Trump's First Week: Inauguration Recap, Executive Actions, TikTok, Stargate + Sacks is Back!

Evidence from Trump’s second term shows a mixed but ultimately retaliatory and selective posture toward business leaders and firms, contradicting Chamath’s claim that “we’re not going to ostracize people” or “play favorites.”

Where the prediction looks partly right:

• Trump has actively courted many major tech leaders, including some who were previously framed as political adversaries:
  • The second inauguration featured prominent tech CEOs and investors — including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI’s Sam Altman — as donors and VIP attendees. (en.wikipedia.org)
  • On January 21, 2025, Trump stood alongside Altman, Larry Ellison, and Masayoshi Son at the White House to unveil Stargate, a joint venture led by OpenAI/SoftBank/Oracle to invest up to $500B in AI infrastructure — described by Trump as the “largest AI infrastructure project in history.” (en.wikipedia.org)
  • A July 15, 2025 AI-and-energy summit including Altman, Zuckerberg, Nadella, and Pichai, and a September 4 White House dinner with over two dozen tech leaders (Zuckerberg, Altman, Gates, Cook, Pichai, Brin, etc.) showcased close engagement and praise for Trump’s pro-business, pro‑AI agenda. (reuters.com)
  • Trump’s AI policy (EO 14179 and his AI Action Plan) is explicitly designed around industry partnerships and deregulation, with OpenAI and other firms providing input — another sign of access rather than ostracism for these particular companies. (en.wikipedia.org)

But key actions clearly do ostracize and punish disfavored firms/figures:

• Targeted retaliation against specific law firms for political reasons:

  • On March 6, 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14230 barring the federal government from using the law firm Perkins Coie, suspending its attorneys’ security clearances, barring them from federal buildings, and ordering reviews aimed at terminating government business with its clients. The order explicitly tied these sanctions to Perkins Coie’s past work for Democratic figures (e.g., Hillary Clinton), as part of a broader Trump campaign against firms tied to investigations of him. (en.wikipedia.org)
  • A federal judge later struck down that order as unconstitutional, calling it retaliatory and aimed at suppressing dissenting viewpoints, noting it used state power to intimidate legal advocates of opposition causes. (politico.com) This is textbook political ostracism of a specific business entity.

• Retaliatory threats against Elon Musk’s companies:

  • Once close allies, Trump and Elon Musk fell into a public feud in mid‑2025 over Trump’s spending bill. In response to Musk’s criticism and threats to disrupt NASA service with SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, Trump publicly threatened to terminate Musk’s “governmental subsidies and contracts”, framing it as an easy way to save “billions and billions of dollars” in the budget. (twitter.com) This is a direct threat to punish a specific business leader and his companies for political opposition.
  • Around the same time, Trump held a White House tech/AI dinner with almost every major Silicon Valley leader except Musk; AP explicitly noted Musk’s “public fallout” with Trump and his notable absence, while rivals like Altman were present. (apnews.com) That selective access is the definition of “playing favorites.”

• Selective exclusion based on ideology in federal contracting:

  • In July 2025, Trump signed an executive order instructing agencies to bar AI vendors with “partisan bias or ideological agendas” — aimed at eliminating “woke AI” from federal contracts and requiring screening for ideological content in AI systems. (ft.com) While not always naming individual firms, it sets up a system in which companies with certain viewpoints can be excluded from federal business, again undermining the idea of an even‑handed, non‑retaliatory posture.

Assessment:

• Chamath’s narrower intuition — that the Trump White House would be open to deals even with previous tech-world critics like Zuckerberg and Altman — has been borne out: Meta and OpenAI enjoy high levels of access, partnership, and praise.
• But his broader claim that the administration “is going to turn a totally new page,” not ostracizing people or playing favorites, has clearly failed. The administration has:
  • Used executive orders to single out particular firms (Perkins Coie and others) for bans and sanctions because of their past political work; and
  • Publicly threatened to pull government contracts and subsidies from Musk’s companies in direct response to his political criticism, while simultaneously rewarding more aligned tech leaders with access and favorable treatment.

Because the prediction was framed as a general stance (“we’re not going to ostracize people… we’re not going to play favorites”), these repeated, targeted retaliatory actions against specific firms and individuals mean the prediction did not come true overall.

Trump’s September 25, 2025 executive order backing a qualified divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. operations adopts a framework in which the new U.S. TikTok entity is valued at roughly $14 billion, a figure reported across multiple outlets covering the deal. (investing.com) By contrast, analysts before and around the time of Chamath’s January 2025 comments commonly put TikTok’s U.S. business in a range from tens of billions up to well above $100 billion depending on assumptions about the recommendation algorithm, with some estimates explicitly pegging U.S. value or U.S.-focused scenarios around or above the $100 billion mark that Thomas Laffont discussed. (cnbc.com) The 2024 Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act legally forced a divestiture or U.S. shutdown, and Trump repeatedly used executive orders to delay enforcement while conditioning TikTok’s survival on an approved sale, a process run through an interagency and White House–led framework rather than a normal market auction. (whitehouse.gov) Coverage of the announced $14 billion price explicitly characterizes it as an extremely low multiple of TikTok U.S. revenue and attributes the discount to the coerced, politically driven nature of the sale, with one analysis calling the valuation daylight robbery relative to the business fundamentals. (business-standard.com) In other words, the currently agreed disposition that keeps TikTok operating in the U.S. under Trump is proceeding at a transaction value far below Laffont’s roughly $100 billion standalone estimate and is clearly shaped by U.S. government leverage rather than by TikTok’s modeled economic value, matching the core of Chamath’s prediction even though some implementation details of the deal may still change before closing.

Chamath’s prediction was that over the next several years of Trump’s second administration, major U.S. industrial‑policy and tech initiatives would increasingly be structured so that, in exchange for special incentives, the federal government retains explicit upside (equity or royalty‑like revenue shares), rather than relying only on grants, loans, or tax credits.

So far, early 2025 evidence points in that direction:

• The U.S. government converted CHIPS Act grants and other funds into about a 10% non‑voting equity stake in Intel, plus warrants for an additional stake, explicitly framed as a shift from grants to ownership in a key semiconductor firm. (apnews.com)
• The Department of Energy restructured a $2.3B loan to Lithium Americas so that the U.S. takes a small equity stake in the company developing the Thacker Pass lithium mine; reporting describes this as part of a broader Trump push to acquire equity in critical‑mineral and tech supply‑chain companies (Intel, MP Materials, etc.). (apnews.com)
• The government took a 10% equity stake in Trilogy Metals tied to approval of the Ambler Access Project road in Alaska, directly linking permitting for a strategic mining corridor to ongoing upside in the project. (streetwisereports.com)
• An $80B Westinghouse nuclear‑reactor package includes profit‑sharing for the U.S. above a return threshold and a contingent 20% equity stake if Westinghouse later IPOs above a set valuation, giving the federal government a royalty‑like share of future gains. (washingtonpost.com)
• In the Nippon Steel–U.S. Steel deal, the U.S. government obtained a “golden share” with veto rights and board‑appointment power as a condition of approving the acquisition, with analysts describing this as effectively partial nationalization—another form of ongoing economic and governance participation tied to regulatory approval. (en.wikipedia.org)

At the same time, not all high‑profile initiatives follow this model: Ex‑Im Bank’s $100B energy push relies on credit guarantees and loans rather than equity; the Stargate AI infrastructure project is financed by OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, MGX, and lenders, with Trump mainly offering expedited permitting; and the TikTok U.S. divestiture compels a sale to a private consortium (Oracle, Silver Lake, MGX, etc.) without the federal government itself taking an equity or royalty stake. (ft.com)

However, as of November 30, 2025, Trump’s second term has been underway for only a little over 10 months. The prediction explicitly concerns what will happen over the next several years of this administration, and it further claims that this upside‑sharing model will increasingly structure major industrial and tech policy. That longer‑term trajectory—whether this approach becomes the dominant, sustained “template” versus a burst of early‑term experiments—cannot yet be known.

Because the specified multi‑year timeframe has not elapsed, and future policy or congressional/market pushback could still significantly alter the pattern, the status of the prediction is inconclusive (too early to definitively judge), even though early developments are directionally consistent with what Chamath described.

Evidence so far shows that part of Chamath’s prediction has occurred, but the core part has not yet been resolved and the stated time window (“within the next few years”) has not expired.

What has happened so far

• On Jan. 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” aimed at restricting birthright citizenship by reinterpreting the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, especially the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”(en.wikipedia.org)
• The order triggered rapid and widespread litigation. States and civil-rights groups filed multiple suits within days, including Washington v. Trump and other challenges in federal courts around the country.(theverge.com)(en.wikipedia.org) This matches Chamath’s claim that the EO would immediately generate lawsuits.
• The Supreme Court took up Trump v. CASA, Inc., a consolidated set of cases arising from these challenges, and issued a decision on June 27, 2025—barely five months after the EO—addressing whether lower courts may issue nationwide injunctions blocking enforcement of the order. That is, the issue associated with the EO reached the Court “very quickly.”(congress.gov)(congress.gov)

What has not happened yet

• In Trump v. CASA, Inc., the justices resolved only the procedural question about nationwide ("universal") injunctions. The Court explicitly did not decide whether Trump’s birthright-citizenship order is constitutional or how to reinterpret “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Analyses of the decision emphasize that “the court’s opinion on the constitutionality of whether some American-born children can be deprived of citizenship remains undecided” and that the fate of the EO’s core policy “was left unclear.”(theguardian.com)(congress.gov)
• The main substantive rulings so far on the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in this controversy have come from lower courts, such as the Ninth Circuit, which held that Trump’s narrower, “allegiance”-based reading contradicts the original public understanding and longstanding Supreme Court precedent like United States v. Wong Kim Ark—but these are not Supreme Court merits decisions on the new EO.(reason.com)(en.wikipedia.org)

Why this is inconclusive

• Chamath’s prediction (as normalized) has two elements: (1) lawsuits will quickly send the birthright-citizenship fight to the Supreme Court, and (2) the Court will take up and opine on the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction” clause in the near term (“within the next few years”).
• Element (1) is already borne out: the EO did rapidly reach the Supreme Court in Trump v. CASA, Inc. within months.(congress.gov)(constitutioncenter.org)
• Element (2) has not yet occurred: the Supreme Court has so far avoided deciding the clause’s meaning or the EO’s constitutionality, leaving those questions unresolved.(theguardian.com) However, because “within the next few years” extends beyond November 30, 2025, there is still time for the Court to grant and decide a merits case squarely addressing the Citizenship Clause.

Given this mix—partial validation (fast path to SCOTUS) but no Supreme Court merits ruling on the clause yet, with the forecast window still open—the correct classification is inconclusive, not clearly right or wrong at this time.

Available reporting shows:

• On January 20–21, 2025, President Trump issued blanket clemency for roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants and commuted the sentences of 14 named leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers (including Enrique Tarrio, Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, Dominic Pezzola, Stewart Rhodes, Kelly Meggs, Jessica Watkins, Roberto Minuta, etc.).(whitehouse.gov)
• Since their release, prominent Proud Boys and Oath Keepers figures have been very active publicly (press conferences, CPAC, lawsuits against DOJ, appearances at court hearings), but there is no credible reporting of any of them carrying out a major new violent plot or attack comparable to or worse than their original January 6 conduct.
  • Enrique Tarrio was briefly arrested near the Capitol for a simple assault allegation (striking a protester’s phone and arm) after CPAC; prosecutors later declined to pursue the case. This is far less severe than his prior role organizing seditious conspiracy around January 6.(apnews.com)
  • Stewart Rhodes returned to Capitol Hill and has engaged in political advocacy after his commutation, but reporting describes speech and lobbying activity, not new acts of violence.(apnews.com)
• By contrast, other pardoned January 6 rioters (not identified as Proud Boys or Oath Keepers members) have committed serious new crimes after clemency, including:
  • Edward Kelley, pardoned for his Jan. 6 offenses, later convicted and sentenced to life in prison for plotting to bomb an FBI office and assassinate dozens of law‑enforcement officers.(en.wikipedia.org)
  • Christopher Moynihan, a pardoned rioter, arrested in October 2025 for terroristic threats after allegedly plotting to assassinate House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.(apnews.com)
  • A broader pattern of reoffending among pardoned Jan. 6 participants (gun charges, deadly DUI, child‑sex crimes, etc.) is documented in overviews of the pardon cohort.(en.wikipedia.org)

However, the specific, normalized prediction you gave is narrower: that members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were involved in January 6 and later pardoned or released would, in the coming years, commit future acts of violence worse than their January 6 conduct.

As of November 30, 2025:

• There is some post‑clemency misconduct by a key Proud Boys leader (Tarrio’s minor alleged assault), but nothing documented that is more serious than his or other leaders’ original roles in organizing or executing the Capitol attack.
• There are no reported new violent plots or attacks by the pardoned/commuted Oath Keepers or Proud Boys leaders comparable to seditious conspiracy and the organized violence of January 6 itself.
• Only about 10 months have passed since their release, and the prediction explicitly speaks of events occurring over “the coming years,” so the relevant time window has likely not fully played out.

Because (a) the condition that Proud Boys/Oath Keepers members commit worse violence has not yet been met, and (b) there is still substantial time left in the forecast horizon, the evidence is not sufficient either to confirm or to falsify the prediction at this point.

So the fairest classification is: inconclusive (too early).

As of November 30, 2025 (about 10 months after the January 25, 2025 podcast), the direction of events is consistent with Friedberg’s claim—there is a large-scale build‑out of AI data centers and advanced chip fabs in the U.S.—but his prediction explicitly concerned what would happen “over the next several years,” which has not yet elapsed.

On the facts: the U.S. is seeing huge chip and data‑center expansion. TSMC has announced that total U.S. investments will reach about $165 billion, including multiple additional fabs, advanced packaging plants, and an R&D center in Arizona, with a long‑term build‑out schedule through at least 2030. (azcommerce.com) Arizona and surrounding states are being positioned as a major semiconductor hub, with dozens of semiconductor-related projects and TSMC’s Arizona fabs already producing advanced chips (including leading AI processors) while more capacity is planned. (economy.ac) In parallel, hyperscale cloud providers are sharply increasing capex for AI servers and data centers: TrendForce estimates combined capex of the eight largest CSPs will jump to about $420 billion in 2025 and exceed $520 billion in 2026, driven heavily by GPU-based AI infrastructure build‑outs. (finance.yahoo.com) Major individual projects like Amazon’s recently announced $50 billion in new U.S. data centers for AI and high‑performance computing for federal customers reinforce the scale of ongoing expansion. (wsj.com)

However, Friedberg’s testable claim was that this “data center and chip infrastructure effort” would “obviously” go forward with or without government involvement over the next several years. To judge that, we would need to see whether the build‑out continues (or would have continued) regardless of evolving U.S. federal policy through a multi‑year window—something we cannot yet fully observe only 10 months later. In addition, many of the marquee chip investments explicitly intertwine with U.S. federal policy and incentives (e.g., CHIPS Act–related support for TSMC’s Arizona expansion), which further complicates any present attempt to separate what’s happening because of government from what would happen without it. (techpowerup.com)

Because the timeframe of “several years” has not passed and the counterfactual of “without government involvement” cannot yet be meaningfully evaluated, the prediction is best classified as inconclusive (too early to tell) rather than clearly right or wrong.

The prediction’s key outcome is that “over the coming decade” (i.e., roughly 2025–2035) the U.S. will be severely disadvantaged relative to China in electricity costs and in its ability to deploy AI competitively, if it fails within a few months of January 2025 to stand up an industrial and regulatory engine for advanced nuclear (e.g., pebble‑bed) deployment.

As of November 30, 2025, fewer than two years of that ~10‑year window have elapsed. Even if we try to assess the antecedent (whether the U.S. has meaningfully “stood up” such an engine), the prediction’s actual claim is about the resulting disadvantage over the decade, which cannot yet be measured: relative electricity costs and AI competitiveness vs. China will depend on policy, build‑out, technology and market evolution through the early‑to‑mid 2030s.

Because the timeframe of the forecast extends well beyond the current date, there is not enough observable data yet to determine whether the U.S. will in fact end up “hugely disadvantaged” in the specified ways. Therefore the correctness of the prediction cannot currently be evaluated.

As of November 30, 2025, it is too early to determine whether Chamath’s full prediction has come true.

1. Status of U.S. stablecoin payment rails

• The U.S. did pass the GENIUS Act in July 2025, the first federal law creating a comprehensive regulatory framework for dollar‑backed payment stablecoins. (en.wikipedia.org)
• However, the law’s core regime does not take effect until the earlier of January 18, 2027 or 120 days after regulators issue final rules; agencies have up to one year from enactment (mid‑2026) to write those rules. Until then, the act mainly provides legal groundwork rather than a fully operational national payment rail. (natlawreview.com)
• Commentators describe the GENIUS Act as laying the foundation for a future blockchain‑based payment system that could make transactions faster and cheaper, but not as a completed, ubiquitous rail in 2025. (napa-net.org)
• Major networks (Mastercard–Fiserv, Western Union, Zelle) have announced stablecoin-based offerings, mostly focused on cross‑border payments, with launches planned for 2026 or with no firm live date yet, indicating the infrastructure is still in rollout/planning rather than “successfully implemented” nationwide. (barrons.com)

2. Effects on GDP growth and payment fraud

• Economic and policy analysis so far emphasizes potential benefits: stablecoins could boost demand for U.S. Treasuries and may put downward pressure on interest rates, but current retail use is limited and broader macroeconomic effects are explicitly described as speculative or long‑term. (reuters.com)
• There is no credible 2025 evidence attributing a significant acceleration of U.S. GDP growth specifically to stablecoin payment rails; any such impact, if it occurs, would likely take several years to show up in macro data.
• On fraud, U.S. authorities are still reporting large and rising crypto‑related scam losses, with stablecoins (especially USDT) heavily used in pig‑butchering and other fraud schemes, prompting new enforcement task forces. This does not yet support a clear claim that payment‑related fraud has been reduced by stablecoin rails overall. (theverge.com)

3. David Sacks’ role

• David Sacks was appointed White House AI and Crypto Czar in Trump’s second term and chairs the President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets. (en.wikipedia.org)
• From early 2025 onward he publicly made stablecoin legislation his top priority, led press events alongside key banking and finance committee leaders, and is widely described as leading the administration’s stablecoin push. (cnbc.com) This part of the prediction—that Sacks would be a key figure in figuring out the system—appears to be on track.

Overall assessment

• The precondition of the prediction—a successfully implemented, widely used U.S. stablecoin payment rail making payments instantaneous and nearly costless—has not yet been fully met; the system is in an early legal and rollout phase.
• Because of that, and because measurable impacts on GDP growth and fraud would reasonably take years to evaluate, there is currently insufficient evidence to say whether the full causal claims (“enormous acceleration to GDP,” “cut fraud”) are right or wrong.

Given the short time since the law’s passage and the long‑run nature of the predicted effects, the forecast is inconclusive (too early to judge), even though the sub‑claim about Sacks being a key architect looks directionally correct.

Several developments since early 2025 indicate that U.S.-dollar stablecoin payment rails have reached meaningful scale and are already both disruptive and economically valuable, in line with Chamath’s prediction.

1. U.S. policy and infrastructure for “U.S. stablecoin rails” now exist.
   In July 2025, the U.S. enacted the GENIUS Act, a federal framework for payment stablecoins that lets banks and other regulated financial institutions issue dollar‑backed stablecoins, defines them as payment instruments (not securities), and mandates 1:1 reserves and monthly audits—essentially formalizing U.S. stablecoin payment rails. (en.wikipedia.org) The Federal Reserve has also proposed giving eligible stablecoin issuers direct access to Fed payment infrastructure via new “payment accounts” / “skinny master accounts,” further integrating stablecoins into core U.S. rails. (finance.yahoo.com)

2. Stablecoins have scaled to volumes comparable to, or larger than, major card networks.
   Dollar stablecoins now make up ~99% of the global stablecoin market with a combined supply above $250–300B. (panewslab.com) On‑chain stablecoin transfers reached about $36.3T annually, surpassing Visa and Mastercard’s combined transaction volume, and recent estimates put average daily stablecoin volume at $3.1T, higher than Visa’s and second only to the U.S. ACH system. (panewslab.com) An a16z industry report finds that by late 2025, adjusted monthly stablecoin volume exceeds five times PayPal’s throughput and is already more than half of Visa’s, with over 1% of global U.S.-dollar circulation now tokenized as stablecoins. (bbx.com) These figures meet any reasonable definition of “implemented at scale.”

3. Concrete disruption of existing payment and financial systems.
   Major payment and fintech players are actively routing payments over stablecoin rails:

   • PayPal’s “Pay with Crypto” allows U.S. merchants to accept stablecoins (e.g., USDC) and other crypto via connected wallets, advertising materially lower fees than many international card payments. (techradar.com)
   • Klarna launched KlarnaUSD, a dollar‑backed stablecoin on a Stripe‑developed blockchain, specifically to cut cross‑border costs by bypassing SWIFT and with plans to extend it to merchant and consumer payments. (ft.com)
     Industry data show that the average stablecoin transaction size has been falling and usage is shifting from large crypto trades to smaller cross‑border and everyday payments, with payment companies’ share of stablecoin volume expected to grow sharply. (coinlive.com)
     Regulators and large asset managers now openly warn that U.S. dollar stablecoins could siphon off bank deposits, dollarize other economies, and destabilize traditional banking and payment systems—evidence that they are already seen as a disruptive alternative infrastructure. (reuters.com)

4. Demonstrable net economic value.
   Academic work estimates that Tether alone held about $98.5B of U.S. Treasury bills by Q1 2025—around 1.6% of the entire T‑bill market—and that this demand has lowered 1‑month T‑bill yields by roughly 24 basis points, implying on the order of $15B per year in U.S. interest savings. (arxiv.org) Broader analyses note that stablecoins collectively hold over $150B in Treasuries, making them a top‑20 holder and a growing, structural source of demand for U.S. debt. (bbx.com) For users and firms, stablecoin rails offer faster settlement and significantly lower cross‑border fees, and are increasingly used for payments, trade, and savings, especially in high‑inflation or under‑banked markets. (panewslab.com)

5. Caveats, but overall alignment with the prediction.
   It’s true that a large share of stablecoin volume still comes from trading and automated activity, and long‑term net effects (including financial‑stability risks) remain uncertain. (panewslab.com) However, by late 2025 the combination of (a) national‑level U.S. regulation and integration into Fed‑adjacent rails, (b) multi‑trillion‑dollar, payment‑like transaction volumes, (c) real shifts in cross‑border payment flows and merchant acceptance, and (d) measurable macro‑level benefits such as reduced U.S. borrowing costs strongly supports Chamath’s claim that U.S. stablecoin rails, once scaled, would be “hugely disruptive and value added.”

Given the evidence available as of November 30, 2025, this prediction is best classified as right, with the understanding that the full long‑term balance of benefits and risks is still evolving.

Evidence shows that within a few weeks of the January 25, 2025 podcast, David Sacks moved from a tentative, onboarding phase into an active policy‑shaping role on crypto and AI.

• Official role and authority: Public records list Sacks as White House AI and Crypto Czar with a term start of January 20, 2025, and as chair/co‑chair of relevant presidential advisory bodies, giving him formal responsibility to shape policy in these domains.(en.wikipedia.org) Executive Order 14178 (“Strengthening American Leadership in Digital Financial Technology”), signed January 23, 2025, creates a President’s Working Group on Digital Asset Markets and tasks it with proposing a federal regulatory framework for digital assets within 180 days; multiple summaries state that this working group is led/chaired by Sacks in his special advisor role.(en.wikipedia.org) That structure is exactly the kind of policy‑shaping authority he was describing.

• Active policy shaping within ~10 days: By February 4, 2025—about ten days after the podcast—CNBC reports Sacks, described as the newly appointed White House AI and crypto czar, meeting with lawmakers and publicly setting concrete priorities: making stablecoin legislation a top focus, and leading a task force studying a U.S. Bitcoin or digital‑asset reserve at the president’s direction. He explicitly frames objectives and timelines (e.g., getting legislation through Congress in roughly six months), which goes well beyond a mere “listening mode” and into active agenda‑setting.(cnbc.com) That timing fits the prediction’s “over the next couple of weeks” window.

• Major policy initiatives soon after: On March 6, 2025, Trump signs an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile; coverage notes that this move followed recommendations and public advocacy by Sacks in his capacity as White House crypto and AI advisor, and that his working group is central to executing the policy.(politico.com) This is clear evidence that by early March—still only about six weeks after the podcast—Sacks was deeply involved in designing and promoting specific federal crypto policy.

• Ethics/onboarding process: Reports describe Sacks serving as a special government employee (SGE) under ethics waivers, with Democratic lawmakers later scrutinizing whether he has complied with SGE rules and time limits—an indication that the White House ethics apparatus formally processed his status.(mexc.com) Additional reporting details a White House memo (dated early March and publicly noted mid‑March) documenting that Sacks and Craft Ventures divested hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto‑related holdings and obtained conflict‑of‑interest waivers to serve as the president’s special advisor for AI and crypto, explicitly tying these divestments to compliance with government ethics regulations.(ainvest.com) While some ethics questions persisted later, this evidence shows that an ethics/onboarding process did occur and was sufficiently advanced by late winter 2025 for him to operate in a fully engaged advisory role.

Putting these pieces together: by early February 2025—well within “a few weeks” of the January 25 podcast—Sacks had moved into visible, substantive policy‑shaping activities on crypto and AI, under a formally recognized White House role and associated ethics framework. The existence of later ethics controversies does not contradict the core claim that, after an initial onboarding period, he transitioned from listening to actively shaping policy in the timeframe he described. Therefore, the prediction is right.

Multiple All-In Podcast episode descriptions after January 25, 2025 explicitly note David Sacks participating on-air. For example, the official All-In episode list for mid/late 2025 includes descriptions such as Episode #245 (October 3, 2025), where it states that “Sacks joins the discussion,” and other episodes in August–September 2025 that describe David Sacks sharing insights or being part of the conversation, indicating he is an active on-air participant again after the January 25 episode.

The aggregated All-In site and the PodcastAI episode index both list David Sacks as one of the four primary hosts, with updated speaking-duration statistics through at least Episode 252 on November 22, 2025, confirming continued on-air appearances well after January 25, 2025.

Additionally, 2025 press coverage (e.g., Business Insider and New York Post) describes David Sacks making comments on the All-In podcast in his role as Trump administration AI/crypto adviser, further corroborating that he returned as an on-air participant during 2025.

Taken together, these sources show that after the January 25, 2025 episode in which he said “I’ll be back,” David Sacks did in fact return as an on-air participant on the All-In Podcast.

Sources: All-In official episode list and descriptions, including episodes in August–October 2025; PodcastAI episode index with host participation metrics through Episode 252 (Nov 22, 2025); 2025 news articles referencing Sacks’ appearances on the All-In Podcast as a Trump administration official.

Citations: [All-In episode index & descriptions] (allin.onpodcastai.com) [Press references to Sacks on the All-In Podcast] (businessinsider.com)