E61: 2022 Predictions! Business, politics, science, tech, crypto, & more

The prediction has two parts:

1. DeSantis wins re‑election in 2022 by a comfortable margin.
   This is clearly correct. In the November 8, 2022 Florida gubernatorial election, Ron DeSantis defeated Charlie Crist roughly 59.4% to 40.0%, a margin of about 19.4 percentage points—widely described as a landslide and the largest margin for a Republican governor in modern Florida history. (en.wikipedia.org)

2. By the end of 2022, he is regarded as the national frontrunner for the 2024 GOP nomination.
   Evidence for the prediction:

• A USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll conducted Dec. 7–11, 2022 found that among Republicans and GOP‑leaning voters, 56% preferred DeSantis vs. 33% for Trump in a 2024 matchup, with about two‑thirds wanting DeSantis to run. Commentators explicitly framed this as DeSantis overtaking Trump and called him the new GOP frontrunner. (uspresidentialelectionnews.com)
• Post‑midterm coverage highlighted DeSantis’s landslide win as making him the party’s “big winner” and a leading or potential frontrunner for 2024, especially contrasted with Trump’s perceived midterm underperformance. (theguardian.com)

Evidence against the prediction:

• Aggregated nationwide Republican primary polling through late 2022 generally still showed Donald Trump ahead of DeSantis, often by substantial margins, when voters were asked about the full 2024 GOP field. These tracking series typically continued to describe Trump as the overall frontrunner. (breitbart.com)
• Early 2023 commentary from major outlets still referred to Trump as the primary frontrunner with DeSantis as a strong but secondary challenger, suggesting that the “frontrunner” label was not universally or durably attached to DeSantis. (cbsnews.com)

Because DeSantis was clearly a leading contender and was even labeled “the new frontrunner” in some polls and media narratives, yet national polling and much analysis continued to regard Trump as the principal frontrunner, whether DeSantis was “regarded as the national frontrunner” by the end of 2022 depends heavily on which observers or metrics you prioritize. The first part of the prediction is unambiguously correct, but the second is neither clearly right nor clearly wrong in hindsight, so the overall prediction is best scored as ambiguous.

On the first part of the prediction – that Omicron would prove effectively unstoppable in the U.S. in 2022 – the data clearly support this. Omicron became the dominant variant by late December 2021, and the BA.1/BA.2/BA.5 waves led to record case counts through much of early and mid‑2022 despite widespread vaccination and prior infection, indicating very high transmissibility and substantial immune escape. The CDC and multiple analyses described Omicron’s rapid spread and near-complete replacement of prior variants across the U.S., consistent with it being effectively ‘unstoppable’ in practice.

On the second part – that this would cause much of the country to shift toward DeSantis‑style, less‑restrictive COVID policies – national policy evolution in 2022–2023 matches that direction:

• By early 2022, many states (including blue states such as New York, New Jersey, California, and others) rapidly lifted indoor mask mandates, school mask mandates, and capacity restrictions, moving toward guidance that emphasized individual risk assessment rather than broad mandates, similar in substance to the approach Florida had already taken under Gov. DeSantis.
• In February–March 2022, numerous Democratic‑led states announced timelines to end mask mandates in schools and public indoor spaces, citing high vaccination rates, Omicron’s ubiquity, and the need to ‘learn to live with the virus’ – a framing that closely resembled the DeSantis/Florida position from 2021.
• The CDC updated its guidance in late February 2022 to “COVID‑19 Community Levels,” which substantially relaxed masking recommendations for most of the country compared with earlier metrics, again moving national guidance toward fewer ongoing restrictions.

While not every jurisdiction copied Florida’s policies exactly, the broad national trend in 2022 was toward lifting mandates and accepting widespread Omicron transmission as unavoidable, which is materially what the prediction claimed would happen.

Because (1) Omicron did in fact spread essentially unchecked across the U.S. in 2022, and (2) the majority of states and federal guidance shifted toward materially less‑restrictive, ‘live with it’ policies that resembled the DeSantis stance more than the stricter 2020–early‑2021 regime, the prediction is best judged as right overall.

By the end of 2022, Putin and Russia did not end up with increased geopolitical leverage or a stronger position vis-à-vis NATO compared to prior years.

Key developments:

• On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full‑scale invasion of Ukraine. This triggered unprecedented Western sanctions and a sharp deterioration in Russia’s relations with the US and Europe, leaving Russia more isolated economically and diplomatically than before 2022.
• Rather than weakening NATO, the invasion reinvigorated and expanded the alliance. Finland and Sweden both applied to join NATO in 2022, explicitly citing the Russian invasion as the reason; their accession was widely described as a major strategic setback for Russia, as it expanded NATO’s presence around Russia’s borders and in the Baltic region.
• NATO and the US significantly increased military, financial, and political support to Ukraine and boosted force deployments on NATO’s eastern flank, strengthening NATO’s cohesion and deterrence posture against Russia.
• Although Russia did temporarily wield energy leverage over Europe in 2022 through gas supply cuts and price spikes, the EU accelerated diversification away from Russian energy. By late 2022 and into 2023, Europe had sharply reduced its dependence on Russian gas, undermining that leverage and further damaging Russia’s long‑term economic position.

Given these outcomes, Putin did not “become a stronger player on the global stage” or increase his leverage over NATO over the course of 2022; instead, his actions largely strengthened NATO and weakened Russia’s broader geopolitical standing. Therefore, the prediction is wrong.

Several key parts of Chamath’s prediction came true, but others are not cleanly testable or are contradicted by events in 2022, so the overall accuracy is ambiguous.

1. Consolidation of power / “ruler for life” – In October 2022, the 20th Party Congress granted Xi an unprecedented third term as CCP general secretary and produced a Politburo Standing Committee made entirely of his allies, with rivals pushed out. Analysts widely described this as power consolidation to a level unseen since Mao and noted that, because term limits had already been abolished in 2018, Xi can now in practice rule indefinitely. (aljazeera.com) This strongly supports the “consolidate power” / “essentially ruler for life” part of the prediction.

2. Domestic dominance / “run roughshod” at home – Xi did tighten control (e.g., Hong Kong under the national security regime and installation of loyalist John Lee as chief executive). (en.wikipedia.org) But late 2022 also saw the largest wave of protests in China in decades against zero‑COVID policies, including some explicit calls for Xi to step down, after which Beijing abruptly dismantled zero‑COVID. (en.wikipedia.org) That outcome suggests his rule remained secure but not cost‑free or completely unchallenged, making “run roughshod” an overstatement.

3. International dominance / “run roughshod internationally” – Foreign‑policy analyses after the 20th Congress emphasize that Xi’s China has become more assertive but also more isolated and “increasingly estranged from the West,” amid economic slowdown and heightened tensions over Taiwan, rather than clearly expanding uncontested dominance abroad in 2022. (euronews.com) This cuts against the idea that he simply steamrolled the international scene.

4. “Biggest political winner of 2022” – This is inherently subjective and comparative. There is no objective metric for “biggest winner,” and prominent global assessments of 2022 influence and leadership (for example, Time’s Person of the Year) highlighted Volodymyr Zelensky and the “spirit of Ukraine,” not Xi, as the central political figure of the year. (news.sky.com) So this part cannot be cleanly scored as true.

Because (a) the structural power‑consolidation piece was largely accurate, but (b) the claims about unrestrained domestic and international dominance and being the biggest political winner are partly contradicted by events and partly non‑falsifiable value judgments, the fairest overall verdict on the prediction is ambiguous, rather than clearly right or wrong.

The prediction has two clear parts:

1. “Biden is going to lose the midterms” (i.e., Democrats lose in 2022).
   In the 2022 U.S. midterms, Republicans won control of the U.S. House of Representatives, flipping it from Democratic control, while Democrats narrowly held the Senate. (dw.com) In common U.S. political language, losing the House majority is widely described as the president’s party “losing the midterms,” so this sub‑prediction is broadly correct.

2. “Trump is going to get destroyed with this January 6th thing and bow out and not run again.”
   The January 6th Committee completed its work and issued a lengthy final report in late 2022, formally blaming Trump for efforts to overturn the 2020 election. (en.wikipedia.org) However, on November 15, 2022, Trump announced a new presidential campaign for 2024 in an address from Mar‑a‑Lago. (en.wikipedia.org) He thus did not “bow out” of presidential politics or “decide not to run again,” even if the investigations may have hurt him politically.

Because this is a conjunctive prediction (both parts are presented together as his political call for 2022) and the second, crucial component is clearly false, the overall prediction must be evaluated as wrong.

Sacks’ prediction had three testable components: (1) Republicans would take the U.S. House in the 2022 midterms, (2) this would be described as a GOP ‘red wave’, and (3) Nancy Pelosi would shortly announce her retirement from Congress and/or from House leadership after that loss.

1. Republicans did win the House in 2022. Democrats went into the midterms with a narrow House majority and came out with Republicans holding 222 seats to Democrats’ 213, flipping control of the chamber. (en.wikipedia.org)
2. However, the scale of GOP gains fell well short of pre‑election expectations; post‑election analysis across the political spectrum commonly referred to 2022 as ‘the red wave that wasn’t’, emphasizing that Republicans secured only a small net gain of House seats and failed to win the Senate. (en.wikipedia.org) So the magnitude implied by calling it a red wave was wrong, even though the House did flip.
3. Pelosi did announce she was stepping down from House Democratic leadership very shortly after the GOP’s House win became clear. On November 17, 2022—one day after outlets projected that Republicans would narrowly take the House—she stated on the House floor that she would not seek reelection to Democratic leadership in the next Congress, while remaining in Congress as a rank‑and‑file member. (cnbc.com) She did not announce retirement from Congress itself until November 2025, when she said she would not seek reelection in 2026. (washingtonpost.com)

Given the normalized formulation allows for retirement from Congress and/or House leadership, the core of Sacks’ forecast—that Democrats would lose the House in 2022 and Pelosi would soon step down from House leadership afterward—did occur on the predicted timeline. The only clearly incorrect element is the characterization of the overall election as a large ‘red wave’. On balance, that makes the prediction substantively right, though somewhat overstated in tone.

Available evidence indicates that in 2022 U.S. influence on the global stage did not materially decline and, in several key respects, actually strengthened.

Politically and militarily, the U.S. led the international response to Russia’s full‑scale invasion of Ukraine. Washington organized the Ramstein Air Base meeting in April 2022, bringing together defense officials from more than 40 nations to coordinate military support for Ukraine, a core exercise of U.S.-led coalition management. (en.wikipedia.org) Broader analyses of the war stress that it revitalized NATO and strengthened U.S. leadership over the alliance and Europe’s security response, rather than diminishing it. (peoplenewstoday.com) These developments point to renewed reliance on U.S. power and leadership, not a loss of geopolitical weight.

Economically, the United States remained the world’s largest economy in 2022, accounting for roughly a quarter of global nominal GDP (about US$25.3 trillion out of ~US$104 trillion), a share consistent with its pre‑2022 position. (our.today) The dollar also retained its central role in the international monetary system: as of Q4 2022, it made up about 58% of disclosed global foreign‑exchange reserves, far ahead of any competitor. (federalreserve.gov) While there was much discussion of “de‑dollarization” after U.S. sanctions on Russia, subsequent research found that the dollar’s share in central‑bank reserves, global debt securities, and FX trading was essentially unchanged after the 2022 sanctions, and that the reserve share was still about 10% higher than in the early 1990s. (en.wikipedia.org) These are not the hallmarks of a material economic influence decline during 2022.

Socially and in terms of soft power, the U.S. continued to be described in 2022-era and subsequent analyses as the foremost great power, with worldwide economic, military, and cultural influence (“Americanization”) and the dominant share of global wealth and alliances. (en.wikipedia.org) Polling in late 2022 did register expectations among Western publics that U.S. influence might fall over the coming five years, but that is about anticipated future decline, not a demonstrated sharp drop in 2022 itself. (gmfus.org)

Taken together, objective indicators (alliance behavior, war-time coalition leadership, GDP share, reserve-currency status, and ongoing cultural reach) show continuity or even strengthening of U.S. influence in 2022, rather than a clear, measurable deterioration from its prior level. The prediction that U.S. global influence would materially decline during 2022 is therefore best judged as wrong.

Chamath’s prediction was that in 2022 the progressive left of the Democratic Party would face a strong backlash from mainstream voters and end up as one of the biggest political losers of the year.

There was some localized backlash: in San Francisco, three progressive school‑board members were overwhelmingly recalled in February 2022, described as punishment for perceived left‑wing excesses, and in June 2022 progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin was recalled in a high‑profile race widely interpreted as a rebuke to progressive criminal‑justice policies. (en.wikipedia.org) Some commentary on the year also argued that progressive Democrats were “America’s biggest losers” and blamed them for Democrats’ House losses. (eurasiareview.com) In Democratic primaries, the number of Sanders‑style progressive insurgents fell compared with 2018/2020, and only one defeated an incumbent, suggesting diminished momentum. (washingtonpost.com)

But on the national 2022 outcome, the data point the other way. Democrats had one of the strongest midterm performances for a president’s party in decades, holding the Senate and gaining a seat while Republicans underperformed historical midterm expectations. (en.wikipedia.org) Post‑election coverage and polling repeatedly labeled Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans—not progressive Democrats—as the biggest losers of the midterms. (theguardian.com) Within the Democratic Party, the progressive “Squad” did not shrink; it grew from six to nine members after the 2022 elections (with Greg Casar, Summer Lee, and Delia Ramirez joining), and incumbents like Ilhan Omar, AOC, Tlaib, Pressley, Bush, and Bowman all won re‑election. (en.wikipedia.org) Research also finds that, even when progressive challengers lost, they helped pull Democratic incumbents leftward on policy and influenced major elements of the Biden agenda (e.g., climate and student‑debt relief). (washingtonpost.com)

Mainstream voters also supported several high‑salience progressive‑leaning positions at the ballot box: abortion‑rights measures passed in states like California, Michigan, and Vermont, while anti‑abortion measures were rejected in Kansas, Kentucky, and Montana; Missouri voters approved recreational marijuana legalization. (en.wikipedia.org) That pattern is inconsistent with a broad popular repudiation of progressive ideas.

Taken together, 2022 featured some notable setbacks for progressive officials in a few jurisdictions, but progressives were not generally regarded as, nor did they empirically function as, one of the year’s biggest political losers. Nationally, Trump/MAGA Republicans clearly fit that label better, while progressives maintained or modestly increased their representation and continued to shape Democratic policy. Chamath’s prediction therefore does not match the overall outcome.

On balance, evidence from 2022 does not support the claim that populist sentiment would generally swell in both the U.S. and globally over that year, even though there were important regional exceptions.

U.S.:

• Analyses of the 2022 U.S. midterms find that many high‑profile Trump‑aligned, election‑denying candidates underperformed or lost, especially in key swing‑state and election‑administration races. The Tony Blair Institute describes U.S. voters as “rejecting populism,” noting “resounding defeats to Trumpist candidates, especially in swing states and for state-level offices involved in election administration.” (institute.global)
• That pattern indicates that, while populist attitudes among parts of the electorate remained strong, their political influence did not clearly intensify in 2022 and in some crucial contests diminished, contradicting a forecast that the “voice of populism” in the U.S. would simply swell over the year.

Global picture:

• A major Cambridge/Bennett Institute study using data through late 2021 found that support for populist parties and agreement with populist attitudes had “collapsed” during the pandemic, with a marked technocratic shift and falling backing for populist leaders across many countries. (phys.org) There is no clear evidence of a broad, global reversal of this collapse in 2022.
• The Tony Blair Institute’s 2023 update, which incorporates 2022 outcomes, reports that the number of populist leaders in power worldwide continued to fall from a 2019 peak of 19 to just 11 at the start of 2023, the lowest level since 2003. Much of the decline came from Latin America, where a wave of more moderate, non‑populist centre‑left leaders replaced earlier populists. (institute.global) This is inconsistent with a claim that populism’s overall global prominence was swelling during 2022.

Important regional exceptions (where his intuition was partly borne out):

• In Europe, several elections did show rising or consolidating strength for populist parties. A 2022 Pew analysis notes that populist parties in Europe—especially right‑wing ones—have increased their vote shares in recent elections, highlighting strong showings in Italy and Sweden and large combined support for populist parties in France’s 2022 elections. (pewresearch.org)
• Italy elected Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, a right‑wing populist party, as the leading force in the governing coalition in the September 2022 general election, marking the country’s most right‑wing government since World War II. (en.wikipedia.org) Sweden’s 2022 election likewise saw the Sweden Democrats, a radical‑right populist party, become the second‑largest party and a key supporter of the new right‑of‑centre government. (en.wikipedia.org) These cases confirm that in some European systems the populist “voice” remained loud or grew louder.

Overall assessment:

• The prediction was that populist, anti‑elitist politics would intensify and become more prominent, not fade, in both the U.S. and globally over 2022. Empirically, 2022 produced a mixed pattern: notable populist advances in parts of Europe, but a continued decline in the global number of populist leaders, a post‑pandemic fall in measured populist support, and clear electoral setbacks for Trump‑style populism in the United States. (institute.global)
• Because key elements of the forecast (especially for the U.S. and the global overall trend) did not materialize, even though some European developments fit the spirit of his claim, the best judgment is that this prediction is wrong rather than generally borne out.

Chamath’s core claim had two testable parts: (1) that 2021/2022 marked the peak market caps for Visa and Mastercard, and (2) that a spread trade shorting those card networks while going long Web3/crypto payments would become extremely profitable.

1. Visa and Mastercard did not peak in 2021/2022

Data since then shows clearly higher prices and market caps:

• Visa’s market cap at end‑2021 was about $469B; by end‑2024 it had risen to about $617B, and by 2025 it’s around $648B, well above 2021 levels.(companiesmarketcap.com) In February 2025, Visa’s stock price hit a new all‑time high around $351.91, explicitly described as an ATH.(investing.com)
• Mastercard’s market cap at end‑2021 was about $352B; by end‑2024 it had grown to roughly $488B, and in 2025 it’s around $493B, again clearly higher than in 2021.(companiesmarketcap.com) In August 2025, Mastercard’s share price reached a new all‑time high near $595.01, with reporting noting a record market cap of $534B at that peak.(investing.com)

Because both Visa and Mastercard have set new all‑time highs in price and market value after 2021, the specific prediction that 2021/2022 represented their “peak market cap” is already falsified.

2. The spread trade thesis has not obviously played out in crypto’s favor

The total crypto market cap first exceeded roughly $3T in November 2021 at the prior cycle peak.(coincheckup.com) As of November 2025, the crypto market is again around $3.0–3.1T—comparable in magnitude, not dramatically higher.(coincodex.com) Over the same period, Visa and Mastercard together have increased their combined market cap from roughly $820B in 2021 to well over $1.1T in 2025.(companiesmarketcap.com) That is not the kind of clear relative collapse versus Web3 payments that would make a short‑cards / long‑crypto‑payments spread “the most profitable” trade of the era.

While some individual crypto projects have performed well, the broad picture is that the major card networks have grown in value and hit new highs, and the crypto market as a whole has not vastly outpaced them from the 2021 baseline. Given that Chamath’s prediction hinged on those 2021/2022 levels being the peak for Visa/Mastercard and on a strongly favorable relative move toward crypto payments, the observable data by late 2025 contradicts his thesis.

Conclusion: Because Visa and Mastercard have surpassed their 2021 market caps and achieved new all‑time highs, the “this is their peak market cap” part of the prediction is already wrong, regardless of the remaining years in the decade-long horizon. This makes the overall prediction wrong on the evidence available so far.

Evidence since late 2021 shows no swift disruption of the major card networks by Web3/crypto payment rails within a year (i.e., by end‑2022/2023), nor even by 2025.

1. Card networks grew rapidly instead of being disrupted (2022–2024).

   • Visa’s net revenue rose from about $24.1B in 2021 to $29.3B in 2022 (+22%), $32.7B in 2023, and $35.9B in 2024, while net income also climbed strongly over the same period. (macrotrends.net)
   • Visa’s total payments volume increased from $11.6T in 2022 to $12.3T in 2023 and $13.2T in 2024, with transactions processed on its network rising from 192.5B (2022) to 233.8B (2024). (annualreport.visa.com)
   • Mastercard’s gross profit likewise rose from $22.2B (2022) to $25.1B (2023) and $28.2B (2024), indicating robust growth, not erosion. (macrotrends.net)
     Strong, sustained growth in volume and profit is inconsistent with a swift disruptive hit to their core business within a year of 2022.

2. Cards remain the dominant consumer payment rails.

   • In global point‑of‑sale (POS) spending for 2023, credit cards accounted for about 27% of POS value (over $10T) and debit cards 23% (over $8.3T), together making up roughly half of all POS transaction value. Digital wallets were ~30%, but most wallet transactions (e.g., Apple Pay, Google Pay) still ride the Visa/Mastercard/Amex rails. (szzcs.com)
   • In the U.S., there were 942 million credit cards from Visa, Mastercard, Amex and Discover in circulation at year‑end 2024, usable at about 34 million merchant locations—figures that continued to grow. (finance.yahoo.com)
     These metrics show continued dominance of card networks rather than rapid displacement by Web3-native rails.

3. Crypto/Web3 payments grew but from a tiny base and did not quickly displace cards.

   • A 2025 analysis of merchant adoption notes that only around 5–10% of U.S. merchants actively accept crypto payments today, despite many expressing future interest. (coinlaw.io)
   • A separate study found that just 12,834 merchants worldwide accepted crypto payments in 2024—vanishingly small compared with the tens of millions of merchants that take cards. (nftevening.com)
   • Even in El Salvador, where Bitcoin was made legal tender and heavily promoted, surveys in 2022 found only ~20% of businesses accepting Bitcoin and just 14% having conducted any Bitcoin transactions; most users stopped using the official wallet after a one‑time bonus. (en.wikipedia.org)
     This is meaningful growth for crypto, but it is not the kind of broad, rapid merchant and consumer migration that would constitute swift disruption of Visa/Mastercard/Amex payment rails.

4. Rising stablecoin/on‑chain volumes have not yet translated into visible damage to card networks.

   • On‑chain stablecoin transfer volume has, in some years, matched or exceeded individual card networks, but analyses emphasize that much of this is trading/liquidity activity, not retail purchasing that competes directly with card rails. (reddit.com)
   • Over the same period, Visa and Mastercard have continued to post record revenues, growing card volumes, and large stock buybacks, indicating that whatever growth is happening in Web3 settlement has not yet shown up as a rapid, negative shock to their economics. (annualreport.visa.com)

5. Regulatory and competitive pressure is incremental, not disruptive.

   • Recent U.S. antitrust litigation led to a revised settlement trimming “swipe fees” and giving merchants slightly more flexibility, but it leaves Visa and Mastercard firmly in place at the center of card payments. (reuters.com)
     This is evolutionary pressure from regulators and alternative rails, not the kind of abrupt Web3-driven displacement implied by “this disruption happens swiftly.”

Taken together, the data show that by one year after 2022 (and even by late 2025), traditional card networks remain highly profitable, growing, and central to global consumer payments, while crypto/Web3 payment rails—though growing—are still a niche in comparison. That outcome contradicts Chamath’s claim that disruption of the card networks by Web3/crypto payment infrastructure would happen swiftly rather than slowly.

Chamath said that starting in 2022 and "over the next several decades" the Davids—small businesses and smaller firms competing with dominant megacaps—would "do really well" relative to the Goliaths.

Evidence from 2022–2025 points the other way:

• Market performance has been led by mega‑caps, not smaller firms. The “Magnificent Seven” (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Tesla, Nvidia) grew to about 29% of S&P 500 market cap in 2023 and massively outperformed the rest of the index: they gained ~71% that year while the other 493 stocks rose only ~6%.(finance.yahoo.com) The top 10 S&P 500 stocks’ weight jumped from 27% at end‑2023 to about 37% by mid‑2024, with the Magnificent Seven alone making up roughly 31% of the index, an unprecedented concentration.(cnbc.com) By 2025, estimates put the Magnificent Seven near 37% of S&P 500 market cap, far larger and more dominant than in 2021.(finance.yahoo.com)(linkedin.com) This is the opposite of a world where smaller competitors are gaining ground on megacaps.

• Small‑cap equities have underperformed large caps since 2022. Analysis using Russell 2000 (small caps) vs S&P 500 (large caps) shows that large caps have dramatically outpaced small caps over the last decade; one 2025 MarketWatch review notes that since 2013 large caps gained about 260% versus ~110% for small caps, and even in 2025 the S&P 500 was still ahead of small caps year‑to‑date.(marketwatch.com) A CFA Institute review in 2025 characterizes this as a prolonged cycle of small‑cap underperformance lasting roughly 12 years and still ongoing.(blogs.cfainstitute.org) Bank of America’s strategist (quoted elsewhere) similarly describes small caps as having lagged large caps every year since 2017. That means that an investor “on the side of the Davids” starting in 2022 has not done “really well” relative to backing the megacap incumbents.

• Most of the overall stock‑market gains have been concentrated in a few mega‑firms. Multiple analyses find that the Magnificent Seven contributed the majority—often well over half—of the S&P 500’s total return in 2023, and an unusually large share of global equity returns more broadly.(seekingalpha.com)(americancentury.com)(cpcadvisors.com)(washingtonpost.com) This concentration in a tiny number of dominant corporations again contradicts the idea that smaller competitors have been the main beneficiaries of the post‑2021 environment.

• Operating conditions for small businesses have been difficult rather than extraordinarily favorable. The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index, a key gauge of small‑business health, stayed below its 50‑year average of 98 for 34 consecutive months from January 2022 until November 2024, reflecting persistent pessimism tied to inflation, supply‑chain issues, and uncertainty.(cmegroup.com)(wisbusiness.com)(bankingjournal.aba.com)(chauffeurdriven.com) Even after a brief post‑election surge in late 2024, readings in 2025 slipped back near or below the long‑run average amid concerns about tariffs, policy uncertainty, weaker sales, and profit pressures—hardly an environment where small businesses are broadly “doing really well.”(bankingjournal.aba.com)(smallbiztrends.com)(reuters.com)

Chamath did attach a multi‑decade horizon, which we obviously cannot fully judge in 2025. However, he was explicit that “starting really next year” (i.e., 2022) being on the side of the Davids would perform very well. The first 3–4 years of that period have instead seen:

• small‑business sentiment and profitability under pressure, and
• financial and economic dominance by the very megacap Goliaths he expected to be outperformed.

Given that the prediction included a clear, near‑term inflection beginning in 2022, and early reality has moved in the opposite direction, the most reasonable assessment with current data is that this prediction has turned out wrong so far.

Stripe did not go public at all in 2022, via IPO, direct listing, or SPAC, so the conditional prediction about it becoming the highest-valued tech IPO/listing in history did not materialize.

Evidence:

• As of the end of 2022, Stripe remained a private company; major financial and tech press tracked Stripe’s status closely and reported multiple private funding rounds and valuation changes (e.g., a March 2021 round valuing it at $95B and later markdowns), but no public listing in 2022.
• Later reporting (2023–2025) discussing Stripe’s potential IPO consistently noted that Stripe still had not gone public yet, implicitly confirming there was no IPO/direct listing in 2022.

Because the predicate event (“Stripe goes public in 2022”) failed, the forecast that this 2022 listing would set a new record IPO valuation is, in practical forecast-scoring terms, wrong: the world in which it was supposed to happen never occurred, and the prediction’s implied real-world claim (“we will see Stripe go public in 2022 at a record valuation”) did not come true.

Sacks predicted that the existing “rise of the rest” pattern—people and industry moving from high‑tax coastal states (e.g., California, New York) to low/zero‑tax states (e.g., Florida, Texas, Tennessee)—would accelerate in 2022 compared with prior years.

On the people/migration side, the 2022 data clearly show stronger flows into those low‑tax destinations than in earlier years:

• Florida – net domestic migration (people moving from other U.S. states):
  • 2019: +139,330
  • 2020: +174,645
  • 2021: +246,571
  • 2022: +314,467 (highest yet, and a ~27% jump over 2021) (beautifydata.com)
• Texas – net domestic migration:
  • 2019: +121,411
  • 2020: +162,299
  • 2021: +195,564
  • 2022: +222,154 (again higher than 2021, and far above pre‑COVID levels) (beautifydata.com)
• Tennessee – net domestic migration:
  • 2021: ~50,450
  • 2022: ~81,600–83,800 (Tennessee’s own data center notes 2022 domestic net migration was a record high and the main driver of its largest one‑year population gain since 2007) (tnsdc.utk.edu)

At the same time, sending states like California and New York continued to have very large net domestic outflows in 2022, well above pre‑pandemic levels:

• California – net domestic migration: 2019: −208k → 2020: −242k → 2021: −478k → 2022: −337k. Outflow eased from the 2021 peak but remained massively higher than 2019–2020, consistent with sustained population flight. (beautifydata.com)
• New York – net domestic migration: 2019: −184k → 2020: −204k → 2021: −300k → 2022: −296k, i.e., 2022 remained near a record net outflow. (beautifydata.com)

Census‑based analyses of 2022 population estimates also emphasize that the South was the only U.S. region with positive net domestic migration, led numerically by Texas and Florida, and that Tennessee’s record net domestic migration was a key driver of its growth. (tnsdc.utk.edu) This is exactly the pattern Sacks described: people leaving coastal/high‑tax states and accumulating in low‑tax southern states.

On the industry/firms side, detailed firm‑migration statistics lag and are best documented through 2021 (which already showed strong net firm gains in Florida, Texas, and Tennessee), so it’s harder to quantify an additional acceleration in 2022 specifically. (bls.gov) However, there is no sign of a reversal; instead, reporting and corporate announcements through and after 2022 continue to show relocations and expansions into these same low‑tax states, consistent with the broader “people + industry” narrative.

Putting this together: domestic migration into Florida, Texas, and Tennessee did grow further in 2022 relative to 2021 and pre‑pandemic years, while outflows from California and New York remained historically high. Regional data point to the South as the sole net domestic migration winner, led by exactly the types of low‑tax states Sacks named. That matches his claim that the trend “was going to keep getting bigger next year” and “pick up steam.”

Given the strong, quantifiable acceleration in people migration and at least continued strength (with no evident reversal) in industry relocation, the prediction is best judged as right.

Evidence shows that in 2022 the U.S. saw a large, measurable jump in reshoring and related manufacturing investment, and that most of the resulting facilities and jobs went to "rest‑of‑U.S." regions rather than to coastal hubs like California.

• Meaningful increase in reshoring (2022): The Reshoring Initiative’s 2022 Data Report found that reshoring + foreign direct investment (FDI) job announcements reached about 364,000 in 2022, a 53% increase over 2021’s record and the highest level ever recorded. (industryweek.com) Other analyses report a similar ~350,000 new reshoring/FDI jobs and tie the surge directly to efforts to shorten supply chains and reduce exposure to overseas—especially China‑related—risks. (engineering.com) Manufacturing construction spending in the U.S. also jumped about 40% in 2022 vs. 2021, reflecting a real build‑out of domestic capacity, not just announcements. (industrialsage.com) This clearly qualifies as a “meaningful” increase.

• Geographic shift to ‘rest of U.S.’ states: The same 2022 Reshoring Initiative data show that the South and Midwest accounted for about 76% of 2022 reshoring/FDI job announcements, with states like Ohio, Georgia, Tennessee, and North Carolina among the biggest winners—classic “rise of the rest” locations outside the traditional coastal hubs. (mhlnews.com) A separate breakdown (also based on Reshoring Initiative data) notes that in the 2022 results California did not rank in the top 20 states for reshoring/FDI jobs, while Texas was in the top 20 with roughly 10,600 projected jobs, alongside other Southern and Midwestern states such as Kentucky, North Carolina, Georgia, and Ohio. (centerforjobs.org) That pattern matches the prediction that new facilities and investments would disproportionately go to interior/Sun Belt states like Texas rather than to California.

• Caveat: New York as an exception: One nuance is that New York actually led all states in 2022 by share of announced reshoring/FDI jobs (about 12%), helped by very large semiconductor projects such as Micron’s planned multibillion‑dollar chip factory in Clay, NY, enabled by CHIPS Act incentives. (mhlnews.com) So the specific claim that investment would flow to “rest‑of‑U.S. states like Texas rather than to California or New York” was partly off with respect to New York, which turned out to be a major beneficiary.

Overall, however, the core of Sacks’s prediction did come true in 2022: reshoring surged to record levels and the lion’s share of new industrial jobs and facilities went to non‑California, largely Southern and Midwestern states, reinforcing the broader “rise of the rest” trend—even though New York emerged as an important outlier beneficiary.

Disney’s underlying business had some strong spots in 2022, but its share price and overall market performance were notably poor, contradicting the “big corporate winner” / “undervalued with a huge surge” prediction.

On the business side:

• Disney’s Parks, Experiences and Products division had a record fiscal year 2022 with about $28.7 billion in revenue, up 73% year over year, and overall management described 2022 as a “strong year” with record parks results and large subscriber growth across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ (total direct-to-consumer subscriptions surpassing 235 million). (thedisneyblog.com)
• However, streaming still lost substantial money: Disney’s direct-to-consumer segment (including Disney+) recorded an operating loss of roughly $1.5 billion in fiscal 2022, reflecting heavy investment and pressuring profitability. (thedisneyblog.com)

On stock/valuation performance (the core of the prediction):

• By early January 2023, analyses of 2022 performance show Disney’s stock fell almost 44% for the year, making it one of the very worst performers in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. (fool.com)
• Other summaries of Dow performance similarly place Walt Disney among the lowest-returning Dow components over the 2022–2023 window, with returns around –42%. (statmuse.com)

The prediction was that Disney would be a big corporate winner for 2022, being undervalued and experiencing a huge surge leading to share-price/valuation outperformance. While parks and subscriber metrics improved, the company’s streaming losses and broader market concerns coincided with Disney becoming one of the Dow’s worst stock performers in 2022, not a winner or an outperformer. Given that the explicit thesis centered on a valuation/stock surge that did not materialize, this prediction is wrong.

Evidence suggests that U.S. Millennials and (older) Gen Z did experience unusually large gains in economic power around 2022, but it is hard to say they were clearly the single biggest “winners,” and some of the specific mechanisms Jason cited (notably trading success) ran the other way.

On the positive side, multiple analyses of Federal Reserve data show that by 2022 younger cohorts’ wealth had surged relative to expectations. A St. Louis Fed study finds that older Millennials’ median wealth in 2022 was 37% above what a life‑cycle model would predict, and younger Millennials/older Gen Z swung from 44% below expectations in 2019 to 39% above in 2022, with their median wealth more than quadrupling to $41,000. (stlouisfed.org) A Center for American Progress analysis concludes that households under 35 saw median wealth rise from $16,000 to $39,000 between 2019 and 2022 (about +140%), and describes younger Americans as the main “winners” of the post‑pandemic recovery, with especially low unemployment and strong wage growth. (americanprogress.org) Cerulli Associates likewise reports that Millennials’ and Gen Z’s financial assets grew the most of any generation from 2019 to 2022, with sharp increases in stock and retirement‑account ownership, indicating rising financial clout. (cerulli.com) Entrepreneurship and job mobility also moved in the predicted direction: CAP notes that the business‑ownership rate for households under 35 hit an all‑time high of 11.3% in 2022—almost double 2019’s rate—while youth unemployment fell from 9.7% in 2021 to about 8.1% in 2022, both supporting greater independence and opportunity for younger workers. (americanprogress.org)

However, 2022 was a terrible year for exactly the kind of risk‑on investing many younger Americans favored. The Nasdaq Composite fell about 33% and the S&P 500 about 19% in 2022, and young investors—especially in crypto—were hit disproportionately hard; surveys show Millennials’ comfort with crypto investing plunged, and reporting notes that Gen Z “fell the hardest” when the crypto market crashed. (en.wikipedia.org) At the same time, structural generational gaps remained huge: by 2023, Millennials and Gen Z together still held just over 9% of total U.S. wealth, while Baby Boomers controlled about 52%, and the wealth gap between older and younger families was larger in 2022 than in 2001. (planning.org)

Because the claim that Millennials and Gen Z were the biggest overall economic winners in 2022 depends on subjective weighting (percentage vs dollar gains, trading losses vs housing and wage gains, and “power” vs absolute wealth), and because some key sub‑claims (investing/trading success) are contradicted by the data, the prediction cannot be cleanly scored as simply right or wrong. Hence, it is best judged as ambiguous.

Evidence from 2022 strongly supports Jason’s prediction of a “big shakeout” in crypto, especially for projects that had not delivered real products.

• Market-wide collapse & loss of interest: In 2022, total crypto market capitalization fell from roughly $2.2–$2.3 trillion in January to under $800 billion by year-end, a drawdown of about 65%, with analysts widely referring to it as a severe “crypto winter.” This coincided with declining trading volumes, reduced retail participation, and a sharp drop in speculative interest.
• Failure and collapse of many projects: 2022 saw high‑profile blowups (e.g., Terra/LUNA ecosystem, Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, Voyager), plus numerous smaller tokens and DeFi/NFT projects that either effectively died, were abandoned, or lost most of their value when they couldn’t sustain user adoption or deliver on promised roadmaps. Many tokens without shipped, sustainable products went illiquid or near‑worthless, and investors largely rotated attention and capital away from such projects.
• Funding and VC pullback: Venture and speculative funding into crypto/web3 peaked around late 2021 and early 2022, then contracted significantly through the rest of 2022, with multiple reports noting that investors became far more selective and skeptical, particularly of projects without clear product-market fit or shipped products.

Jason’s prediction was qualitative, not about a specific token, but about a broad shakeout where non‑shipping projects would lose value and investor interest in 2022. The documented crash, widespread project failures, and funding pullback in that year match this pattern very closely, so the prediction is best classified as right.

Evidence strongly supports Friedberg’s prediction that the crypto bubble would effectively burst in 2022 and that the vast majority of tokens would suffer massive value destruction.

By mid‑June 2022, data from CoinGoLive reported that 13,240 of 13,436 cryptocurrencies (≈98.5%) were down more than 90% from their all‑time highs, and about 95.5% had fallen more than 99.99%, i.e., had effectively gone to zero. This was summarized by Crypto Briefing under the headline “Almost Every Crypto Asset Is Down Over 90% From Peak.” (cryptobriefing.com) That directly matches the claim that ~90% of projects/tokens would “blow up” (collapse or experience major declines) during 2022.

Mainstream coverage at the end of 2022 also described the cycle as a popped bubble: The Washington Post wrote in December 2022 that there was “the sense that the crypto bubble has definitively popped,” in the context of a 2021–2024 crypto crash and a roughly 70% drawdown in total market cap from the 2021 peak. (en.wikipedia.org) The bursting was driven in part by rising interest rates and risk‑asset deleveraging; for example, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s May 4, 2022 half‑point rate hike was cited alongside the broader sell‑off in speculative assets, including crypto. (en.wikipedia.org)

2022 also saw multiple marquee failures that accelerated the collapse of many tokens and projects: the Terra/UST–LUNA death spiral in May 2022, in which LUNA fell from an all‑time high of about $119 to “virtually zero,” wiping out roughly $40–45 billion in market value (en.wikipedia.org), and the November 2022 bankruptcy of FTX, then the third‑largest exchange, which triggered further contagion across lenders and tokens. (en.wikipedia.org) These events are consistent with his description of widespread “scammy nonsense” and large numbers of projects failing once leverage and easy money dried up.

Data on project survival rates also line up with his “90% won’t make it” framing. CoinGecko data summarized in 2023 showed that 1,866 of the 6,300 cryptocurrencies listed in 2022 were already classified as “dead” within about a year, and 4,367 of 2021‑listed projects had also died, underscoring that the majority of new projects quickly failed or were abandoned. (reddit.com) Other analyses based on Nomics data noted that by October 2022, more than 12,100 cryptocurrency projects had stopped operating in the bear market. (reddit.com)

Finally, Friedberg’s secondary claim—that a small minority of projects would endure and have long‑term value—is directionally borne out as of late 2025. Bitcoin, for example, trades around $91,000, above its 2021 peak, indicating that at least some large, established networks have survived the crash and later appreciated again, while thousands of smaller tokens remain dead or near‑worthless. (reddit.com)

Taken together—near‑universal 90%+ drawdowns in 2022, large numbers of projects becoming effectively or formally dead, clear recognition in contemporaneous reporting that the “crypto bubble” had popped, and a minority of major projects persisting—the prediction that the 2022 crypto bubble would burst and roughly 90% of projects would blow up while a few survive is best judged as right.

Evidence shows both parts of Sacks’s prediction largely played out:

1. Fed QE ended by March 2022
   Official Fed communications and subsequent analysis note that the Federal Reserve completed its pandemic-era net asset purchases and ended QE in March 2022, then quickly shifted to rate hikes and, by June, quantitative tightening. (sec.gov) That matches his timing (“March will be the last month”).

2. Post‑April 2022 performance of liquidity‑sensitive assets
   After QE ended:

   • Crypto: Bitcoin’s price fell about 33–34% from December 1, 2021 to April 30, 2022, and then another ~64% from April 1 to December 31, 2022, a cumulative crash of roughly 75% from late‑2021 levels, emblematic of the 2022 “crypto winter.” (statmuse.com)
   • High‑growth / speculative stocks: The ARK Innovation ETF (ARKK), a proxy for highly speculative growth names, declined about 67% in 2022, with most top holdings down 50–80% that year, far worse than the S&P 500’s ~19% drop and the Nasdaq’s ~33% fall. (gurufocus.com) This is exactly the sort of “growth stocks that benefited from excess liquidity” he highlighted.
   • Collectibles (e.g., sports cards): A detailed 2022 year‑end report from Card Ladder shows its broad vintage index was down about 5% for the year, while modern and ultra‑modern card indices fell over 30% in 2022, after huge gains in 2020–21—described as a retraction after an overheated, speculation‑driven boom. (sportscollectorsdaily.com) A separate overview explicitly notes that the sports‑card market “saw a downturn in 2022,” even though long‑term returns remained strong. (withvincent.com)
   • Art (especially speculative/digital segments): While the overall traditional art market was relatively stable in 1H 2022 and even posted small gains, alternative‑asset research notes art returned roughly 0% in the first half of 2022 while stocks and crypto were falling, indicating at best stagnation rather than outperformance. (insights.masterworks.com) More importantly for Sacks’s “excess liquidity” thesis, the speculative NFT/collectibles side of the art market collapsed: Art Basel/UBS reporting shows art‑related NFT sales on NFT platforms fell about 49% in value in 2022 versus 2021, and collectibles‑style NFTs dominated that earlier boom. (artsandcollections.com) Those are precisely the frothy, liquidity‑driven segments he was pointing to.

3. Macro context and causality
   The broad 2022 bear market in risk assets coincided with the Fed moving from QE to aggressive tightening: the S&P 500 fell 19% and the Nasdaq 33% for 2022 amid rapidly rising rates and shrinking liquidity, a pattern widely attributed to central‑bank tightening after the end of QE. (en.wikipedia.org) While one cannot prove causality from QE alone, the timing and concentration of damage in the most speculative, liquidity‑dependent assets (crypto, high‑growth tech, NFTs, modern collectibles) match his stated mechanism.

Because (a) the Fed did in fact stop net QE by March 2022, and (b) from roughly April 2022 onward, the assets he singled out—especially crypto, speculative growth stocks, and modern collectibles—suffered large absolute declines and clear underperformance relative to broader benchmarks, his prediction is best judged as right, with the caveat that traditional high‑end physical art was more resilient and only cooled rather than collapsing immediately.

The prediction required two things to happen in June 2022: (1) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) would launch a Democratic primary challenge against Sen. Chuck Schumer for his New York U.S. Senate seat, and (2) she would lose that primary.

Official records of the 2022 United States Senate election in New York show that in the Democratic primary, Chuck Schumer was the only listed Democratic nominee. The same source lists Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among the figures who declined to run, not as a candidate. There is no record of her filing to run for Senate or appearing on the June 2022 primary ballot against Schumer; the filing deadline for that primary was April 7, 2022, and she did not file. (en.wikipedia.org)

Instead, AOC ran for re‑election to the U.S. House in New York’s 14th Congressional District and continued serving there; coverage of her House races and later elections treats her as the sitting representative from NY‑14, and notes that her Republican opponent Tina Forte had already lost to her in the 2022 general election. (election2024.nycitynewsservice.com)

Because AOC never actually launched a primary challenge to Schumer in 2022 at all, the core event described in Chamath’s prediction did not occur, and the attached outcome (“and she will lose”) also did not occur. Therefore, the prediction is wrong.

The prediction hinged on two linked claims: (1) a substantial Republican “red wave” in the 2022 midterms, and (2) that, in response, Democratic establishment figures and major voices would openly revive and praise Bill Clinton–style centrist triangulation as the party’s model.

1. No Republican “red wave” materialized. In 2022 Republicans won a narrow House majority but underperformed expectations, while Democrats held the Senate and made historically strong showings for a president’s party in midterms (e.g., net gubernatorial gains, no loss of Senate incumbents or state legislative chambers).(en.wikipedia.org) Contemporary coverage widely described the outcome as “the red wave that wasn’t” rather than a wave.(pbs.org) So the core triggering condition of the forecast (“after the red wave”) did not occur.

2. Democrats did not broadly rediscover or celebrate Clintonian triangulation in late 2022. Post‑midterm commentary inside the Democratic-aligned media environment often argued the opposite: that the 2022 results showed the limits of Clinton-era triangulation and that the party’s future lay in a more forthrightly progressive strategy. A prominent Salon essay, for example, declared that after the midterms “the Clinton era is finally over” and that “triangulation is dead,” explicitly rejecting Clinton’s 1990s centrist model as a path forward for Democrats.(salon.com) Later analyses of the Biden White House likewise emphasized that, unlike Clinton after 1994, Biden was not forced into a major centrist pivot; instead, advisers argued they could avoid a Clinton-style triangulation moment and continue focusing on issues like abortion rights and democracy.(sanjuandailystar.com) While some commentators and “Washington veterans” cited Clinton as one possible model for bipartisan governance after the election, this was in the context of general historical comparison and often came from non‑Democratic figures; it did not amount to a clear, party‑wide revival of Clinton’s triangulation as the endorsed strategy for Democrats.(csmonitor.com)

Because there was neither the predicted Republican red wave nor a discernible, establishment-level Democratic move to praise and emulate Bill Clinton’s triangulating centrism by the end of 2022, the podcast prediction did not come true.

National data show some Republican gains with both Hispanics and Asian Americans in the 2022 midterms, but not enough for these groups to become Republican‑leaning swing blocs as the normalized prediction claims.

• In the 2018 House elections, exit polls found Hispanics voting 69% Democratic / 29% Republican and Asians 77% Democratic / 23% Republican. By 2022, the national House exit poll showed Hispanics at 60% Democratic / 39% Republican and Asians at 58% Democratic / 40% Republican. That is a noticeable GOP improvement (about +10 points among Hispanics and +17 among Asians vs 2018), but both groups still clearly favored Democrats overall. (en.wikipedia.org)

• Catalist’s validated‑voter analysis likewise finds Latino support for Democrats in 2022 House races at roughly 62%, essentially unchanged from 2020, contradicting the idea of a wholesale realignment toward Republicans at the national level. (catalist.us)

• Other Asian‑focused data point the same way: an AAPI Civic Engagement Fund election‑eve poll found Asian American voters supporting Democrats 51% vs 37% for Republicans, and an AALDEF 2022 exit poll reported Asian American House votes at 64% Democratic vs 32% Republican. (aapifund.org)

• Summaries of the 2022 midterms note that Republicans did make gains among working‑class voters of color and among Hispanics, but still emphasize that Democrats continued to win a majority of these voters. (en.wikipedia.org)

Putting this together, Republicans did receive higher shares of the Hispanic and Asian American vote than in some recent cycles, but those groups remained Dem‑leaning overall, not "Republican‑leaning swing blocs" that "went for Republicans in big numbers" in the aggregate. The normalized prediction therefore overstates the shift and is best judged wrong, even though it anticipated the direction (some GOP gains) correctly.

In 2022 there was a clear onset and escalation of major interstate and proxy-style conflict, matching Friedberg’s prediction in both timing and geography.

1. Ukraine became a full‑scale war with global implications in early 2022.

   • On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full‑scale invasion of Ukraine, described as the biggest attack on a European country and the first full‑scale war in Europe since World War II. 【(en.wikipedia.org)
   • The conflict rapidly internationalized: by mid‑2025, Ukraine had received well over $150 billion in direct military aid and hundreds of billions in total assistance from the U.S. and other allies, with Western stockpiles and industrial bases repurposed to sustain the war 【(en.wikipedia.org). This level of foreign arming and support is widely analyzed as turning the war into a de facto proxy conflict between Russia and a U.S./NATO‑aligned coalition, exactly the type of “proxy wars” and “great global conflict” dynamic Friedberg described.

2. Tensions around Taiwan also escalated materially in 2022.

   • In August 2022, after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, China launched unprecedented live‑fire military drills in six zones encircling the island, including missile tests and frequent incursions of ships and aircraft across the Taiwan Strait median line. 【(cnbc.com)
   • Taiwan and multiple international actors condemned these exercises as highly destabilizing and akin to a partial blockade, prompting fears of a new Taiwan Strait crisis 【(theguardian.com).

3. The “beginning of a period” part is borne out by persistence.

   • The large‑scale Russo‑Ukrainian war that began in 2022 has continued for years, with world leaders still marking its anniversaries in Kyiv and debating long‑term support and European security architecture in 2025 【(lemonde.fr). This supports Friedberg’s framing that 2022 would mark the start of a longer era of elevated great‑power conflict rather than a brief flare‑up.

Given that in 2022 there was (a) the outbreak of the largest European war since WWII, heavily shaped by global proxy dynamics, and (b) a sharp military escalation around Taiwan, Friedberg’s prediction that 2022 would see “the start of great global conflict” with “proxy wars… maybe something in the Ukraine, maybe something related to Taiwan” is well aligned with what actually happened.

By the end of 2022, China had taken substantial visible actions on climate—especially in renewables—but these did not translate into it being widely perceived as the leading country in climate-change mitigation rather than as a main climate “foe.”

On the action side, China accelerated clean-energy deployment. In 2022 it installed record amounts of solar and wind capacity and, by global comparison, accounted for a very large share of new renewable power additions, helping make it the world’s top producer of electricity from renewables.(en.wikipedia.org) Many analyses highlighted that China was becoming the dominant market and manufacturer for solar, wind, and other green technologies.(dw.com) These are exactly the kind of “visible actions” the prediction referred to.

However, simultaneous coal expansion and high emissions dominated perceptions:

• In 2022 China approved roughly 90–106 GW of new coal power—about two large coal plants per week—quadrupling approvals versus 2021 and accounting for the vast majority of new coal projects globally.(energyandcleanair.org) This was widely reported as a renewed coal boom, not a phase‑out.
• Analyses of 2022 data framed this surge as a major threat to global climate goals and as undermining China’s claim to climate leadership, explicitly saying it “directly threatens the 1.5°C temperature goal” and “undermines its global leadership on renewables deployment” and the credibility of its climate commitments.(e3g.org)
• At the same time, China remained clearly identified in international coverage as the world’s largest current greenhouse‑gas emitter, responsible for roughly a third of global CO₂ emissions, reinforcing its image as the central climate problem.(en.wikipedia.org)

Reflecting this, major outlets in 2023 (looking back at 2022 performance) framed China in ambivalent terms—asking whether it is a “climate hero or a fossil fuel baddie,” while stressing that it leads the world in renewables but is still heavily dependent on coal and is the biggest emitter.(dw.com) Similarly, COP27 reporting emphasized China’s status as the largest emitter, its cautious stance on issues like loss-and-damage finance, and the perception among other countries that it could and should do more.(carbonbrief.org)

Taken together, the predominant international narrative by the end of 2022 was that China was a paradox—simultaneously a leader in clean‑energy deployment and a major climate spoiler—rather than being broadly reclassified from “foe” to clear, uncontested leader in climate mitigation. That falls short of the prediction’s bar that China would be “widely perceived internationally” primarily as a climate‑mitigation leader by the end of 2022. Therefore, the prediction is wrong.

The prediction was that in 2022 there was a meaningful (though low‑probability) chance of a major natural catastrophe large enough to significantly impact markets and/or global affairs. That outcome did in fact occur.

In mid‑2022, Pakistan suffered catastrophic monsoon floods that affected about 33 million people, destroyed or damaged millions of homes, wiped out large areas of cropland and infrastructure, and caused estimated direct damage and economic losses in the tens of billions of US dollars (Pakistan government/UNDP/World Bank assessments range from about $15–40 billion).(britannica.com)

The World Bank explicitly linked these catastrophic floods to a sharp slowdown in Pakistan’s economic growth, higher inflation, and increased poverty, describing how the floods materially worsened the country’s macroeconomic outlook. That is a clear, documented impact on markets and the national economy.(worldbank.org)

The disaster also had significant global‑affairs consequences: it triggered large‑scale international relief and reconstruction pledges (roughly $10 billion in climate‑related support), and it became a central example in global climate‑justice and security debates, with analysts warning that the flooding could exacerbate instability with implications for regional and global security.(britannica.com)

Since a major natural catastrophe in 2022 did occur and it clearly affected both markets (Pakistan’s economy and financial conditions) and global affairs (aid, climate diplomacy, and security discussions), the realized outcome aligns with Friedberg’s prediction.

Key parts of Jason’s prediction did not materialize in 2022.

1. Economy did not “boom”
   • Real U.S. GDP grew 2.1% in 2022, sharply down from 5.9% in 2021 – solid growth, but not typically described as a boom. (bea.gov)
   • Inflation averaged about 8.0% in 2022 and peaked at 9.1% in June, the highest since the early 1980s, creating a widely described cost‑of‑living crisis. (theworlddata.com)
   • Financial markets were very weak: the S&P 500 returned around −18% to −19.6% in 2022, its worst year since 2008, which is inconsistent with a “booming” economic environment. (spglobal.com)
   • The labor market was strong (unemployment averaged about 3.6% and returned to its pre‑pandemic level) but this was overshadowed by high inflation and falling asset prices. (bls.gov)

2. 2022 was not experienced as a broadly “great year” by Americans
   • Public mood and economic confidence were poor. In September 2022, Gallup data showed 79% of Americans dissatisfied with “the way things are going in the U.S.,” with only 21% satisfied. (gopusa.com)
   • Inflation and the high cost of living were repeatedly cited by Americans as the top national and personal financial problems in 2022, with majorities saying they worried “a great deal” about inflation and the economy. (news.gallup.com)
   These metrics and perceptions are hard to reconcile with the claim that 2022 would simply be “a great year” for the U.S.

3. U.S. influence and “exceptionalism” did not clearly “soar”
   • Internationally, views of the U.S. in 2022 were generally favorable and better than during the Trump years, but confidence in President Biden and in the U.S. slipped from 2021 levels; Pew described international public opinion of the U.S. as positive but not sharply rising. (pewresearch.org)
   • Among Americans themselves, a June 2022 Pew survey found that 47% said U.S. influence in the world had been getting weaker in recent years, versus only about 20% who said it was getting stronger, indicating that the domestic narrative of American decline persisted rather than being overturned. (pewresearch.org)

Overall, 2022 featured low unemployment and continued recovery, but also historic inflation, a bear market, and deep public dissatisfaction, while Americans largely perceived U.S. global influence as weakening. That falls well short of the predicted “booming” economy, soaring influence, and broadly “great year,” so the prediction is best judged as wrong.

Evidence from 2022 shows that major U.S. prestige outlets did pivot toward a “live with Covid” framing, even if their motivations and degree of revisionism are matters of interpretation.

1. Shift to a “live with the virus / new normal” narrative

   • In January 2022, The Washington Post ran a long news analysis explicitly describing a global and U.S. “strategic retreat” from trying to crush Covid, noting that the phrase “live with the virus” had become the new mantra and that “crushing the virus is no longer the strategy.”(washingtonpost.com)
   • A January 6, 2022 Washington Post op‑ed by Jackie Spinner (widely highlighted by the Post’s own podcast) argued “we have to learn to live with covid and the mitigations it requires,” and that canceling school is “not sustainable.”(washingtonpost.com)
   • A February 2022 Post opinion piece on the “next phase” of the pandemic urged moving past polarizing rhetoric toward “reasonable compromises that allow us to live with covid-19.”(washingtonpost.com)
   • A Fox News write‑up of a New York Times editorial board piece (December 2021, heading into 2022) reports the board telling Americans the virus is not going away soon and that those “paralyzed” by fear need to learn to live with the reality of the virus and return toward normal life—exactly the kind of rhetorical pivot Sacks predicted.(foxnews.com)
   • A 2022 media‑criticism piece from FAIR quotes a September 2022 New York Times article on China’s zero‑Covid policy describing China as an “anomalous” holdout while “the rest of the world learns to live with the coronavirus,” confirming that by late 2022 the Times was explicitly using “learn to live with it” language as a baseline.(fair.org)
   • CNN’s political coverage in February 2022 reported polling that framed the public choice as either prioritizing stopping the spread or accepting that “it’s time to learn to live with the virus,” normalizing that framing as a mainstream option rather than an outlier.(abc17news.com)

2. Framing Covid as endemic / flu‑like and non‑eradicable

   • On PBS’s Amanpour & Company (carried on many public‑TV outlets and covered online), Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel—introduced as a former Biden Covid adviser—argued in January 2022 that the U.S. must “change course” and “learn to live with this disease,” saying outright that “we’re not going to defeat the coronavirus,” that it will be “like flu… other respiratory viruses” and will reach an endemic, manageable level.(pbs.org)
   • A January 2022 Washington Post piece likewise stressed that zero‑Covid was no longer realistic, that SARS‑CoV‑2 would remain part of the world like other circulating viruses, and discussed it in the context of an eventual “stalemate” where the virus becomes more like other endemic respiratory illnesses.(washingtonpost.com)
     These are not full minimizations of risk, but they very clearly move away from “eradication” talk and toward the “cold/flu‑like endemic virus we live with” frame Sacks described.

3. Downplaying eradication / harsh lockdown strategies

   • The same January 2022 Washington Post analysis notes that “crushing the virus is no longer the strategy” in democratic countries and that essentially no nations outside China were still pursuing “zero Covid,” explicitly contrasting new “live with it” approaches to the earlier suppression/lockdown paradigm.(washingtonpost.com)
   • Follow‑on coverage emphasized that most political leaders in the U.S. lacked the capital to return to strict lockdowns, and that policy debates had shifted to how to keep schools and businesses open safely—again consistent with a media narrative that strict lockdowns were no longer on the table and not something to be revived.(washingtonpost.com)

4. “It’s over” vibes and political timing

   • President Biden’s own September 2022 “60 Minutes” interview—he said “the pandemic is over” while acknowledging Covid remained a problem—was widely reported and debated across major outlets.(foxnews.com) That high‑profile declaration, less than two months before the midterms, reinforced a sense in mainstream coverage that the acute emergency phase was finished, even as many pieces still noted ongoing deaths and long‑Covid.
   • More broadly, 2022 saw Democratic governors and federal officials push an “endemic management” line (e.g., Newsom’s California endemic plan in February 2022), with national outlets presenting “living with the virus” as the new consensus.(en.wikipedia.org)
     Whether this shift was intended specifically to benefit Democrats before the midterms is a matter of political interpretation, and no direct evidence (e.g., internal media directives) proves that motive. But the observable part of Sacks’s forecast—that prestige outlets would substantially pivot from emergency/eradication framing to a live‑with‑Covid, endemic framing ahead of the 2022 midterms—did occur.

5. Where the prediction overreaches

   • The coverage did not uniformly say “Covid is basically just a cold,” nor did it universally minimize the virus; high‑profile pieces warned about vulnerable groups, new variants, and the risks of surrendering too soon.(localnews8.com)
   • Claims that outlets “memory‑holed” their prior support for lockdowns or acted primarily as a coordinated political operation to help Democrats are speculative. Critics have made that argument, but it rests on inference rather than hard documentation.

Overall, however, taking the falsifiable core—that leading U.S. prestige media in 2022 would markedly pivot from a crisis/eradication frame to one emphasizing that Covid is here to stay and must be lived with, downplaying renewed lockdowns, and doing so in the run‑up to the midterms—the prediction aligns well with how coverage actually evolved. The strongest parts (the narrative pivot and “live with Covid” rhetoric) clearly came true; the more conspiratorial parts about motive can’t be definitively proven either way but don’t negate that the main forecasted shift did happen.

Parts of Sacks’s prediction line up with what happened in 2022, but the core causal and intentional claims can’t really be verified.

What clearly did happen

• By 2021–22, a strong “back to normal” / end‑restrictions narrative was already dominant in COVID coverage across the political spectrum, emphasizing reopening, economic recovery, and “life after COVID.” This shift predates the 2022 U.S. midterms and is described as the dominant COVID narrative since January 2021 in a media‑analysis report using Zignal Labs data. (thisissignals.com)
• In 2022, governments, experts, and media widely adopted “live with the virus” framing—arguing that society must move from emergency footing to ongoing coexistence with COVID. Academic work explicitly describes this as a cross‑cutting narrative used by politicians, experts, and media, motivated by economic concerns and fatigue, not specifically by U.S. midterm politics. (mdpi.com)
• Public behavior and attitudes by mid‑2022 had also shifted: an Annenberg survey in July 2022 found worries about COVID’s health effects declining, mask use indoors collapsing, and the share of Americans who say they’re back to “normal, pre‑COVID‑19 life” more than doubling versus January. (asc.upenn.edu) That suggests a broad societal move away from crisis mode, which news outlets were reflecting.

What didn’t clearly happen as described

• When President Biden said on 60 Minutes in September 2022 that “the pandemic is over,” major mainstream outlets (NPR, New York Times, etc.) reported the remark but also highlighted that 400–500 Americans were still dying daily and quoted experts who criticized or questioned his framing. (woub.org) That is not a clean flip to an “opposite” narrative of “no big deal”; it’s a mixed narrative of both normalization and ongoing risk.
• Research summarizing U.S. COVID coverage up to 2021 finds American media unusually negative about COVID compared with other countries, regardless of outlet ideology, and there is no widely cited 2022 content‑analysis showing a wholesale reversal to predominantly positive/minimizing coverage; instead, coverage volume and focus shifted as cases and deaths declined from 2021 levels and as policy moved toward endemic management. (en.wikipedia.org)

Why the prediction can’t be cleanly scored

• The observable part of the prediction (“coverage becomes much less alarmist / more ‘it’s over’ in 2022”) is only partially borne out: there was a sustained shift toward “back to normal” and “living with the virus,” but mainstream outlets continued to foreground ongoing deaths, long COVID, boosters, and disagreements among experts.
• The unobservable part—Sacks’s key mechanism—is that this flip would be driven by the midterm election outcome the media wanted, with outlets consciously contradicting and “memory‑holing” prior narratives to help that outcome. That requires evidence of editorial intent and coordinated election‑driven strategy that we simply don’t have. The same narrative shift is documented in non‑U.S. and non‑election contexts, and is plausibly explained by vaccines, variant evolution, economic pressure, and audience fatigue, not just U.S. midterms.

Because some surface‑level elements (less emergency tone, more normalization in 2022) did occur, but the crucial claim about why (explicit election‑driven, memory‑holing behavior by mainstream media) can’t be established from available evidence, the fairest classification is ambiguous, not clearly right or clearly wrong.

Available data strongly suggests the All‑In Podcast has a large audience, but it doesn’t let us cleanly verify Chamath’s specific 2022 comparison to CNBC and CNN.

What we know about CNBC and CNN in 2022

Nielsen-based rankings compiled by Adweek for calendar year 2022 show:

• Most CNBC shows averaged only ~0.1–0.25 million total viewers: for example, Fast Money Halftime (236k), Squawk on the Street (234k), The News with Shepard Smith (220k), Closing Bell (206k), The Exchange and TechCheck (197k), Power Lunch (195k), Fast Money (174k), Mad Money (148k), Squawk Box (117k), Worldwide Exchange (55k). (adweek.com)
• CNN’s main shows were generally higher: Anderson Cooper 360 averaged 868k total viewers in 2022; other CNN shows like The Lead, Erin Burnett OutFront, Situation Room, Inside Politics, CNN Newsroom and others ranged roughly from ~700k down to ~400k viewers. (adweek.com)
• Network-wide weekly averages for late 2022 put CNN at ~0.43M total-day and ~0.47M primetime viewers, and CNBC around 0.12–0.17M, underscoring that most CNBC programs are in the low-hundreds-of-thousands range, while CNN’s are several hundred thousand to nearly 1M. (barrettmedia.com)

So numerically, “most CNBC shows” are well below ~250k average viewers, while “some CNN shows” cluster around 400–700k+.

What we know about All‑In’s audience

• A February 2023 blog post about All‑In notes that on YouTube alone the show then had 300–400k views per weekly episode and ~23M cumulative views. (thelongerweekend.com) That is YouTube-only and already exceeds the typical 2022 audience of most CNBC programs listed above.
• A 2025 Wall Street Journal profile, citing Podscribe, reports that each episode now averages about 750k downloads plus YouTube views and that All‑In is among the top 100 podcasts in the U.S. (wsj.com) This confirms that by 2025 their per‑episode reach clearly exceeds the 2022 average audience of essentially all CNBC shows and overlaps with or surpasses many CNN programs.

However, none of these sources provide a precise, independently-audited figure for All‑In’s weekly cross‑platform audience specifically by the end of 2022. We can only infer backwards from:

• 300–400k weekly YouTube views as of early 2023, plus
• the general pattern that audio downloads usually add substantially to a podcast’s YouTube audience.

Those inferences make it plausible that, by late 2022, All‑In’s total weekly audience was already larger than the average audience of most CNBC shows, and possibly comparable to lower‑rated CNN shows. But:

1. Metrics aren’t directly comparable. Chamath talks about “more than a million people a week that listen,” i.e., weekly unique listeners across platforms. TV ratings use average concurrent viewers per minute per airing. A show can have 200k average Nielsen viewers but millions of unique viewers over a week; without uniform methodology we cannot rigorously say one “passed” the other.
2. We lack time‑specific podcast numbers. The only concrete third‑party figure near the prediction window is the Feb 2023 blog’s YouTube‑only estimate; the Podscribe 750k‑per‑episode number is from 2025 and doesn’t specify historical 2022 levels. (thelongerweekend.com) Rephonic and similar services gate their exact listener estimates, so we don’t have a verifiable 2022 series.
3. His base comparison to MSNBC/CNN already seems numerically dubious. Public data show MSNBC’s average 2022 primetime audience was around 1.2M viewers, substantially larger than typical podcast‑scale audiences. (en.wikipedia.org) That undercuts the reliability of the original boast and makes it harder to treat his million‑per‑week number as a trusted baseline.

Because of (a) the mismatch in measurement standards, and (b) the absence of audited 2022 cross‑platform audience figures for All‑In, we cannot definitively determine whether by the end of 2022 its weekly audience had actually surpassed the average viewership of most CNBC shows and some CNN shows, even though it likely does so by 2025.

Therefore, the fairest classification is:

• Result: "ambiguous" – enough time has passed, but the available data and incompatible metrics do not allow a clear right/wrong judgment.

Evidence shows that no such school-choice voucher measure actually made the California statewide ballot in 2022, nor did it become a dominant election issue with $100M+ in spending.

• There were indeed school-choice / ESA initiative proposals in California around that time. The Legislative Analyst’s Office summarized proposed initiatives that would have created Education Savings Accounts funded with about $13,000–$14,000 per student for those attending private schools or homeschool, closely matching the structure Sacks described. (lao.ca.gov) These were proposals submitted for title and summary, not qualified ballot measures.
• Supporters of the leading effort, the Educational Freedom Act backed by Californians for School Choice, failed to gather enough signatures. News coverage in April 2022 reported that school choice "will not be on the ballot in November" after the campaign collected only about 200,000 signatures, roughly 20% of the ~997,000 valid signatures required to qualify an initiative. (localnewsmatters.org) Another analysis likewise notes that the ESA-related PACs raised and spent only hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting petitions, not anything near nine figures. (tultican.com)
• The official list of propositions on the November 8, 2022 California general-election ballot includes Propositions 1, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31. None is a school-choice or voucher initiative; Prop 28, for example, is about arts and music funding in public schools, not portable vouchers. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Because no school-choice voucher measure reached the ballot, it could not be "the big, big election" issue in California or nationally, and there is no evidence of anything close to $100M being spent on such a contest. Total reported fundraising for the main school-choice campaign was only in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. (localnewsmatters.org)

So while Sacks correctly anticipated that activists would try to run a ~$13k-per-pupil school-choice initiative, his core prediction—that it would be on the 2022 statewide ballot and become one of the biggest, $100M+ election fights—did not happen.

Available data on the underlying metals and on broad asset classes in 2022 indicates that a basket of battery metals was not the single best‑performing major asset class.

• Lithium prices roughly doubled again in 2022, ending the year up about 70–80% and ranked as the best‑performing individual commodity for the second year in a row. Nickel also rose strongly, around 40% for the year. (elements.visualcapitalist.com)
• However, cobalt prices fell sharply from their peak and finished 2022 down about 25–30%, and graphite showed only moderate gains rather than a huge spike. An equal‑weight basket of lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite therefore would have returned something on the order of a few tens of percent, not the 60%+ needed to dominate all other major investable categories. (elements.visualcapitalist.com)
• By contrast, energy was widely reported as the standout major asset class in 2022. The S&P 500 Energy sector posted a total return of about +65.7% for the year, far ahead of the broad S&P 500, which was down about 18%. (spglobal.com)
• On the commodities side, the S&P GSCI Energy index gained about 42% in 2022, and some individual energy commodities (notably certain coal benchmarks) were up well over 100%, exceeding even lithium’s gains and any reasonable weighted basket of lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite. (ycharts.com)
• Investable battery‑metal themed equity products, such as lithium and battery‑technology ETFs, actually had negative calendar‑year returns in 2022 despite the spike in lithium prices, so these were clearly not the top‑performing investable asset class either. (financecharts.com)

Because other well‑recognized asset classes (especially energy equities and energy commodities) delivered substantially higher returns than any plausible basket of battery metals in 2022, Chamath’s prediction that battery metals would be the best‑performing asset class among major investable assets for that calendar year did not come true.

Available evidence doesn’t let us determine whether 2022 Series A investments actually outperformed seed and growth on a returns/multiples basis.

1. Too early in the fund/vintage lifecycle

   • Carta’s VC Fund Performance report shows that 2022-vintage funds had deployed only ~43% of their committed capital after 24 months, significantly less than prior vintages, meaning much of the 2022 capital (including many Series A checks) is still being put to work. (carta.com)
   • The same dataset finds that median IRR for 2021–2022 vintages is still below zero and median TVPI is below 1×, and explicitly notes that we are “still years out from seeing the performance data” for these newer vintages. (twobytwo.notion.site)
   • Venture funds are typically evaluated over 8–12 years, so by late 2025 we do not yet have mature, realized-return data for the 2022 Series A cohort.

2. No reliable, stage‑by‑stage return benchmarks for the 2022 vintage

   • Public benchmarks (Carta, PitchBook, NVCA, etc.) mostly report performance by vintage year and overall fund, not by financing stage (seed vs Series A vs growth) for 2022 deals. The available numbers (IRR, TVPI, DPI) are aggregated across stages, so we cannot see whether Series A deals specifically beat seed or growth on multiples. (carta.com)

3. What we can see cuts in different directions, but is about valuations and volumes, not realized returns

   • Multiple 2022–2023 analyses agree that late/growth-stage funding and valuations were hit hardest in the downturn, while seed was the most resilient stage; Series A/early stage sits between these extremes. (news.crunchbase.com)
   • That pattern is consistent with Sacks’ view that growth was overheated, but it does not establish that Series A was better than seed on realized or even marked multiples—only that late-stage fared worst.

Because (a) 2022-vintage returns are still immature and (b) we lack clean, stage‑level performance data comparing 2022 Series A vs seed and growth, the prediction that Series A would be the best-performing part of venture on a returns/multiples basis in 2022 cannot be confidently scored as right or wrong yet.

Evidence from 2022 shows that early‑stage startup equity/venture capital was not the best‑performing major asset class.

On the positive side of the ledger for 2022, multiple cross‑asset surveys and consultant reports identify commodities (and in some studies direct property) as the top‑performing major asset class, with commodities returning roughly +17–22% for the year while most other tracked asset classes (global equities, bonds, listed real estate, etc.) were negative. One 20‑year asset‑class study by Atchison found that in 2022 only commodities (+17%), direct property (+11%), and cash (~+1%) had positive returns; the other 12 asset classes were in the red, making commodities the top performer that year.(adviservoice.com.au) Another analysis based on Morningstar data likewise reports commodities as the best‑performing asset class in 2022, with a +22% return to November 30, 2022, far ahead of other major assets.(npifund.com) Broad equity and bond markets were clearly negative (e.g., US stocks about –19.5%, ex‑US stocks –16%, US aggregate bonds –13.4%).(reddit.com)

By contrast, venture capital—and specifically early‑stage VC—had a poor year in 2022. Cambridge Associates notes that the US Venture Capital Index had a double‑digit negative return in the first half of 2022 and that 2024’s gains “rebounded … following two years of negative returns in 2022 and 2023,” confirming that full‑year 2022 VC performance was negative overall.(nlholdinggmbh.com)(cambridgeassociates.com) Their first‑half 2022 commentary further shows that all major VC sectors except industrials posted double‑digit negative returns (e.g., IT –13.3%, financials –28.4%), implying broad markdowns in venture portfolios that include early‑stage deals.(cambridgeassociates.com) A review by American Century likewise states that VC fund returns “collapsed in 2022” and funds have posted six straight quarters of losses starting in early 2022, underscoring that VC was not a winning asset class that year.(americancentury.com) PitchBook‑based reporting from Fortune and TechCrunch adds that 2022 saw the first decline in early‑stage valuations in 10 quarters, with early‑stage pre‑money medians falling and deal activity slowing—hardly characteristics of the top‑performing asset class.(fortune.com)(techcrunch.com)

Putting this together: commodities and, in some local studies, direct property clearly outran other major asset classes in 2022, while venture capital—including early‑stage funds—had negative returns and falling valuations. No reputable cross‑asset comparison ranks early‑stage startup equity as the best‑performing asset class in 2022; the available data show the opposite. Therefore, Jason’s prediction that early‑stage startup equity would be the best‑performing asset class of 2022 was wrong.

What was predicted

• 2022 would see increased global geopolitical conflict.
• In that environment, energy commodities and energy stocks and defense stocks would significantly outperform broader markets.
• Bitcoin might gain a role as a defensive portfolio asset in a world of war and conflict.

What happened in 2022

• Global conflict clearly escalated. Russia launched a full‑scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the largest European conflict since World War II. (en.wikipedia.org) U.S.–China tensions around Taiwan also spiked, notably during Nancy Pelosi’s August 2022 visit and China’s encircling live‑fire exercises. (en.wikipedia.org) That’s a clear increase in geopolitical conflict versus prior years.

• Energy commodities and energy stocks massively outperformed broad equities. Brent crude’s average price jumped to about $101/barrel in 2022 vs ~$71 in 2021, reflecting a major energy shock. (statistico.com) The S&P 500 Energy index returned about +65.7% in 2022, while the overall S&P 500 had a –18.1% total return—its worst year since 2008. (spglobal.com) This is exactly the kind of “significant outperformance” of energy he described.

• Defense stocks also beat the broader market. A broad U.S. defense ETF, iShares U.S. Aerospace & Defense (ITA), returned roughly +10% in 2022, while the S&P 500 was down about 18%. (financecharts.com) Many major defense names—Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, etc.—posted gains in the 20–40% range that year, far ahead of the market. (dividend.com) So his call that defense stocks would outperform in a conflict‑heavy year was borne out.

• Bitcoin emphatically did not act as a defensive asset. Bitcoin’s 2022 return was about –64%, a far steeper loss than broad equities and consistent with its behavior as a high‑beta risk asset, not a hedge or safe haven. (statmuse.com) It did not assume a defensive role in portfolios during the inflation/war shock of 2022.

Overall assessment

• The core, testable parts of Friedberg’s prediction—more geopolitical conflict and strong outperformance of energy and defense stocks vs. the broader market in 2022—were clearly correct.
• His Bitcoin remark was explicitly tentative (“it could be the case that bitcoin…sees a role”) and turned out wrong, but it was framed as a possibility rather than the main thesis.

Because the main forecast about conflict and the performance of energy and defense equities was accurate and central to what he was arguing, this prediction is best classified as "right", with the caveat that the Bitcoin sub‑call failed.

Evidence from 2022 supports the core of Chamath’s claim that a major trend would be rapid growth of peer‑to‑peer style payments that weaken traditional rails, with Africa as a leading source of innovation and adoption.

1. Rapid rise of P2P/mobile‑money rails in 2022
The GSMA’s State of the Industry data show that in 2022 Africa’s mobile money industry processed about $836.5 billion across 44.9 billion transactions, up roughly 22% in value and 21% in volume from 2021. These transactions are dominated by wallet‑to‑wallet transfers and everyday payments—classic peer‑to‑peer (and P2P‑adjacent) use cases. (itweb.africa)
Globally, mobile money transaction value rose to $1.26 trillion in 2022, so Africa alone accounted for about two‑thirds of global mobile money transaction value and nearly 70% of global transaction count. (ecofinagency.com) This is precisely the kind of structural shift toward account‑to‑account, wallet‑based payments he was pointing at.

2. “Destruction of traditional rails” (at least locally)
In many African markets, telecom‑run mobile money and similar wallets have effectively leapfrogged or bypassed traditional payment rails (branch‑centric banking, card POS networks, checks). Reports on 2022 confirm that mobile money is used for everyday purchases, bill pay, merchant payments and remittances, not just occasional transfers, indicating substitution away from legacy rails rather than a mere niche add‑on. (itweb.africa) That doesn’t mean cards and banks vanished, but it does mean P2P/mobile‑money rails are doing a significant share of the work that traditional rails used to do—matching the spirit, if not the literal extremity, of “destruction.”

3. Did this trend “come out of Africa”?
GSMA’s regional analysis describes Sub‑Saharan Africa as the global “epicentre” of mobile money, with almost half of all registered mobile money accounts worldwide and about two‑thirds of all mobile money transactions. (gsma.com) In 2022 specifically, West Africa accounted for 33% of all new registered mobile money accounts worldwide, the highest share of any sub‑region globally, and led in mobile‑money‑enabled remittances and merchant payments. (gsma.com) This strongly supports the idea that the most advanced and fastest‑growing mobile‑money/P2P ecosystems—and much of the innovation around agent networks, interoperability, and low‑cost rails—were indeed emerging from Africa.

4. Important nuance: Africa was a leader, not the only one
Outside Africa, India’s UPI and Brazil’s Pix also exploded in 2022. UPI processed about 74 billion transactions in 2022, nearly doubling from 2021 and becoming India’s dominant digital payment channel. (businesstoday.in) Brazil’s Pix became the country’s most popular payment method by 2022, with 24 billion transactions and volumes surpassing cards, reshaping retail payments there. (segpay.com) So the worldwide P2P/instant‑payment trend was multi‑polar: Africa, India, and Brazil all played key roles.

Why this still counts as basically correct
Chamath did not try to rank Africa against every individual scheme; he argued that a major 2022 trend would be the rapid growth of P2P payment systems eroding traditional rails, and that this wave would “come out of Africa.” 2022 data show:

• P2P‑style rails (mobile money, real‑time A2A) did grow explosively and increasingly displaced traditional mechanisms in multiple regions.
• Within the specifically wallet/mobile‑money segment—which is the clearest analogue of what he was discussing—Africa clearly led the world in both absolute scale and growth, and was explicitly described by industry sources as the global epicentre of this model.

He overstated the word “destruction” and underplayed the importance of India and Brazil, but the directionally key elements of his prediction—P2P rails rising fast and Africa being a leading hub of that innovation and adoption in 2022—are borne out by the data. Hence the verdict of “right” rather than “wrong” or “ambiguous.”

Evidence from 2022 shows highly visible, intra-Democratic clashes between progressive and more moderate/pragmatic factions in exactly the arenas Sacks named:

• San Francisco (London Breed vs. Chesa Boudin): In June 2022, voters recalled progressive DA Chesa Boudin, after a long, public conflict over crime and public safety in which Mayor London Breed and other moderates backed his removal. Breed then appointed a more moderate replacement, Brooke Jenkins. The recall was nationally covered as a backlash against progressive criminal-justice policies and part of a broader Democratic fight over crime and reform.(en.wikipedia.org)

• Philadelphia (Michael Nutter vs. Larry Krasner context): Former Democratic mayor Michael Nutter had already attacked progressive DA Larry Krasner in late 2021 over his comments on crime. In 2022, Krasner was the target of a high-profile impeachment effort, driven by criticism that his progressive policies fueled gun violence. While the formal impeachment push came from Republicans in the state legislature, the controversy around Krasner’s policies and Nutter’s earlier broadside kept the moderate-vs-progressive divide in Philadelphia politics in the spotlight.【(washingtonpost.com)

• New York City (Eric Adams vs. progressives): After taking office in January 2022, Mayor Eric Adams (running as a law-and-order, anti–“defund the police” Democrat) clashed with progressives over policing and crime policy. Coverage in early 2022 highlighted tensions between Adams and left-wing activists/officials skeptical of his plans to revive plainclothes anti-crime units and expand policing, explicitly framing this as a rift between the party’s moderate and progressive wings.【(washingtonpost.com)

• Federal level (progressives vs. Joe Manchin): The rift over Build Back Better continued into 2022. Progressive lawmakers and groups publicly condemned Manchin for blocking or watering down the bill and later preemptively blamed him for expected Democratic midterm losses, portraying him as sabotaging the party’s agenda. This extended the late-2021 BBB fight into a very visible 2022 intra-party feud between progressives and more conservative Democrats.【(newsweek.com)

Taken together, 2022 featured exactly the kind of prominent, ongoing "civil war" Sacks predicted—between progressive and pragmatic/liberal Democrats—playing out in San Francisco, Philadelphia, New York City, and around Joe Manchin at the federal level. The conflicts not only continued but, in key cases like Boudin’s recall and the Manchin/BBB saga, clearly escalated in visibility and stakes, matching the substance and timing of the prediction.

Sacks made a two-part, time-specific prediction.

1. 2022 GOP relatively united, no major internal “civil war” yet
   Donald Trump himself was not on the ballot in 2022; his 2024 presidential campaign was only announced later on November 15, 2022, after the midterms. (en.wikipedia.org) During the 2022 cycle, national Republicans largely rallied around shared midterm themes (inflation, crime, border, opposition to Biden) and a unified House agenda branded as the “Commitment to America,” rolled out by Kevin McCarthy as the GOP’s midterm roadmap. (voz.us) While there were ongoing Trump–establishment tensions, there was no formal split or new party; the GOP ran a common national platform and did not experience the kind of full-on schism commentators were warning might be coming. Predictions of a looming Republican “civil war” over Trump and Ron DeSantis were framed as something on the horizon, not yet fully underway. (businessinsider.nl) This broadly matches Sacks’s claim that Republicans would be “surprisingly united” in 2022 because Trump wasn’t directly on the ballot.

2. 2023 GOP primary with Trump running produces major internal conflict
   Trump did in fact run for president again, having formally launched his 2024 campaign in November 2022 and then competing in the 2023–24 Republican primaries. (en.wikipedia.org) By 2023 there was a crowded GOP field (notably Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley), and the contest quickly became acrimonious, with Trump repeatedly attacking DeSantis—including mocking him as “DeSanctimonious” and devoting extended riffs to criticizing him at 2023 campaign events in Iowa. (en.cibercuba.com) Commentators and party actors themselves increasingly described the situation in “civil war” terms, especially in Florida, where the state Democratic chair said Republicans had “completely imploded” and were engaged in a “civil war” between Trump and DeSantis factions. (floridianpress.com) National coverage likewise said Trump’s 2024 campaign announcement “deepened” what Democrats called “an all-out civil war engulfing the Republican party” after the 2022 results. (theguardian.com)

   Beyond the presidential primary, 2023 also saw unprecedented open warfare inside the House GOP: Republicans needed 15 ballots in January 2023 to elect Kevin McCarthy speaker because a bloc of hard-right Republicans refused to support him. (en.wikipedia.org) Then on October 3, 2023, eight Republicans joined Democrats to remove McCarthy as speaker—the first successful ouster of a sitting speaker in U.S. history—triggering weeks of chaotic infighting over his replacement. (en.wikipedia.org) This very public, historically unusual leadership meltdown inside the GOP majority fits well with the notion that “all hell” broke loose within the party once the 2024 nomination fight and Trump’s renewed candidacy dominated Republican politics.

Because both parts of the forecast line up with what actually happened—relative cohesion in 2022 followed by intense, multi-front Republican infighting in 2023 with Trump running—the prediction is best judged as right.

Evidence shows that 2022 did see some notable activity around Yamanaka‑factor/epigenetic reprogramming and longevity, but the scale and mainstream cultural impact fell far short of what Friedberg predicted.

1. Investment & “gold rush” claim

   • Altos Labs formally launched in January 2022 with roughly $3 billion in funding to pursue “cellular rejuvenation programming” based on reprogramming biology; this was widely reported as a landmark or record biotech/longevity deal and framed as a “bet on finding the fountain of youth.” (en.wikipedia.org)
   • However, sector‑wide data show that overall longevity investment in 2022 declined versus 2021. Longevity.Technology’s 2022 investment report finds $5.2B invested in 130 deals in 2022, down from $6.2B and 190 deals in 2021, with the Altos round making up more than half the total and analysts characterizing 2022 as a “down year” once Altos is excluded. (longevity.technology)
   • Niche longevity media describe 2022 as “the year of the mega‑reprogramming startup,” highlighting Altos, Retro Biosciences, and other well‑funded partial‑reprogramming companies, but this characterization appears in specialist newsletters rather than in broad financial or general‑news coverage. (sub.longevitymarketcap.com)
   • Taken together, this looks like a few very large reprogramming‑focused bets inside an otherwise cooling funding environment, not a broad “gold rush” on the order of the recombinant‑DNA/Genentech boom that transformed all of biotech.

2. “Magazine covers,” “fountain of youth,” and mainstream hype

   • There were some prominent stories: for example, The Economist ran an article in January 2022 titled “A $3bn bet on finding the fountain of youth” about Altos Labs, and other mainstream outlets covered Altos as an unusually well‑funded longevity startup. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Popular‑science and niche outlets in 2022 used “fountain of youth” language explicitly in connection with Yamanaka factors and cellular rejuvenation (e.g., blog pieces such as “Yamanaka factors…the key to the fountain of youth?” and coverage of skin‑cell reprogramming studies framed as a possible “fountain of youth”). (the-gist.org)
   • Nonetheless, I could not find evidence that 2022 was repeatedly treated across major mainstream magazines as the “fountain of youth” year driven by Yamanaka‑factor breakthroughs. Coverage was sporadic and usually framed as speculative early‑stage science or as one big startup, not as an industry‑wide tipping point.

3. “60 Minutes” and broad public narrative

   • Searches turn up well‑known 60 Minutes pieces on anti‑aging and longevity (e.g., older segments involving resveratrol, George Church, or David Sinclair), but these date to the late 2000s and 2010s, not to 2022, and are not specifically about Yamanaka‑factor cellular reprogramming. (stevieawards.com)
   • I find no record of a 2022 60 Minutes segment that focused on Yamanaka‑factor‑based cellular reprogramming or that declared a new “fountain of youth” based on this work.

4. “Year of Yamanaka‑based reprogramming” in the broader culture

   • Scientific and trade coverage in 2022–2023 continued to describe cellular reprogramming as a promising frontier in longevity research and noted Altos as a high‑profile entrant, but later overviews (e.g., a 2025 Washington Post explainer on cellular reprogramming) recount the field’s history and Altos’s launch without calling 2022 a unique “year of reprogramming” for the broader public. (washingtonpost.com)
   • No mainstream retrospective or timeline I can locate describes 2022 in the sweeping terms Friedberg used (e.g., comparable to the Genentech recombinant‑DNA boom or “the year of Yamanaka factor based reprogramming” in general public discourse).

Bottom line:
While 2022 did bring a few extremely well‑funded Yamanaka‑factor/epigenetic‑reprogramming companies and some "fountain of youth"‑themed headlines, the sector as a whole did not experience a broad, Genentech‑scale gold rush, there was no identifiable wave of 60 Minutes–level mainstream coverage centered specifically on Yamanaka reprogramming, and 2022 is not widely remembered or labeled as “the year of Yamanaka‑based reprogramming.” The central thrust of the prediction therefore did not come true, so the best classification is "wrong".

Accredited‑investor rules

• The only major U.S. change that let some people qualify as accredited based on knowledge rather than income/wealth was the SEC’s August 26, 2020 amendments, effective December 8, 2020, which added categories for holders of certain professional certifications and other sophisticated entities—not a new, general-purpose exam that anyone could take in 2022 to become accredited. (sec.gov)
• As of 2022, an individual generally still had to meet the $200k income / $1m net‑worth thresholds or hold specific licenses such as Series 7, 65, or 82; there was no broad “pass a test and you’re accredited” pathway. (en.wikipedia.org)
• A bill to further revisit the accredited‑investor definition (H.R. 4708, 2021) never advanced beyond introduction in the House, so no additional statutory change occurred by the end of 2022. (congress.gov)

Crypto legal framework

• In March 2022, Executive Order 14067 (“Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets”) directed agencies to study digital assets and propose policy options, and Treasury published a July 2022 international engagement framework under that order. These documents initiated coordination and reports but did not themselves establish a clear, binding regulatory regime for crypto markets. (bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov)
• The Digital Commodities Consumer Protection Act, introduced in 2022 to create a federal regime for many crypto assets, remained only a proposed law; it was not enacted, and the FTX collapse was widely seen as delaying its prospects. (en.wikipedia.org)
• Even years later, senior regulators were still publicly calling for a comprehensive digital‑asset framework and describing the U.S. regime as fragmented and incomplete, confirming that such a framework did not exist in 2022. (politico.com)

Because (1) there was no new 2022 change creating a general test‑based path to accredited‑investor status, and (2) no clear, comprehensive U.S. legal framework for crypto was implemented by the end of 2022, the combined regulatory shift Jason predicted—timed to 2022 and enabling the kind of broad, globally accessible capital formation he described—did not materialize.

Multiple sources confirm that Amazon’s Tolkien-based prequel series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power—a high-budget show set in the Second Age of Middle-earth—premiered on Prime Video in early September 2022. Official and press materials state that the series launched worldwide on September 2, 2022 (with U.S. viewers able to start watching the first two episodes on the evening of September 1, 2022).(aboutamazon.in)

Because the prediction was simply that Amazon’s big-budget Tolkien prequel series would land/premiere in 2022, and it in fact debuted in September 2022, the prediction was correct.

Evidence shows both key parts of Chamath’s prediction came true by the end of 2022:

1. In‑person All‑In Summit in May in Miami
   • The first All‑In Summit was held in Miami Beach, Florida, at the New World Symphony from May 15–17, 2022, organized by the All‑In podcast hosts and attended by tech and finance leaders. (aedeapartners.com)
   • Multiple All‑In episodes and special “#AIS” talks are labeled as recorded LIVE at the All‑In Summit in Miami, confirming that the event actually took place as described. (allinchamathjason.libsyn.com)

2. Expansion into a broader “All‑In media” presence with written and other formats
   • By 2022, All‑In was already more than an audio podcast: episodes and summit interviews were being distributed on YouTube as video as well as via the usual podcast platforms, i.e., a multi‑format media franchise rather than just a single show. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • Individual episodes and summit sessions had official written descriptions/show notes in the podcast feed (for example, the December 3, 2022 episode E106 has a structured written outline and linked reading in its episode page/transcript), which qualifies as published written content associated with the All‑In brand. (allinchamathjason.libsyn.com)

Chamath’s core claims—that the All‑In brand would expand beyond the podcast into (a) a live summit in May in Miami and (b) a broader media footprint including written and other content formats—are therefore borne out by the facts by the end of 2022.

1. Cell-based chicken by end of 2022 – This clearly happened. Singapore’s food regulator approved Eat Just/GOOD Meat’s cultivated chicken in December 2020, and it was first sold to diners at restaurant 1880 soon after. By 2021–2022 it was being served in additional Singapore venues (restaurants, delivery, even a hawker stall), at prices well above conventional chicken and only in very limited quantities—exactly “possible to taste, very expensive, not mass-market.” (en.wikipedia.org)

2. Cell-based sushi within three years (by end of 2024) – Also effectively met. Wildtype had working sushi-grade cultivated salmon years before 2022 and held public tasting events: a “momentous evening” at Olympia Oyster Bar in Portland to taste the “world’s first cell-based salmon,” with nigiri/roll preparations, and additional tasting-room events at its San Francisco pilot plant, which includes a dedicated sushi bar for visitors. (wildtypefoods.com) There are also documented public tastings such as a 2022 New York event where Wildtype invited members of the public (via newsletter) to a lab-grown salmon tasting. (reddit.com) These are exactly cell-based sushi products “available for tasting” by well before the 2024 deadline, even though full commercial restaurant/retail launch had to wait for U.S. FDA approval in 2025. (foodandwine.com)

3. Commercial-scale, animal-free cell-based meat in 5–10 years (2027–2032) – This part cannot yet be evaluated. As of late 2025, cultivated meat and seafood are approved only in a few jurisdictions (e.g., GOOD Meat chicken in Singapore and the U.S., Vow’s quail products in Australia, Wildtype salmon in the U.S.), served in a tiny number of high-end venues and at very high costs; industry analyses still describe the sector as far from true commercial scale and not price-competitive with conventional meat. (en.wikipedia.org) Since the prediction window for this claim runs roughly through 2027–2032 and we are only in 2025, it’s too early to say whether it will ultimately prove right or wrong.

Because the short-term chicken and sushi milestones have been achieved but the long-term 5–10 year commercial-scale claim is still within its future window, the overall multi-part prediction must be rated “inconclusive” rather than fully right or wrong at this time.