E49: Coinbase CEO reflects on controversial blog, state of the markets, 1000 unicorns, tax reform & more

Chamath’s claim has two parts: (1) that there would be sustained employee political/activist movements and internal petitions at Apple, and (2) that these would eventually show up negatively in Apple’s operating results (growth, margins, or similar metrics).

The first part clearly happened. Since 2021 Apple has seen visible internal activism, including the #AppleToo movement over workplace mistreatment and pay equity, followed by organizing under the "Apple Together" banner, which led to petitions, open letters, and even a small retail walkout. (en.wikipedia.org) In 2022, Apple Together organized widely reported internal petitions and public letters against Apple’s return‑to‑office mandates, explicitly framing them as issues of worker wellbeing and diversity. (theguardian.com)

The second part—whether this activism has measurably hurt Apple’s operating results by late 2025—is much harder to establish. Apple’s headline financials from fiscal 2021–2024 show very high and relatively stable profitability: revenue rose sharply from 2020 to 2022 and then stayed near that higher level, while operating margins increased from about 24% in 2020 to around 30–32% in the years after the activism began. (devyara.com) Recent reports for 2025 likewise describe record or near‑record revenues, net income, and strong gross margins, driven by iPhone and services growth, not by any evident drag from internal dissent. (investopedia.com) Where analysts and management do flag material risks to Apple’s earnings, they emphasize regulatory and antitrust issues (e.g., the Google search deal, App Store litigation) and tariffs, not employee activism or internal petitions. (barrons.com)

Because Apple’s results remain very strong and any financial effect of activism is (if it exists) too small to separately identify—and because no clear causal link or attribution is made in filings, earnings commentary, or mainstream analysis—there is no objective way, as of November 2025, to say that the activism has clearly shown up as a negative in operating results. At the same time, we also cannot prove that it has not had any impact at the margin, or that it will not in the future, especially since the prediction did not include a time limit.

Given this combination—documented activism, strong financial performance, and no clear, quantifiable connection between the two—the status of the prediction is ambiguous rather than definitively right, wrong, or simply "too early."

What he predicted Chamath argued that once COVID vaccines and a Tamiflu‑like oral antiviral were widely available, COVID would be economically “like a flu”: worker absenteeism from COVID would fall materially and most of the economy would return to normal levels of on‑site work and activity.

1. Preconditions were met

• COVID vaccines were already widely available in the U.S. by 2021.
• The FDA authorized the first oral antiviral, Paxlovid (nirmatrelvir/ritonavir), on Dec. 22, 2021, and molnupiravir on Dec. 23, 2021, for early outpatient treatment of high‑risk patients. By mid‑2022 these drugs were no longer in short supply and were sitting on pharmacy shelves, according to contemporaneous reporting. So his trigger condition did occur.

2. Acute crisis and broad economic drag did largely fade

• The WHO ended COVID’s status as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern on May 5, 2023, noting over a year of declining deaths, reduced pressure on health systems, and “a downward trend…allowing most countries to return to life as we knew it before COVID‑19.”
• The U.S. terminated its national and public‑health emergencies in April–May 2023; by then unemployment was back around its pre‑pandemic lows and labor‑market indicators showed a tight labor market rather than COVID‑driven weakness.
• Sectors that were previously devastated by restrictions (air travel, tourism, hospitality) had largely recovered to or exceeded 2019 activity by 2023–24.

This part of his intuition—no more rolling shutdowns or macro‑scale COVID drag once vaccines and treatments were in place—was broadly correct.

3. On‑site work did not return to “normal levels” Where the prediction clearly fails is his expectation that this would restore normal pre‑COVID levels of on‑site work. The data show a large, persistent structural shift to remote/hybrid work:

• Before COVID, full days worked from home were about 7% of paid workdays (2019).
• By mid‑2023, that share stabilized around 28% of paid workdays—roughly four times the pre‑pandemic level—and BLS summarized that high work‑from‑home rates “persist in 2023.”
• WFH Research and related surveys show this plateau has continued: about 27–28% of paid days were worked from home in 2024–2025, indicating a new steady state rather than a reversion.
• Stanford economist Nick Bloom and co‑authors characterize return‑to‑office as having hit a new normal: roughly 60% of workers fully on‑site, ~30% hybrid, ~10% fully remote, not a full reversion to 2019 patterns.

So while most workers are physically on‑site again, the level of on‑site work is nowhere near “normal” pre‑COVID levels for large swaths of the economy. Remote/hybrid work has become a durable structural change—very unlike flu seasons, which never produced a comparable, lasting shift in where work is done.

4. Worker absenteeism and long‑COVID make it not flu‑like Chamath’s argument explicitly tied “like a flu” to reduced ability for people to stay away from work. The reality is more complicated:

• Acute illness absenteeism did spike dramatically during Omicron: in January 2022, 7.8 million U.S. workers missed work for illness or medical reasons, more than double January 2021, with 3.6 million not working at all that week. That was an extreme COVID‑driven peak.
• Those spikes have subsided as immunity and treatments improved, and there have not been repeated Omicron‑scale absenteeism waves—but COVID has left a large chronic footprint via long COVID:
  • Brookings estimates from 2022–2023 suggest long COVID may be keeping 1.6–4 million full‑time‑equivalent workers out of the U.S. labor force at any given time—potentially around 15% of the then‑current labor shortage.
  • Government and clinical overviews likewise estimate millions of Americans with persistent symptoms, with roughly 1 million or more adults no longer able to work due to long COVID.

Seasonal influenza causes absenteeism but has never produced this scale of persistent labor‑force loss or long‑term disability in modern data. COVID’s ongoing impact on who can work, and how much, is structurally larger than a typical flu season, even after vaccines and antivirals.

Bottom line

• It is true that once vaccines and oral antivirals were available and widely deployed, the acute emergency phase ended and broad economic activity largely normalized.
• But the core, stronger claim—that COVID’s economic impact would become flu‑like, with worker absenteeism no longer a meaningful issue and on‑site work returning to normal pre‑COVID levels—has not come to pass. Remote/hybrid work remains about four times higher than before, and long COVID continues to sideline a non‑trivial slice of the workforce in a way that has no parallel with seasonal flu.

Because those central, falsifiable aspects of his prediction are not borne out by the data, the best overall judgment is that the prediction is wrong, albeit directionally right about the end of the emergency phase.

Evidence from 2022–2023 shows that inflation did become a central economic and political issue in the U.S., particularly around the 2022 midterms and into early 2023.

Economically, U.S. inflation surged to a 40‑year high, peaking at 9.1% year‑over‑year in June 2022 and remaining elevated into 2023, prompting aggressive Federal Reserve rate hikes and widespread discussion of a potential recession. This surge significantly eroded purchasing power and was explicitly cited as a problem for Democrats going into the 2022 midterm elections.【(en.wikipedia.org)

Politically and electorally, multiple sources identify inflation/cost of living as the top concern for voters in the 2022 midterms. A summary of the 2022 U.S. elections notes that “the economy, inflation in particular, remained the top issue for voters throughout 2022,” citing an October 2022 Monmouth poll in which 82% of Americans said inflation was an “extremely or very essential issue” and large majorities disapproved of Biden’s handling of it.【(en.wikipedia.org) Exit‑poll reporting for the midterms similarly found that roughly one‑third of voters named inflation as the most important issue to their vote—more than any other single issue, including abortion, crime, gun policy, or immigration.【(reddit.com)

Although abortion and threats to democracy were also highly salient, the data consistently show inflation/cost of living as the leading voter concern and a dominant frame for political conflict in late 2022 and early 2023. That matches Chamath’s forecast that, roughly 18 months after October 2021 and around the midterms, “it’s going to be all about” inflation. Therefore, the prediction is best judged as right.

The prediction explicitly gives a 20–30 year horizon: David Friedberg says the index of then-current unicorns could be worth more than the ~$46T market cap of all existing U.S. public companies "in the next 20 or 30 years" from the 2021 episode date.(transcriptforest.com) That puts the evaluation window roughly between 2041 and 2051. As of today (November 30, 2025), only about four years have elapsed since the prediction was made, so we are far short of the earliest evaluation date. There is no way yet to determine whether the private-unicorn index in question will exceed $46T within that future window. Therefore the accuracy of the prediction cannot currently be judged and is inconclusive (too early to tell).

Taxes and spending. After FY2021, federal tax collections and outlays did in fact move sharply higher and stay elevated. Federal tax revenue jumped to $4.9T in FY2022—about 19.6% of GDP, one of the highest shares ever recorded and well above the ~17% post‑war average—and remained historically high thereafter. (taxfoundation.org) Federal outlays stayed far above their historical norm: spending was 25.1% of GDP in 2022 and 23.4% in 2024 versus a 50‑year average near 21%, with nominal outlays rising from $6.27T (2022) to $6.75T (2024) and over $7T by 2025. (crfb.org)

Deficits and debt. Post‑COVID deficits never returned to traditional peacetime levels. The deficit was 5.5% of GDP in 2022, 6.3% in 2023, 6.4% in 2024, and about 5.9% in 2025—roughly double the 50‑year average of ~3.6%, and among the largest peacetime deficits on record. (en.wikipedia.org) Debt held by the public reached about 97–98% of GDP by 2023–24, while total gross federal debt climbed to roughly 123% of GDP in 2025—explicitly described as the highest in U.S. history and the first time debt has been sustained around 100% of GDP in peacetime. (fiscal.treasury.gov) These outcomes align with his concern about record‑level peacetime deficits and national debt persisting or worsening.

Unicorn “golden era.” 2021 is broadly documented as an extraordinary, peak year for unicorn formation. CB Insights and related analyses show that around 500–600 new unicorns were created in 2021, more than in the previous decade combined, roughly doubling the global herd to over 1,000 and leading many commentators to call 2021 “the year of the unicorn.” (netguru.com) After that, conditions deteriorated: North America and APAC “suffered a setback” in 2022, with new unicorn creation dropping sharply relative to 2021, and from 2023 through mid‑2025 only about 100‑plus new unicorns per year were being added—similar to pre‑boom years rather than 2021’s surge. (globaldata.com) Venture funding and exits also remained far below 2021 levels: by 2024 global VC investment was still about 55% under its 2021 peak, and annual exit value (~$149B in 2024) was a fraction of 2021’s ~$842B. (reuters.com) Analysts describe a large backlog of unicorns stuck in private markets, many valued at bubble‑era 2020–21 prices, reinforcing the idea that 2021 was a unique high‑water mark. (news.crunchbase.com)

Overall assessment. While most of the post‑2021 tax burden increase came from bracket creep, inflation, and revenue strength rather than explicit new tax-rate hikes, the facts match the spirit of Sacks’s forecast: (1) federal taxes collected and government spending both rose to and stayed at unusually high levels; (2) peacetime deficits and national debt remained near or moved toward record highs; and (3) 2021’s unicorn boom is now widely viewed as an exceptional peak followed by a materially tougher funding and exit environment, despite a later AI‑driven niche boom. On balance, the prediction has substantially come true.