed between roughly $40 and $70 per share. For example, on March 25, 2024 it closed at $49.95, and on March 28, 2024 it closed at $61.96, after a sharp post‑listing surge. (statmuse.com)

As of late November 2025, DJT trades around $11.5 per share. Relative to a $50–$60 entry price typical of that late‑March window, this is a loss on the order of 75–80%.

Media coverage over 2024–2025 consistently characterizes DJT as having plunged from its post‑debut highs: by early September 2024 it had lost more than 70% from its late‑March peak and was trading below $17, (markets.com) by late August 2024 it was down about 65% from its debut level around the time it went public, (forbes.com) and by 2025 articles describe DJT having fallen roughly 70–75% from earlier highs. (wsj.com) The overall trajectory since the March 2024 mania has been a sustained, large drawdown rather than a stable or rising trend.

Some short‑term traders could have sold during interim rallies, but the prediction concerned retail investors buying around that time and holding over time on average. Given that the stock’s price today is a small fraction of its late‑March 2024 level and has spent much of the time trending down from those highs, the average buy‑and‑hold retail buyer from that period would indeed be sitting on a very large percentage loss.

Therefore, Jason’s prediction that such buyers would "lose a large amount of money" has, in aggregate and over the time that has now passed, turned out to be right.

Chamath’s claim was that in the coming years many other individuals would take companies public whose enterprise values, like Trump Media’s DJT, are driven largely by their personal brand rather than by revenue or profits.

Since that March 2024 prediction, we’ve seen very few clear equity-market examples. The closest is conservative cable network Newsmax (NMAX), whose March 2025 IPO briefly pushed its market cap to roughly $20–30 billion on only about $171 million of annual revenue and sizable losses; coverage explicitly framed it as a Trump‑aligned or Trump‑adjacent meme stock whose valuation was wildly out of line with fundamentals, similar in spirit to DJT. (ft.com) But beyond DJT itself and NMAX, there has not been a broad wave of new, personality‑centric IPOs whose value is primarily the goodwill of a single influencer or celebrity.

Instead, most major celebrity brands remain private (for example, Kim Kardashian’s Skims at a $5 billion private valuation and Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty at over $2–2.7 billion) and are discussed as potential, not actual, IPO candidates. (reuters.com) At the same time, the strongest “brand‑only” behavior has shown up in celebrity meme coins and Trump‑linked crypto projects—such as the $TRUMP coin and Trump’s World Liberty Financial token WLFI—where market caps in the billions briefly rested almost entirely on the fame of the associated figure rather than on cash flows or utility. (en.wikipedia.org) That trend rhymes with Chamath’s thesis but operates mainly in crypto, not via companies going public on stock exchanges.

Because (1) only about a year and a half has passed since the prediction, (2) the phrase “in the coming years” leaves the time horizon open, and (3) we do not yet see “many” clear, DJT‑style personality‑driven IPOs even though we see some partial analogues, there isn’t enough evidence yet to call the prediction definitively right or wrong. Hence the result is inconclusive (too early).

The prediction concerned people buying Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT) stock around late March 2024, when it was trading at meme-level valuations, and warned they would "lose a large portion" of their money over time.

Historical data show DJT closed between roughly $37 and $66 during March 2024, with a closing price of about $61.96 on March 28, 2024, near the time of the hype around its Nasdaq debut.【1search0】 MacroTrends reports DJT’s price at $61.96 on March 31, 2024 and a latest closing price around $11 in late November 2025, with 2025 showing a ~67% annual decline from the start of the year.【1search3】 A recent article also notes the stock crashed to all-time lows around $10–11 in November 2025, down roughly 70% in 2025 alone.【1news14】

That means a buy-and-hold investor who bought in late March 2024 at ~$40–$70 is now sitting on losses of roughly 70–85% of capital (e.g., from ~$62 to ~$11). Even when looking at the full year 2024, the year-end price (~$34) remained far below the late‑March level (~$62), implying persistent impairment for that cohort of buyers.【1search3】 Contemporaneous coverage throughout 2024 already documented a severe and sustained post-listing slump from the initial surge in the high $50s–$70s down into the $20s–$30s and below.【1news12【1news15【1news16】

While some short‑term traders could have exited with gains, Jason’s claim was about the broad set of investors buying during the meme spike “if you buy this stock” and hold it over time. Given the magnitude and persistence of the drawdown from late‑March 2024 levels to late 2025, those investors in aggregate did, in fact, lose a large portion of their invested capital. Therefore, the prediction is right.

Evidence from 2024 shows that the DNC and Democratic-aligned groups did, in fact, mount a coordinated legal campaign to limit RFK Jr.–Nicole Shanahan ballot access, including in key battleground states.

The DNC created a dedicated third‑party team and worked with Democratic strategists’ super PAC Clear Choice Action, which was explicitly founded to minimize third‑party impact and, together with the DNC, filed legal challenges to Kennedy’s ballot petitions in multiple states.(en.wikipedia.org)

By late June 2024, CBS reported that Kennedy was already facing ballot‑access lawsuits in five states—Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Delaware, and New Jersey—brought by Democratic state parties, DNC‑aligned PACs, and Democratic election lawyers, and noted that the DNC pledged to continue challenging his ballot access.(cbsnews.com) Nevada and North Carolina are widely treated as presidential battlegrounds; in Nevada, the state Democratic Party helped coordinate a lawsuit to keep him off the ballot, and in North Carolina, Clear Choice challenged his We The People party petition as unlawful.(cbsnews.com)

Separately, Democratic actors pursued ballot challenges in other swing states. In Georgia, “Democratic lawsuits” led the chief state administrative law judge to kick Kennedy and other independents off the ballot before the secretary of state later restored some candidates and deemed Kennedy’s case moot after his withdrawal, with Democrats considering an appeal.(en.wikipedia.org) In Pennsylvania, a closely watched swing state, voters represented by election lawyer Tim Ford filed a petition in Commonwealth Court seeking to keep Kennedy and Shanahan off the ballot, arguing signature and residency defects in their nomination papers.(wtae.com)

DNC‑backed plaintiffs also succeeded in New York, where two voters backed by the DNC and the Democratic‑affiliated Clear Choice Action challenged Kennedy’s petition on residency and signature grounds; state courts removed him from the ballot, and the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately let that exclusion stand.(en.wikipedia.org)

Taken together, these actions show a sustained, multi‑state legal strategy by the DNC, state Democratic parties, and Democratic election lawyers—including in major battlegrounds like Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—to keep the RFK Jr.–Shanahan ticket off ballots or make access harder. Even if one quibbles over whether the final tally of such efforts in “5–6” specific swing states was exact, the substantive core of Sacks’s prediction—that Democratic/Biden‑aligned lawyers would mount an aggressive legal ‘full court press’ in key decisive states to block the Kennedy–Shanahan ticket from the ballot—was borne out by events.

By November 2024, the conditions and results of the presidential race ended up far from what Jason described:

1. Biden was not the Democratic nominee in the 2024 general election. He withdrew on July 21, 2024 and Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee against Donald Trump. (en.wikipedia.org) The prediction framed the effect specifically as RFK Jr. “peeling off” votes from Biden in the 2024 election.

2. RFK Jr. suspended his independent campaign and endorsed Trump before the election, then tried to get off the ballot. Reporting shows he ended his campaign, backed Trump, and successfully withdrew from the ballot in several key battlegrounds, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona. He remained on the ballot in Wisconsin and Michigan only because state law made withdrawal difficult. (apnews.com) That is the opposite of an ongoing, strong third‑party run siphoning votes from the Democratic ticket in those states.

3. Actual vote share: Kennedy never reached “a couple of percentage points” in key swing states where he remained on the ballot. Nationwide, third‑party and independent candidates combined for about 2.13% of the vote; RFK Jr., as a withdrawn independent, received only about 0.49% nationally. (en.wikipedia.org) In Wisconsin and Michigan—two core swing states where he could not be removed—AP reporting puts his support at roughly 0.5% in each, well under the 2–3 percentage‑point range implied by “a couple of percentage points.” (apnews.com)

4. Available polling and post‑Biden‑withdrawal analyses indicate Kennedy hurt Trump at least as much as, and often more than, the Democrat, rather than uniquely hurting Biden/Harris. For example, a Marquette Law School poll in Wisconsin (conducted after Harris became the nominee) found that in a multi‑candidate matchup, Kennedy drew 6% overall and took slightly more from Republicans than Democrats, with particularly strong appeal to independents. (marquette.edu) A Washington Post analysis similarly concluded that, once Harris was the nominee, Kennedy and other third‑party candidates tended to erode Trump’s position more than Harris’s, with Harris generally doing better in polls when third‑party candidates were included. (washingtonpost.com)

Putting this together:

• Kennedy’s final ballot presence in core battlegrounds was limited.
• Where he did remain (e.g., WI and MI), his actual vote share was about half a percentage point, not “a couple of percentage points.”
• The best available evidence suggests his late‑stage support did not primarily come out of Biden/Harris’s hide in key swing states.

Given these facts, the specific prediction that the RFK Jr.–Nicole Shanahan independent ticket would peel off roughly a couple of percentage points from Biden in key swing states did not come true.

The prediction concerns population levels by the end of this century (around the year 2100). As of today (2025), that date is still roughly 75 years in the future, so it is not yet possible to verify whether:

• The U.S. population will be “around 400 million” by ~2100, or
• Populations of other Western countries will be about half of their current levels by that time.

Current demographic data and projections can suggest trends, but they cannot confirm outcomes that far in the future. Therefore, the prediction cannot yet be judged as right or wrong; it’s simply too early to tell.

Since the March 29, 2024 episode, the broad fiscal and political status quo has indeed persisted: the U.S. has continued to run large deficits and add to the national debt, which reached about $38 trillion by October 23, 2025, with Congress subsequently raising the debt ceiling to $41.1 trillion rather than forcing sharp, immediate austerity or a restructuring of obligations. (en.wikipedia.org) Despite growing alarm from economists and officials about an emerging “debt crisis,” policy responses have largely taken the form of more borrowing authority and ongoing high spending, not a sudden systemic reset.

There have been episodes of acute stress—most notably the 43‑day federal government shutdown in 2025 and large Trump‑era federal workforce cuts—but these amounted to partisan brinkmanship and administrative downsizing, not a sovereign default, radical debt restructuring, or a forced end to the high‑spending model Chamath was describing. (en.wikipedia.org) However, his prediction explicitly framed this pattern as continuing “for a very long time,” which implies a multi‑year or even multi‑decade horizon. With only roughly a year and a half elapsed since the prediction, there has not been enough time to determine whether the status quo will indeed persist for “a very long time,” even though events so far are consistent with his view. Therefore, the correct assessment today is inconclusive (too early to tell) rather than definitively right or wrong.

Evidence strongly supports Friedberg’s prediction that the spike in cocoa prices would lead major chocolate makers to shrink products and raise effective prices, with consumers seeing smaller and more expensive chocolate.

• Cocoa price spike: Cocoa futures roughly tripled in 2024, at points hitting around $10,000 per metric ton—far above prior norms—creating intense cost pressure on chocolate manufacturers.(benzinga.com)
• Early concrete shrinkflation tied to cocoa: Reporting in March 2024 noted that Mars had already reduced the size of its standard Galaxy bar by 10 grams while keeping the price the same, explicitly in response to soaring cocoa costs.(dairynews.today) Similar moves were later documented for Mondelez’s Cadbury Freddo multipacks, which were cut from five to four bars while the price stayed at £1.40, again justified by sharply higher cocoa and other input costs.(thescottishsun.co.uk)
• Size cuts and price hikes across big manufacturers: By late 2024–2025, major brands including Nestlé and Mondelez were reported to have reduced product sizes, raised prices, and in some cases lowered cocoa content in response to the cocoa crisis, with Christmas and everyday chocolate described as noticeably more expensive despite smaller packs.(thetimes.com) Analyses of the confectionery sector similarly describe strategies of shrinkflation (smaller packs at same price) and skimpflation (less cocoa per product) as industry‑wide responses to high cocoa costs.(foodprocessing.com.au)
• Consumers seeing smaller, costlier chocolate on shelves within months: Halloween 2024 coverage in Canada and North America notes that fun‑size chocolate bars and Halloween candy boxes contained fewer or smaller pieces than before, with cost per item up 5–10% versus the prior year, explicitly framed as shrinkflation amid sharply higher cocoa prices.(retail-insider.com) A Wells Fargo/industry analysis on the 2024 Halloween season likewise highlighted that record cocoa prices were leading companies such as Hershey, Nestlé, and Mars to reduce chocolate content, rely more on fillers, and send smaller quantities of chocolate per bag while keeping sticker prices similar—classic shrinkflation visible to shoppers.(fooddive.com)

While some analysts emphasized that the steepest retail price impact would arrive in late 2024 and into 2025, these reports show that within months of March 2024 consumers were indeed encountering smaller chocolate products and higher effective prices from major brands, driven by the cocoa price spike. That matches the substance of Friedberg’s prediction.

Sacks made two linked claims: (1) federal interest expense, already around/above $1T per year, would keep rising as debt rolled into higher rates; and (2) entitlement spending driven by demographics would keep growing.

1. Interest expense has in fact kept rising and crossed $1T.

• Net interest outlays were about $658–659 billion in FY 2023. (ceicdata.com)
• CBO’s Monthly Budget Review for September 2024 reports that net interest on the public debt increased by about $240 billion in FY 2024, reaching roughly $950 billion—very close to the “over a trillion” figure he cited conversationally and a massive jump from 2023. (einpresswire.com)
• The next year, FY 2025, CBO estimates that net interest on the public debt surpassed $1 trillion for the first time, confirming that the interest burden continued to grow after 2024. (edwardconard.com)
• CBO’s 2025 and long‑term outlooks project net interest payments continuing to climb over the coming decade (roughly doubling again by the mid‑2030s), consistent with his “keep growing” / “foreseeable future” language. (crfb.org)

His exact statement that interest was already “over a trillion” in 2024 is a bit ahead of the finalized net‑interest data (~$950B), but by 2025 the run‑rate and official estimates do cross $1T, and the directional prediction (ongoing growth as higher‑rate debt rolls over) is borne out.

2. Demographically driven entitlement spending is also rising.

• Treasury’s own analysis of FY 2024 notes that the increase in total outlays was partly due to higher spending on Social Security and Medicare attributable to demographic aging. (fraser.stlouisfed.org)
• Estimated Social Security expenditures rose to about $1.5T in FY 2024 and are projected around $1.6T in FY 2025, reflecting more beneficiaries and COLAs—clear year‑over‑year growth. (x.com)
• Reuters and CBO reporting on FY 2025 confirm that spending on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid continued to increase in 2025. (reuters.com)
• CBO, the Social Security and Medicare Trustees, and multiple fiscal analyses all attribute the long‑run rise in these programs to population aging and health‑care cost growth, with Social Security and federal health programs projected to keep rising as a share of GDP over the coming decades. (crfb.org)

Given (a) the realized increases in net interest from 2023→2024→2025, culminating in >$1T by 2025, and (b) the continued and demographically driven growth in major entitlements over the same period (with projections showing further increases ahead), Sacks’s macro‑level prediction is substantially correct. Minor numerical imprecision on the exact timing of “over a trillion” in 2024 doesn’t change that the core forecast—that both interest expense and entitlement spending would keep rising from 2024 onward—has been validated by subsequent data and official projections as of late 2025.

Jason’s prediction in E172 had two parts: (1) that the All‑In YouTube channel would do a live Q&A stream around the 600k‑subscriber mark, and (2) that they would hold an in‑person “million subscriber party” once they reached 1,000,000 subscribers, inviting as many fans as possible.(podscripts.co)

Part 1 – ~600k live Q&A:

• On June 28, 2024, the channel ran a “500K Subscriber Livestream!” on YouTube. Summaries describe it as an All‑In live stream celebrating 500,000 subscribers, with real‑time audience interaction, super chats, and future “live chat”/Q&A plans; during the stream they note the channel at about 528k subs.(getrecall.ai)
• While this milestone is at ~500k rather than literally 600k, it is close in magnitude and matches the spirit of Jason’s forecast (a live Q&A–style stream tied to a mid‑range subscriber milestone). So the first part is approximately fulfilled.

Part 2 – 1M-subscriber in‑person party:

• Multiple later episodes and summaries reiterate plans for a “million subscriber party,” including mentions of doing something “crazy” for the million‑subscriber YouTube milestone and references to holding it in Las Vegas, but always framed as a future event.(getrecall.ai)
• As of late November 2025, analytics sites show the All‑In YouTube channel at roughly 970–975k subscribers—close, but not yet at 1,000,000.(speakrj.com) There is no credible reporting or documentation that a dedicated “million subscriber party” for fans has already been held; existing large in‑person events (the All‑In Summits) are separate conferences, not billed as a million‑subscriber celebration.(en.wikipedia.org)

Because the key condition for the second half of the prediction (actually reaching 1,000,000 subscribers and then holding the promised fan party) has not yet occurred, the overall prediction cannot be definitively judged. The mid‑milestone live Q&A behavior looks directionally correct, but the central “million subscriber party” claim remains untested, so the fairest overall label is inconclusive (too early).