ALL INPredictions
Last updated Nov 29, 2025
Prediction
Chamath
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Chamath @ 00:48:49Ambiguous
marketstech
A Starlink IPO, if it occurs in roughly the next year or so after this August 2023 discussion (by end of 2024), would be the single offering capable of broadly re‑opening and catalyzing the U.S. tech IPO market, bringing many investors “off the sidelines.”
I made this prediction earlier. But I think the only company that can really catalyze things would be if people are ready to do Starlink. I mean, it's the most obvious, natural, logical thing that would just get everybody excited and off the sidelines and into the arena. But that may take another year, may not, but it may.View on YouTube
Explanation

Chamath’s normalized prediction was essentially conditional: if a Starlink IPO happened in roughly the next year (by end‑2024), it would be the one offering that could broadly reopen and catalyze the U.S. tech IPO market.

What actually happened:

  • As of the end of 2024 and even mid‑2025, Starlink has not gone public; it remains a private subsidiary of SpaceX, and Elon Musk has repeatedly said a Starlink IPO is unlikely before 2025 and possibly several years later. (ebc.com)
  • Because no Starlink IPO occurred in the specified window, we have no direct evidence about how such an offering would have affected the IPO market; the core “if Starlink IPO, then it reopens the market” claim is therefore untestable.

We can say that the U.S. tech IPO market began to thaw without Starlink: Arm’s September 2023 IPO was widely described as a potential catalyst, followed by Instacart and Klaviyo, though that trio did not fully “reopen” the window. (fortune.com) In 2024, deals like Reddit, Astera Labs and others coincided with commentary that the IPO market was reopening or rebounding. (valuethemarkets.com) This context suggests Starlink was not strictly the only offering capable of catalyzing activity, but that still doesn’t let us observe the specific counterfactual scenario he described.

Since the antecedent of his conditional (a Starlink IPO by about late 2024) never occurred, the prediction can’t be cleanly scored as right or wrong based on real‑world outcomes, so the fairest classification is "ambiguous."