Sacks’ prediction was that, like Hollywood studios, legacy banks would increasingly be “gobbled up” or eclipsed by large digital tech/fintech players over the ensuing years.

What actually happened 2021–2025:

1. Bank consolidation was led by banks, not big tech/fintech.

   • In 2023, UBS rescued and acquired Credit Suisse in a government‑brokered deal – a giant bank buying another giant bank, with no tech acquirer involved. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • In the 2023 U.S. regional banking crisis, First Republic was seized and sold to JPMorgan, and Silicon Valley Bank’s U.S. business went to First Citizens – again, large/traditional banks absorbing weaker banks. (fdic.gov)
   • Ongoing consolidation (e.g., PNC’s 2025 deal for FirstBank; NatWest acquiring most of Sainsbury’s Bank and a Metro Bank mortgage book) has also been bank‑to‑bank, not big tech buying banks. (en.wikipedia.org)

2. Fintechs did not start gobbling up major legacy banks.

   • A few fintechs bought small community banks mainly to obtain charters – e.g., SoFi’s $22.3M acquisition of Golden Pacific Bancorp and LendingClub’s earlier Radius Bank deal – but these are tiny relative to the global banking system and pre‑date or just coincide with the 2021 prediction. (en.wikipedia.org)
   • The fintech sector then hit a “winter”: global fintech funding fell 32% in 2022 vs. 2021 and another 42% in 2023, leaving many fintechs capital‑constrained rather than in a position to acquire large banks. (spglobal.com)

3. Big tech’s direct banking/credit pushes mostly stalled or retrenched instead of scaling into bank takeovers.

   • Google scrapped its Plex bank‑account plan in late 2021 and explicitly said it would focus on enabling banks rather than becoming a provider itself. (cnbc.com)
   • Meta’s Diem/Novi crypto and wallet initiatives were shut down by 2022 after heavy regulatory resistance. (cointelegraph.com)
   • Apple experimented with deeper finance (Apple Card, Apple Savings, Apple Pay Later) but then:
     • Moved to exit its consumer partnership with Goldman Sachs for Apple Card/Savings. (macrumors.com)
     • Discontinued its in‑house BNPL product Apple Pay Later in 2024, shifting installment loans back to banks and third‑party lenders like Affirm. (cnbc.com)
   • Amazon has expanded into lending in India by acquiring non‑bank lender Axio and gaining a direct‑lending license, but Axio is a modest fintech, not a major bank; this is a niche regional move, not a wave of global bank acquisitions. (reuters.com)

4. Regulators have actively curbed big tech dominance in finance, not enabled a takeover of banks.

   • Central banks and the BIS have warned that big tech in finance raises serious concerns over market power and data concentration, prompting calls for entity‑based regulation. (bis.org)
   • The EU is moving to exclude large U.S. tech firms like Meta, Apple, Google, and Amazon from its new Financial Data Access (FiDA) regime specifically to prevent them from dominating digital finance. (ft.com)
   • Under the Digital Operational Resilience Act, EU regulators instead classify Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft, etc., as critical third‑party service providers to banks – powerful infrastructure vendors, not bank owners. (reuters.com)
   • In the U.S., the CFPB has moved to supervise major wallet and payment apps (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo) similarly to banks, signaling a push to regulate them rather than let them quietly morph into bank‑like giants. (reuters.com)

Taken together, by late 2025 the financial sector has not “gone the same way media did” in the sense Sacks described. Consolidation has been driven by traditional banks absorbing other banks, while big tech and fintech players have mostly become partners, vendors, or niche lenders, often retreating from the most bank‑like activities under regulatory and economic pressure. There is no broad pattern of legacy banks being “gobbled up” by big tech/fintech analogous to his Hollywood‑studio analogy, so the prediction is best assessed as wrong given the evidence to date.