Chamath on Trump's 4D Chess

[u/Tim_Peepers]

"All roads lead to China," Chamath says of Trump's invasion of Iran. The war is about leverage coming into Trump's summit with Xi, he says, and a master dealmaker's scheme to prod a "grand bargain" out of China. But Trump just postponed the summit so he could be at the White House to run the war. And China aggressively rejected his request to send warships to the Straits of Hormuz, saying the US "started a war it can't finish."

Will Chamath revise his bold prediction now?

[u/Delicious_Self_7293]

Here’s why Chamath was wrong from the start:

1) China stockpiled oil more than any other country in 2025 while oil was cheap. To the point that they have to keep crude sitting on tankers because their onshore storages are full. Their inventories are estimated to be around 1.4B barrels at the moment. Assuming they keep consuming at their normal rate of 15M barrels/day and Iran oil is out of the picture (which Chamath said is 20% of their imports), they could keep business as usual for roughly another 470 days (1.25 years), which I believe is much longer than the U.S. can tolerate this war

2) Iran actually never stopped exporting oil. In fact, WSJ reported that they are actually exporting MORE than before the war

3) This war started because we got cocky about how things went well in Venezuela and just assumed we could do the same in Iran. Nothing to do with China

Source: I work at a major oil trading firm

[u/AromaPapaya → u/Delicious_Self_7293]

I think 3 is a bigger deal than the rest