E93: Twitter whistleblower, cloud security vulnerabilities, student debt forgiveness & more

Multiple year‑end business and tech recaps for 2022 explicitly described Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover saga as one of the biggest, or even the single biggest, business story of the year, confirming that it remained a dominant, defining narrative through the end of 2022.

Key evidence:

• Straight Arrow News’ year‑end list of the 5 biggest business stories of 2022 ranked the “Twitter Takeover” #1 and stated that “The Elon Musk Twitter saga has easily been the biggest business story of the year.” (san.com)
• Global News (Canada), in a segment titled “The Peak Daily’s top stories of 2022”, described Elon Musk buying Twitter and the ensuing layoffs and leadership drama as “one of the biggest business stories of the year.” (globalnews.ca)
• The London Evening Standard’s list of “The 10 biggest tech stories of 2022” called “Elon Musk buys Twitter – and chaos reigns” “the biggest tech event of the year,” emphasizing that the takeover and its fallout drove a long-running series of mini‑dramas. (standard.co.uk)
• A Nine News (Australia) year‑end recap of “The top three tech stories of 2022” listed “Elon Musk buys Twitter” among those top three, underscoring its global prominence in late‑2022 coverage. (9news.com.au)
• The underlying saga continued to generate major headlines throughout the remainder of 2022: the legal fight over Musk trying to exit the deal, Twitter’s lawsuit to force completion, and then Musk finally closing the $44 billion acquisition on October 27, 2022, followed by mass layoffs, advertiser pull‑outs, and controversial policy changes in November and December. (en.wikipedia.org)

Because mainstream business and tech outlets retrospectively framed Musk’s Twitter takeover as one of the (and often the) biggest business stories of 2022, Jason’s prediction that it would remain a defining business story for the rest of that year is best judged as right.

Public filings and contemporaneous reporting show that Elon Musk ultimately closed the Twitter acquisition at the original price of $54.20 per share, not at a reduced price or via a cash settlement of the price gap.

• Twitter’s Form 8‑K filed with the SEC states that on October 27, 2022, pursuant to the April 25, 2022 merger agreement, each outstanding share of Twitter common stock was converted into the right to receive $54.20 in cash per share. (sec.gov)
• In early October 2022, Musk informed the court and Twitter that he intended to proceed with the deal on the original terms of $54.20 per share, and Twitter confirmed its intention to close at that price. (cnbc.com)
• Delaware Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick then stayed the trial, giving Musk until October 28, 2022 to close the transaction to avoid the scheduled October 17 trial; after the deal closed, the litigation was effectively resolved without a full trial or merits opinion, i.e., without “full adjudication” in Chancery. (cnbc.com)
• Reporting at the time even noted that Twitter had at some point offered Musk “billions off the transaction price,” which his side claimed he refused—underscoring that the final outcome was no discount from $54.20. (foxbusiness.com)

Chamath’s prediction specified that, before the Delaware Chancery Court fully adjudicated the case, the most likely outcome would be a settlement where Musk either (a) pays roughly the economic difference between the then‑trading price and $54.20 per share (on the order of $7–10 billion), or (b) closes at a renegotiated price around $51 per share, below $54.20. The timing aspect (resolution before full adjudication) turned out to be accurate, but the core economic claim did not: the dispute was resolved by closing at $54.20, with no $7–10 billion settlement payment and no lower per‑share price. Thus, taken as a whole, the prediction is wrong.

Available public records show that after Peiter “Mudge” Zatko’s August 2022 whistleblower disclosures about Twitter’s security and alleged foreign government agents, (1) the Senate Judiciary Committee, not the Intelligence Committee, held a high‑profile open hearing with Zatko on September 13, 2022, where these national‑security concerns were aired. (cbsnews.com) (2) Zatko and/or his lawyers met with staff for several committees, including staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI); SSCI’s spokeswoman confirmed the committee had received his complaint and was working to set up a meeting with him. (tribune.com.pk) However, those reports describe staff‑level or member‑level meetings with the whistleblower, not a formal closed‑door session where “Twitter representatives” (i.e., current company executives) were “hauled” before SSCI.

Looking at SSCI’s official activity reports for the 117th and 118th Congresses, the committee describes a wide range of classified briefings and hearings but does not specifically mention any closed session with Twitter (or X) or follow‑on briefings with other large tech platforms arising from the Zatko allegations. At the same time, SSCI explicitly notes that “most of the Committee’s oversight work is conducted in secret and cannot be discussed publicly,” so the absence of a reference in these reports or in press coverage is not definitive proof that such a session never occurred. (congress.gov) We do know that SSCI has a history of closed‑door interactions with Twitter and other platforms on earlier issues like Russian election interference, and those prior briefings were publicly acknowledged. (inkl.com) But for the specific, post‑whistleblower closed‑door SSCI meeting with Twitter executives that Chamath forecast, there is no clear public confirmation either way.

Because SSCI’s classified proceedings are often not disclosed, and the committee itself emphasizes that much of its work cannot be made public, we cannot determine from open sources whether a closed‑door SSCI session with Twitter representatives (and subsequent similar sessions with other tech firms) actually occurred during the ensuing legislative term. Therefore the prediction’s outcome is best characterized as ambiguous, rather than clearly right or clearly wrong.

Summary of the prediction Jason predicted that growing worries about government access to cloud‑hosted data would cause “a lot of people” to move off the cloud, with (a) many consumers and small businesses buying/using self‑hosted “mini servers” or similar local encrypted storage, and (b) broader adoption of cloud/device services where providers don’t hold the decryption keys.

What actually happened (2022–2025)

1. Cloud usage kept growing strongly instead of people moving off it.

   • Worldwide IaaS/public‑cloud infrastructure revenue rose from about $120B in 2022 to ~$140B in 2023 and ~$172B in 2024, with double‑digit annual growth, and analysts expect continued >20% growth. (gartner.com)
   • The overall cloud storage market itself was about $59B in 2024 and projected to exceed $270B by 2031. (globenewswire.com)
     This is the opposite of “a lot of people moving off of the cloud”; mainstream behavior has been more cloud, not less.

2. Self‑hosted "mini servers"/NAS did grow, but remain a relatively small niche.

   • Consumer/home NAS is a growing category, with global consumer NAS revenue estimated around $6B in 2024 and projected to roughly double by 2030; residential use is the fastest‑growing segment, and privacy plus centralised home storage are cited as drivers. (grandviewresearch.com)
   • By contrast, cloud storage services are tens of billions of dollars already and growing faster in absolute terms than consumer NAS, meaning NAS remains a comparatively small slice of how people store data. (globenewswire.com)
     So while there is a visible home‑lab / private‑cloud niche, it does not amount to a broad consumer or small‑business migration away from mainstream cloud providers.

3. End‑to‑end encrypted / “we don’t have the keys” services expanded, but mostly as options layered on existing clouds.

   • Apple introduced Advanced Data Protection for iCloud in late 2022 and expanded it globally in 2023, letting users keep keys on their own devices so Apple cannot access most iCloud categories—if they opt in. Apple’s own documentation stresses it’s an optional setting, not the default. (macrumors.com)
   • Meta began rolling out default end‑to‑end encryption for Messenger in 2023, after years of offering E2EE only as an opt‑in, and plans to extend this to Instagram messaging. (techcrunch.com)
   • Privacy‑first providers like Proton (Mail/Drive/Docs/etc.), which are architected so the provider cannot read user content, grew to over 100 million accounts by 2023. (en.wikipedia.org)
     These moves do validate the direction Jason described for part (b), but they remain optional features or minority platforms layered on top of a still‑booming conventional cloud ecosystem. There is no evidence that the typical consumer or small business has shifted to “provider‑can’t‑decrypt” architectures for most of their data.

4. Government access pressures did increase, but didn’t trigger a broad behavioral shift.

   • Transparency and independent analyses show sharp growth in government data requests: a Proton analysis of Apple, Google, and Meta transparency reports found accounts handed to US authorities rose over 600% from 2014–2024, fueling concern about state access to cloud‑stored data. (euronews.com)
   • The UK’s use of the Investigatory Powers Act to secretly demand backdoor access to Apple’s end‑to‑end encrypted iCloud backups led Apple to pull its Advanced Data Protection feature in the UK rather than weaken encryption—an emblematic clash over government access. (theverge.com)
     Despite these headline cases, the market data above shows continued rapid expansion of mainstream cloud services and only niche‑scale growth of self‑hosted alternatives. So the political pressure and concern Jason cited are real, but they have not yet translated into a mass exodus from the cloud.

Bottom line By late 2025, we do see:

• More government attempts to get at cloud data, and
• Some growth in self‑hosted storage and in services where providers don’t hold decryption keys.

However, these shifts are small compared to the explosive overall growth of conventional cloud usage, and most consumers and small businesses still rely on major cloud providers that can access their data. That means the core prediction—"a lot of people moving off of the cloud" toward mini‑servers and fully user‑keyed services—has not materialized at scale.

Verdict: the prediction is mostly wrong.

As of November 2025, there is not enough evidence to decisively judge this long‑horizon prediction about “the next several years and decades.”

On one hand, traditional centralized cloud and web platforms remain overwhelmingly dominant in usage and revenue. Public cloud infrastructure is still controlled primarily by a few hyperscalers: AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud together hold roughly 60%+ of the global cloud infrastructure market, with AWS alone around 29–31% in 2024–2025 and the overall cloud market continuing to grow rapidly. (crn.com) Decentralized storage and compute networks (IPFS/Filecoin, Arweave, etc.) are tiny by comparison, and most consumer services (social, productivity, commerce, media, AI) still run on centralized architectures.

Decentralized and user‑controlled data models have grown, but from a small base and remain niche relative to mainstream web services. Web3 dapps saw strong growth, reaching on the order of 20–25 million daily unique active wallets by late 2024/early 2025, and hundreds of millions of people globally now hold crypto or use Web3 tools. Still, monthly active dapp users are estimated in the single‑digit millions to low tens of millions, far below the billions using centralized apps. (dappradar.com) Similarly, decentralized social protocols (Farcaster, Lens, Nostr) and federated networks (Mastodon, Bluesky) have grown to millions or at most tens of millions of users and a few million daily actives, which is meaningful but small compared to centralized platforms like X/Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok. (blockeden.xyz) These numbers do not yet constitute decentralized services “winning” substantial market share versus centralized incumbents.

Moreover, much of what is marketed as “decentralized” today still depends heavily on centralized infrastructure. Many prominent Web3 applications and wallets rely on centralized RPC/node providers such as Infura and Alchemy, and on conventional cloud hosting (AWS, Google Cloud, Cloudflare) for front‑ends and APIs, creating de‑facto chokepoints. (forbes.com) That undercuts the idea that user‑controlled architectures have already structurally displaced enterprise‑controlled servers.

At the same time, there are visible trends in the direction Friedberg described. Major consumer platforms, especially Apple and Google, are increasingly emphasizing on‑device processing and privacy‑preserving designs—Apple Intelligence, for example, explicitly treats on‑device computation as its “cornerstone,” only escalating to Apple‑run servers when needed, while Google similarly pushes more on‑device AI and data minimization. (apple.com) Crypto wallets, non‑custodial identity, and decentralized apps have also grown substantially in users and technical maturity since 2022, even if they remain far from mainstream dominance. (dappradar.com) These developments support the direction of the prediction (more user‑centric architectures, more distributed control), but not yet its stronger claim that such models will win significant market share over centralized services.

Because Friedberg explicitly framed the timeline as “over the next couple of years and decades,” the horizon clearly extends well beyond 2025. The evidence so far shows modest but real growth of decentralized and user‑controlled models alongside continued dominance and innovation in centralized cloud and platform services. That mix is not enough to declare the prediction either clearly right or clearly wrong at this stage, so the fairest assessment is that it remains inconclusive (too early to tell).

Available data through late 2025 do not show the kind of spending reallocation Chamath described.

On the restaurant/discretionary side, U.S. spending on food away from home (restaurants, fast food, etc.) has risen strongly since 2022. USDA’s Economic Research Service reports record per‑capita food spending in 2023, with a 12% jump in food‑away‑from‑home spending that pushed it to the highest share of total food dollars since the series began; that share climbed further in 2024 to about 58.5% of all food expenditures. (ers.usda.gov) The National Restaurant Association notes that, in real (inflation‑adjusted) terms, spending at eating and drinking places in Q2 2025 reached an all‑time high and is roughly on or above its pre‑pandemic trend line. (restaurant.org) BLS data similarly show food‑away‑from‑home’s share of food spending rebounding after COVID and remaining robust through 2023. (bls.gov) None of this is consistent with a noticeable consumer pullback from restaurant meals.

On the privacy/protection side, markets for consumer cybersecurity and privacy tools (antivirus, VPNs, identity‑theft protection, password managers, etc.) are growing, but from a much smaller base and largely for reasons like rising cyber threats and remote work, not clearly because households are cutting other consumption to fund them. Global consumer cybersecurity software revenue was about $7.8B in 2022 and is projected to reach around $20.2B by 2032 (≈10% CAGR). (alliedmarketresearch.com) Other analyses put 2024 consumer cybersecurity or “computer security for consumer” markets in the low‑ to mid‑tens of billions of dollars worldwide—orders of magnitude smaller than U.S. restaurant spending alone, which is in the trillions. (emergenresearch.com) VPN‑specific surveys do not show a clear surge driven by privacy awareness: one 2025 report finds U.S. VPN usage declining since 2023, with many users on free options rather than paid subscriptions. (security.org)

More importantly, there is no evidence that the growth in privacy tools is funded by cutting back on restaurants or other similar discretionary spending. Macro data show restaurant spending growing strongly at the same time that consumer cybersecurity markets expand, and privacy‑economics research generally finds that although people say they care about privacy, they are often reluctant to pay significant amounts or change convenient consumption habits to protect it. (scribd.com) Given that (1) restaurant spending is at record highs rather than falling, (2) privacy‑tool spending is still relatively small in household budgets, and (3) there is no documented substitution effect from dining‑out to privacy services, the specific prediction that a “meaningful” share of consumers would reallocate money away from restaurant meals to paid privacy protections has not materialized.

Because enough time has passed (over three years) and the observable trends move in the opposite direction of the claimed pendulum shift, this prediction is best classified as wrong.

Evidence from 2022–2025 shows that some bundled privacy offerings did emerge, but they did not become $20–30/month mainstream products with broad consumer uptake as described.

1. Bundled privacy suites do exist, but are niche

• Proton launched Proton Unlimited, a single subscription that bundles encrypted email, calendar, cloud storage, password manager, wallet, and Proton VPN in one plan, marketed as a privacy‑by‑default ecosystem.
  • Price: about $12.99/month on a monthly basis or $9.99/month when billed annually.
  • It’s explicitly pitched as a bundle replacing separate Mail+VPN plans. (proton.me)
• Mozilla created a Firefox Relay + Mozilla VPN bundle at $6.99/month (billed annually), a discounted privacy/security package. (9to5mac.com)
• Brave offers a built‑in VPN integrated in the Brave browser for $9.99/month, with Brave Search Premium (ad‑free private search) at $3/month as a separate subscription; both can be combined but are not sold as a single $20–30 "suite". (brave.com)
• DuckDuckGo launched Privacy Pro, a bundle integrated into its privacy browser/search that includes a VPN, personal‑data broker removal, and identity theft restoration for $9.99/month. (macrumors.com)
• Traditional security suites (Norton 360, Bitdefender Ultimate Security, etc.) bundle antivirus, VPN, password managers, and identity protection at consumer price points, further confirming a bundling trend. (tomsguide.com)

So, the supply‐side part (vendors offering privacy/security bundles) did materialize, but that alone doesn’t satisfy the prediction’s stronger claim about mainstream consumer behavior and $20–30 pricing.

2. Pricing is generally below the predicted $20–30/month range

• Proton Unlimited: about $12.99/month (or ~$10/month on annual billing). (proton.me)
• DuckDuckGo Privacy Pro: $9.99/month. (macrumors.com)
• Brave VPN: $9.99/month; Brave Search Premium (ad‑free private search) $3/month. Even combined, this is around $13/month, not $20–30. (brave.com)
• Mozilla VPN + Firefox Relay bundle: $6.99/month (annual). (9to5mac.com)
• A large 2025 VPN usage study finds the median paid VPN spend is about $10/month, with most paid plans falling in the $2–$15/month range. (security.org)

Higher‑end security bundles (e.g., NordVPN’s top "Prime" tier or identity‑theft + credit‑monitoring suites) can approach or exceed $20/month, but the typical consumer privacy/VPN bundle is much closer to $7–13/month. The core pricing expectation of $20–30/month as the norm for average consumers has not played out.

3. Consumer uptake of these bundled suites is not “widespread mainstream”

• Overall VPN usage in the U.S. is meaningful but not dominant: a 2025 representative survey finds 32% of U.S. adults use a VPN, down from 46% in 2023; about 75 million Americans use VPNs. Most Americans (68%) either don’t use a VPN or don’t see the need. (security.org)
• That same report shows users gravitate mainly to standalone VPN brands like NordVPN, Proton VPN, ExpressVPN, and Norton Secure VPN; it does not show that multi‑service privacy bundles (VPN+private search+browser+extras) dominate VPN usage. (security.org)
• Brave — a leading privacy browser — reports 100 million monthly active users, but only “nearly 100,000” Brave VPN subscribers, i.e., roughly 0.1% of users paying for the built‑in VPN bundle. This ratio indicates that even within a highly privacy‑aware audience, paid bundled privacy protection is a small minority behavior, not mainstream. (brave.com)
• DuckDuckGo’s search engine handles around 3 billion queries per month (~100M/day) but has <1% global search market share; its subscription bundle launched only in 2024 and, while visible in tech media, has no public evidence of mass‑market penetration. (electroiq.com)

Taken together, we see:

• Yes: Multiple privacy‑oriented companies now sell bundled privacy/security subscriptions, often integrating VPN with browsers or privacy‑first ecosystems.
• No: These bundles have not become a $20–30/month standard mainstream product that "average Joe" consumers widely buy. Typical prices are lower, and adoption of these specific suites is limited compared to overall internet users and even compared to total VPN users.

Because the prediction was specifically about mainstream, widespread uptake at a roughly $25/month price point, and current data instead show niche adoption and lower, more competitive pricing, the prediction is best judged as wrong, even though it correctly anticipated the general direction toward more bundled privacy offerings.

Available post‑election data broadly support Chamath’s prediction that Biden’s 2022 student loan forgiveness plan did not become a top‑tier motivator for most voters, nor is there clear evidence that it materially boosted turnout.

1. Issue salience vs. other concerns
   National polling before the 2022 midterms consistently found inflation/economy and abortion at the top of voters’ priority lists; student loans were not listed among the leading concerns. An NPR/Marist poll, for example, reported inflation as the top issue overall and abortion as the next most important, without student debt appearing as a primary category. (wusf.org)
   Among college students and young voters—those most directly affected by student debt—survey data show that student debt ranked only about eighth in importance, behind issues like gun control, racial inequality, healthcare, climate change, inflation, and abortion. (bestcolleges.com) This aligns with Chamath’s claim that, "at the polls," other issues would matter more.

2. Turnout effects
   An NPR piece focusing on young voters, citing Democratic strategist and elections analyst Tom Bonier, noted that while the forgiveness plan was popular, he “hasn’t seen any significant boosts in voter registration or turnout” that could be attributed specifically to Biden’s student loan executive order, contrasting it with the clear mobilizing effect of the Dobbs abortion decision. (wfae.org) That is consistent with the prediction that the policy would not materially increase turnout.

3. Counter‑evidence and why it’s limited
   A post‑midterm poll commissioned by the Student Borrower Protection Center (an advocacy group) found that 51% of 1,500 voters surveyed said student debt relief was the only, very, or somewhat motivating reason they voted, and more than three‑quarters of under‑30 voters in that sample reported it as a motivating factor. (newsweek.com) However, this evidence is limited: it comes from a single advocacy‑sponsored survey of a relatively small sample and does not show that student loan relief was a top issue relative to inflation or abortion, nor that it produced a measurable, system‑wide turnout surge.

Taken together, neutral polling and post‑election analyses indicate that while student loan forgiveness was popular with many borrowers and may have modestly influenced preferences at the margins, it did not emerge as a leading issue or a clearly documented driver of turnout in the 2022 midterms. That matches the substance of Chamath’s prediction, so it is best classified as right.

The prediction had two key components:

1. "Republicans win one of the chambers. Probably the House."
   In the 2022 midterms, Republicans did flip one chamber: they gained control of the U.S. House of Representatives for the 118th Congress, winning a narrow majority (commonly reported as 222–213 or 221–214 depending on timing/estimates). (en.wikipedia.org) This directly matches both parts of the claim: at least one chamber and probably the House.

2. "I think the Senate is still up for grabs."
   This was framed as an assessment of uncertainty, not a directional call. At the time (August 2022 and up through Election Day), major outlets and analysts characterized control of the Senate as a toss‑up. (cbsnews.com) The eventual outcome was that Democrats retained and slightly expanded their majority in the Senate (a Democratic hold with a 51–49 edge including independents who caucus with them). (cnbc.com) Since he did not predict a specific winner in the Senate, merely that it could go either way, this part is not falsified by the result.

Because Republicans indeed won control of one chamber—specifically the House, as he said was most likely—and he made no incorrect concrete claim about the Senate outcome, the overall prediction is right.