Chamath was directionally right that U.S. political and regulatory pressure on TikTok/ByteDance would escalate, but the core economic parts of his prediction have not materialized by late 2025.

1. Regulatory and political pressure did escalate (this part was right).
– In April 2024, Congress passed and President Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), a law explicitly targeting ByteDance and TikTok and requiring divestiture of TikTok’s U.S. operations or a nationwide ban by January 19, 2025.(en.wikipedia.org)
– TikTok and ByteDance challenged the law (TikTok, Inc. v. Garland), but in January 2025 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the statute and the divest‑or‑ban framework.(en.wikipedia.org)
– TikTok briefly went dark for ~170 million U.S. users around January 18–19, 2025, after app stores and hosting partners pulled support under the law.(reuters.com)
– The new Trump administration then issued a series of executive orders delaying enforcement of the ban while negotiations over a U.S. sale/divestiture proceeded, pushing the effective deadline out multiple times into late 2025.(whitehouse.gov)
So the political/regulatory pressure piece is clearly fulfilled, arguably more dramatically than typical forecasts.

2. TikTok’s U.S. business and ad demand have grown, not suffered a sustained, politically‑driven collapse.
– User metrics: TikTok’s U.S. audience kept expanding after early 2023. TikTok itself reported 150M U.S. users in February 2023 and 170M by January 2024; estimates for 2025 still place U.S. users in roughly the 120–170M range, with ~82M daily active users in January 2025.(backlinko.com) There is no evidence of a structural loss of U.S. users driven by politics; usage remains extremely high. – Advertising: Rather than a “significant pullback in advertising demand” caused by political pressure, mainstream forecasts and reporting show continued strong ad spend on TikTok:

• Reuters (Dec 2024) reported that after an appeals court upheld the TikTok law, advertisers “showed little urgency to shift their budgets away” from TikTok, with projected $12.3B in 2024 U.S. ad revenue.(reuters.com)
• WARC/WARC Media estimates cited in 2025 project TikTok to earn $11.8B in U.S. ad revenue in 2025, up ~21% and outpacing overall U.S. social media ad growth, assuming a ban is avoided.(advanced-television.com)
• ByteDance’s overall and TikTok-specific numbers show rapid growth: analyses estimate TikTok’s global ad revenue rising from a few billion dollars in 2022 to around $5B in 2024 and a forecast $33B+ by 2025, with roughly three‑quarters of TikTok revenue from advertising.(resourcera.com)
  – There was a short‑term hit during the January 2025 shutdown, when U.S. advertisers paused campaigns while the app was offline, but reporting frames this as a temporary reaction to service being unavailable and legal uncertainty, not a voluntary long‑term retreat under political pressure.(ft.com)
  Overall, the evidence points to continued or rising advertiser demand, not the sustained, politically-driven pullback that was central to Chamath’s prediction.

3. ByteDance’s enterprise value is higher now than at the time of the prediction.
– ByteDance did see valuation compression from its 2021 peak of about $400B down to roughly $220–270B in 2022–2023, with observers explicitly linking some of that discount to U.S. political risk.(pymnts.com) This backdrop is what Chamath was reacting to in early 2023. – However, since then valuations have recovered strongly:

• Research aggregators and company buyback programs show internal valuations of about $315B in March 2025 and $330B+ in August 2025.(sacra.com)
• Reuters and other outlets report Q1–Q2 2025 revenue growth of ~25% YoY and note “strong advertising demand,” even as U.S. regulatory risk persists.(reuters.com)
• A November 2025 secondary share sale reported in the Spanish financial press implied an even higher valuation, around $480B, surpassing the earlier 2021 peak and reflecting intense investor demand for ByteDance equity.(cincodias.elpais.com)
  – ByteDance does trade at a lower revenue multiple than Meta, and coverage explicitly attributes part of that discount to U.S. regulatory and geopolitical risk.(sacra.com) But that is a relative multiple discount, not the absolute destruction of enterprise value Chamath implied when he said the EV was “quite challenged” and that insiders should try to “sell and get out.” In absolute terms, ByteDance is larger and more valuable than when he spoke.

4. Net assessment versus Chamath’s full prediction.
Chamath’s normalized prediction (per your wording) contained three linked claims:

1. Escalating U.S. political/regulatory pressure on TikTok/ByteDance – Correct; this clearly occurred (new law, Supreme Court case, divest‑or‑ban framework, temporary shutdown).(en.wikipedia.org)
2. That pressure would "materially harm" TikTok’s U.S. business and ByteDance’s enterprise value – Not borne out in the medium term: user growth and ad revenue in the U.S. have remained strong and ByteDance’s overall revenues and implied valuations are at or above prior peaks.(backlinko.com)
3. A "significant pullback in advertising demand" as advertisers come under political pressure to cut TikTok spend – Directly contradicted by industry data and reporting that advertisers largely stayed on TikTok and continued increasing spend, with only brief pauses around the January 2025 outage.(reuters.com)

Because the mechanism and outcome Chamath emphasized—advertisers fleeing under political pressure, leading to a structurally damaged U.S. business and a persistently impaired ByteDance valuation—has not happened, the prediction as a whole is best characterized as wrong, even though he was right about the direction of regulatory pressure.