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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
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Chamath @ 00:36:50Wrong
economygovernment
For calendar year 2025, starting from April 1, 2025, Trump-era tariffs will generate an annualized run rate of roughly $50 billion per month in revenue (equivalent to about $400 billion if applied over a full 12‑month period).
Well, the number, the number I said, Jason, is like a yearly run rate. So technically, if you just look at the calendar 25. You only get a stub of eight months because it starts April 1st.View on YouTube
Explanation

Available data on 2025 tariff/customs‑duty receipts fall far short of the prediction that Trump‑era tariffs would be bringing in roughly $50B per month from April 1, 2025 onward (≈$400B over the remainder of 2025).

Key facts:

  • Before the new 2025 tariff wave, total customs duties for all tariffs in FY 2024 were about $77B for the full year, illustrating the historical scale of tariff revenue. (usafacts.org)
  • After the "Liberation Day" tariffs in early April 2025, monthly customs duties rose sharply but remained far below $50B per month:
    • April 2025: about $16–16.3B in customs duties, a record at the time. (reuters.com)
    • June 2025: about $26.6–27.2B. (english.alarabiya.net)
    • August 2025: $29.5B, a new monthly record. (fastbull.com)
    • October 2025: $31.4B in customs duties, again a record but still well below $50B. (reuters.com)
      These are total customs duties; the incremental portion attributable specifically to Trump’s new tariffs would be smaller.
  • A Congressional-budget style analysis finds that total customs‑duty collections for all of FY 2025 were about $195B, with $151B collected in the second half of the fiscal year (April–September 2025)—an average of roughly $25B per month, roughly half of the predicted $50B run rate. (crfb.org)
  • USAFacts, summarizing Treasury data, reports $165.2B in customs duties through August of FY 2025, consistent with other estimates that the entire FY 2025 total ends up around $195B, not anywhere near $400B or a $600B annualized pace. (usafacts.org)
  • A recent article on the “Liberation Day” tariffs notes that they generated $215.2B in FY 2025 and $40.4B so far in FY 2026, which again implies total annual revenue from these tariffs in the low‑hundreds of billions, not $400B+ in just the April–December 2025 window. (the-sun.com)

Putting this together:

  • To match Chamath’s claim, by late 2025 tariff revenue would need to be running at about $50B/month, implying roughly $300B from April–September alone and ≈$400B over the rest of calendar 2025.
  • Actual total customs‑duty receipts from April–September 2025 were about $151B (≈$25B/month), and even including record months in August and October never approached $50B in a single month. (crfb.org)

Even allowing for some uncertainty in separating “Trump‑era” tariffs from baseline duties and for incomplete December 2025 data, the realized and projected revenue levels are far below the implied ~$400B over the 2025 stub period or a $600B annualized pace. The prediction therefore did not come true.