Predicting the future is the easy part. This page is the hard part — every public call on this site since 2017, graded against what actually happened. The hits, the misses, and the partial credit reality insists on.
“Facebook's cloning machine will choke Snapchat's new-user growth, and Snap can't out-run it without drastic innovation.”
Instagram Stories hit 250M daily users within a year — bigger than all of Snapchat. Snap's growth stalled exactly where predicted (the next billion users), and the stock spent most of the next five years below its IPO price.
Called 2017 · Resolved 2018
“Spectacles become journalism's cheap, mobile, risk-free camera — and Snapchat's wedge into the news industry.”
Snap wrote down $40M of unsold Spectacles less than six months later. Citizen journalism absolutely took over the news — it just happened on the phone already in everyone's pocket, no camera-glasses required.
Called 2017
“Amazon will turn Whole Foods into data-customized grocery stores — every shelf stocked by purchase data, grocery margins transformed.”
Half right. Prime did become the Whole Foods membership layer, exactly along the demographic overlap described. But the data-customized store never shipped, grocery margins never transformed, and Amazon was still pausing and rethinking its grocery formats six years later.
Called 2017 · Resolved 2023
“The Essilor-Luxottica merger creates a vertically integrated giant nobody's heard of, and your glasses stay expensive because price competition quietly dies.”
Merger closed October 2018. EssilorLuxottica then bought GrandVision (7,000+ more stores), kept gross margins above 60%, and became the textbook example journalists reach for when they explain why a $15 frame costs $400. Price never became the differentiator.
Called 2017 · Resolved 2021
“Google should buy Snap — it's the one move that fixes Google's social problem and gives Facebook a real fight.”
Google did not buy Snapchat. Nobody bought Snapchat. Google+ was shut down in 2019, Google still has no social network, and Snap spent most of the decade worth less than the rumored offer. The logic was clean; the universe abstained.
Called 2017 · Resolved 2019
“Google Home fills in the offline data gap — and the ad applications are limitless.”
The data-capture motive was real, but the goldmine never materialized. Smart speakers commoditized into kitchen timers, the voice-ad business never showed up, and Google ended up cutting Assistant teams and folding the whole effort into Gemini. Limitless, it was not.
Called 2017 · Resolved 2024
“CVS is paying $69B for Aetna to align healthcare's broken incentives under one roof — and become your healthcare front door, not your pharmacy.”
The merger closed in November 2018. HealthHUB clinics rolled out the next year, and CVS Health became one of the five largest US companies by revenue — insurer, pharmacy, PBM, and increasingly the doctor's office, all under one roof. The front-door strategy, executed almost to the letter.
Called 2017 · Resolved 2018
“Disney pulls its content, launches a BAMTech-powered streaming service for every demographic, and does to Netflix what Netflix did to cable.”
ESPN+ launched two months after this was published. Disney+ followed in November 2019 and hit 100M subscribers in 16 months — the fastest streaming ramp ever. Cable kept collapsing, and by 2022 Netflix lost subscribers for the first time in a decade and got dragged into ads. The script ran as written.
Called 2018 · Resolved 2019
“The merger is really about spectrum: T-Mobile's low band plus Sprint's mid band is the fastest path to cheap 5G — and possibly the top of the industry.”
Closed April 2020. T-Mobile built its 5G lead on Sprint's 2.5GHz mid-band exactly as described, won effectively every 5G network award for years, passed AT&T in subscribers, and watched its stock roughly triple while Verizon and AT&T ran catch-up ads. The spectrum thesis aged like wine.
Called 2018 · Resolved 2020
“Zillow's unmatched housing data makes home-flipping at scale a near-inevitable profit machine. Watch them.”
We watched. Zillow Offers bought high, sold low, lost roughly $880M, and shut down in November 2021 — taking a quarter of the company's jobs with it. The data moat was real; the unit economics were a moat in the other direction. The market-maker thesis died publicly and expensively.
Called 2018 · Resolved 2021
“Disney is buying Fox to stockpile content and take control of Hulu — ammunition for its own streaming service launching in 2019.”
Disney closed the Fox deal in March 2019 for $71.3B, took operational control of Hulu, and launched Disney+ that November — the exact blueprint, on the exact timeline. One of the most literal resolutions in this ledger.
Called 2018 · Resolved 2019
“Within two years, you'll pay to watch content at Disney owned-and-operated movie theaters.”
The funniest kind of wrong. In 2020 a federal court terminated the Paramount consent decrees — the very rule that made studio-owned theaters legally fraught — and Disney still didn't open a single one. The door swung open and nobody walked through it. Disney+ was the theater all along.
Called 2018 · Resolved 2020
“Amazon opens thousands of 4-star stores worldwide — physical storefronts engineered to funnel shoppers into Prime.”
Amazon opened a few dozen, not thousands — then closed every 4-star store, bookstore, and pop-up in one sweep in March 2022. The funnel turned out to be a cul-de-sac. (The grocery-store bet from the same playbook is still limping along.)
Called 2018 · Resolved 2022
“The inevitable future of ride-sharing is driverless and dirt cheap — with Tesla's owner-fleet model leading the way.”
Driverless arrived: Waymo was doing hundreds of thousands of paid robotaxi rides a week by 2025. But it came from Google's fleet, not Tesla owners renting out their cars, and the rides aren't cheaper than an UberX yet. Direction right, mechanism wrong, economics pending.
Called 2018 · Resolved 2025
“Nikola — a $20B public company that has never sold a working product — may very well be completely fraudulent.”
It was. Founder Trevor Milton was convicted of securities fraud in 2022 (the truck-rolling-downhill video became industry folklore), and Nikola itself filed for bankruptcy in 2025. The $2B GM partnership quietly evaporated along the way.
Called 2020 · Resolved 2022
“Feature-length, à-la-carte 'album musicals' — a movie-priced experience built around a new album — will mint money for artists and platforms.”
Right shape, wrong shelf. Taylor Swift's Eras Tour film sold $260M+ of à-la-carte tickets in 2023 and Beyoncé's Renaissance followed — feature-length music experiences priced like movies, exactly as described. They just shipped through theaters instead of streaming platforms.
Called 2020 · Resolved 2023
“Netflix and Amazon ship a discounted 'grandparents' plan to capture the demographic that streams the least.”
Nobody shipped a seniors plan. Netflix's cheaper ad tier (2022) eventually addressed price-sensitive holdouts in general, and streaming's older-demo adoption rose on its own — but the targeted plan this called for never existed. A nice idea the industry left on the table.
Called 2021 · Resolved 2022
“Snap's future is bridging the virtual and real world through a camera — and Meta won't be far behind.”
The future was right; the winner wasn't. Camera-first smart glasses became the category of the decade — but it was Meta's Ray-Bans that sold in the millions while Snap's AR Spectacles stayed a developer kit. 'Meta won't be too far behind' turned out to be the most accurate clause in the post.
Called 2021 · Resolved 2025
“US vaccination rates spike within four weeks, driven by a flurry of business vaccine requirements.”
Called in early August 2021. The FDA's full approval landed August 23, the corporate mandate wave followed immediately (United, Tyson, Google, and hundreds more), and US daily vaccinations climbed sharply through late August and September. Four weeks, as quoted.
Called 2021
“Salesforce's enterprise distribution gives Slack a Teams-like growth curve.”
The curve never bent. Teams blew past 300M users on the Office default; Slack grew revenue respectably but stopped reporting user counts, and its founder left Salesforce within two years. Distribution beat product — which was the post's own thesis about Microsoft, turned around and pointed at Slack.
Called 2021 · Resolved 2023
“Password-sharing is Netflix's easiest revenue lever — most sharers will convert rather than cancel, pushing well past 300M subscribers.”
Netflix pulled the lever in May 2023 and posted its biggest subscriber surges since COVID — roughly 30M adds that year — then crossed 300M members by the end of 2024, square in the predicted range. Right mechanism, right elasticity, right number.
Called 2022 · Resolved 2024
“Altman's ouster is governance, not performance — and with Satya's leverage, it's not too late to salvage. The alternative: Sam rebuilds overnight and OpenAI's value walks out the door.”
Written 24 hours into the chaos. Five days later Altman was back as CEO, the board was replaced, and Microsoft had an observer seat. The salvage scenario ran exactly as sketched — Satya applied the leverage, 738 of 770 employees threatened to walk, and the board folded.
Called 2023
“There will be a lookback on how detrimental TikTok's algorithm was for a generation's mindshare — at a global scale.”
Still cooking. The US passed a divest-or-ban law in 2024, the app went dark for a night in January 2025, and a forced restructuring followed — but the full societal lookback this called for hasn't been written yet. The ledger waits.
Called 2024 · Still open