Vox Future Perfect 2025 predictions. Here’s how accurate we were

It’s that time of year again.

Every January 1, the Future Perfect team makes forecasts for the events we think will (or won’t) happen over the next 365 days. And every December 31, we go back over those predictions and tally up how we did.

All of our predictions were made positively — as in, something will happen — and came with probabilities attached, which are meant to indicate our relative confidence in the forecast. To simplify scoring, predictions that came with a higher than 50 percent probability that proved out, or with a probability below 50 percent that did not prove out, were marked as “correct call.” Those that came with a higher than 50 percent probability that did not prove out, or with a lower than 50 percent probability that did prove out, were marked “incorrect call.”

If for some reason the forecast could not be resolved — such as, random example here, a new US government chose to delay putting out data or a report that would have clarified the question — we marked it as undecided.

The scorecard? Nineteen correct, four incorrect, and two undecided works out to a winning percentage of .800, if we count ties as half a win. (That would put us a tad over the 1906 Chicago Cubs, who recorded the best single-season winning percentage in major league baseball history. Hopefully this doesn’t mean we’ll be cursed for a century.)

As always, the point is less to keep score than to get better at forecasting by identifying where we’ve succeeded, where we’ve failed — and maybe where we need to take some more chances. Fortunately, we’ll have another shot tomorrow, when we publish our 2026 forecasts. —Bryan Walsh

Congress passes a major tariff bill (20 percent) — CORRECT CALL

2025 certainly did not lack for tariff news, but almost all of it came from the Trump administration, which used executive powers to impose sweeping new duties on most countries on Earth, and from the Supreme Court as it weighed whether any of that was legal.

There was some speculation at the start of 2025 that the need for new revenue in Republicans’ big tax bill would lead it to include some Trump-y tariffs. That didn’t happen, mostly because it didn’t need to happen: President Donald Trump could just impose the tariffs unilaterally, or try to at least. As I wrote in my initial prediction, “the odds that Trump does new tariffs using presidential authority are nearly 100 percent.” If anything, “nearly” 100 percent was an underestimate. —Dylan Matthews

Trump dissolves the Department of Education (5 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Let’s check the fine print: This prediction would’ve resolved true if Congress passed a law formally abolishing the Department of Education. That did not happen in 2025, so the prediction stands.

What Trump did do is issue an executive order instructing the Secretary of Education to, “to the maximum extent appropriate and permitted by law, take all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education.” What has followed are sweeping staff cuts that it’s fair to call a gutting of the department, with various court challenges that in July culminated in a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the administration, at least for the time being. One major pending fight is over the legality of the department moving its functions to other parts of the federal government.

But again, read the fine print. The administration’s solicitor general, in his Supreme Court filing in June, stated, “The government has been crystal clear in acknowledging that only Congress can eliminate the Department of Education.” What the administration did were simply layoffs, not the closure of a legally created government agency. While the Trump team is clearly trying to have it both ways here, I’m inclined to trust their lawyer — they did not dissolve the department. —DM

The Affordable Care Act is repealed (30 percent) — CORRECT CALL

This is another one where the fine print matters. In my initial prediction, I wrote that a bill “repealing the ACA” has to do at least three of the following five things:

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act certainly satisfies the first two of these requirements. Per the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget’s breakdown, the bill includes $1.1 trillion in cuts to health care programs over a decade. The vast majority of those cuts go to Medicaid, by imposing work requirements, limiting “provider taxes,” and other changes. But about $226 billion in cuts go to the Affordable Care Act’s exchange-based coverage, mostly by making certain immigrants ineligible.

But squeezing Medicaid and the exchanges is, at most, cutting the Affordable Care Act, not repealing it. Trump and Congress did not change the employer mandate for health insurance, or allow ACA funds to go into health savings accounts, or, crucially, eliminate protections for people with preexisting conditions or limits on hiking premiums based on age. In my book, that means the ACA has yet to be repealed. —DM

Jerome Powell will no longer be Fed chair (10 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Trump would love nothing more than to fire Jerome Powell, who was first appointed chair of the Federal Reserve by some fiendish anti-MAGA president named Donald Trump way back in 2017. Powell has been open about the way Trump’s tariffs, by hiking prices, are slowing the Fed’s process of lowering interest rates, and the president does not like that one bit.

In April, Trump said Powell’s “termination cannot come fast enough!” In July, he showed off a letter he had written, but not filed, firing Powell. In November, he told reporters he wanted to fire Powell, but people like Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent are “holding me back.” And in August, Trump attempted to fire Fed governor Lisa Cook, a move the Supreme Court has blocked but which was, among other things, a clear threat to Powell that he could be next.

Yet here Powell is, still chair of the Fed. Actually removing him, or trying, proved too rich for Trump’s blood. Powell’s term as chair ends in May 2026, meaning Trump will pick his successor, but it appears he’ll be able to stay in charge until then. He can also keep his post as a regular governor on the board until January 2028, if he wants it. —DM

Trump will have a positive favorability rating (25 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Let’s go to the graph, folks:

Everyone’s polling average is a little different, but basically every one looks like this from Nate Silver: Trump began his presidency slightly above water, but now Americans disapprove of him by a healthy margin (13 points here). The Economist’s average shows him as less popular than either President Joe Biden or Trump himself in term one were at this point in their presidencies.

Being below water at this point has become pretty normal for presidents in the 21st century, so there wasn’t much courage in me predicting Trump would be more disliked than liked. But it’s interesting to me that the speed of the decline has picked up in recent months. I would’ve guessed that Trump’s most-disliked period would’ve been the height of DOGE, but it’s been the period when his ties to Jeffrey Epstein were most under question. —DM

Musk and Trump are still friends at the end of the year (40 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Only two men can tell us if Elon Musk and Trump are truly, as of December 2025, “friends.” But the formal definition I used here is that they stop being friends “if one or the other publicly and unambiguously disparages his counterpart at least three times” over the year. And buddy…

Those Musk tweets are now deleted, and there appears to have been some degree of rapprochement in the ensuing months. But as predicted, there was a massive blow-up in their relationship, centered around the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and, implicitly, the failure of Musk’s DOGE to do anything to actually reduce federal spending. While it does seem as if they’ve made an attempt to patch things up, what’s clear is that their bond is much weaker than it was on January 1. Sad! —DM

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s preliminary estimates of US car crash deaths for 2024 will be lower than 40,000 (70 percent) — CORRECT CALL

America stands out among wealthy nations for being the land of death by cars. But there is, finally, some good news here: After a terrifying period of elevated car fatalities during Covid, the US has seen 13 consecutive quarterly declines in these deaths. As of 2024, we’re back below 40,000 Americans killed by cars annually, according to federal statistics — an achievement that (sadly) calls for celebration. But we still have a ways to go before we’re back down to the pre-pandemic baseline. —Marina Bolotnikova

Benjamin Netanyahu is still Israel’s PM at the end of November 2025 (75 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Netanyahu seemed like a marked man going into 2025.

The war in Gaza had already stretched past a year, and dozens of hostages remained in the hands of Hamas, even as Israel was coming under fire for charges of genocide in its conduct of the war. Netanyahu himself was facing long-running corruption allegations and public anger over both judicial reforms and the war, while the International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants for him and for his former defense minister Yoav Gallant (as well as Hamas military commander Mohammed Deif).

Well, there’s a reason that Netanyahu is the longest-serving leader in Israeli history: The man has an undeniable talent for political self-preservation. With Trump returning to the White House, Netanyahu had an ally who gave him an even freer hand in Gaza, where Israel adopted tactics that maximized damage (and civilian suffering) in Gaza while reducing the record number of casualties it had suffered in 2024. In June, he launched a major attack against Iran that represented a major tactical victory, one that ultimately included enlisting the US in the attack. By October, whether he fully wanted it or not, Netanyahu had a ceasefire in Gaza that included the return of the remaining 20 living hostages.

As 2026 begins, Netanyahu is far from popular and Israel has increasingly become an international pariah, but he has yet to be dislodged from his position at the top of his deeply divided country. Perhaps that will change with the next Israeli elections, which must take place no later than October 27, but I, for one, have learned not to bet against this man. —BW

Argentina’s yearly inflation is below 30 percent (20 percent) — UNDECIDED

This has been a very challenging year for Argentina’s economy, after a surprisingly strong 2024. Inflation is far below where it was when the populist Kirchners were in charge, but swaggering libertarian president Javier Milei’s reforms have also led to high unemployment and voter discontent. That led to a defeat in Buenos Aires elections in September, which led currency, stock, and bond markets to fret over the country’s prospects. This culminated in the US government offering to buy up to $20 billion in Argentinian pesos so Milei’s government had an adequate supply of dollars and could maintain a viable exchange rate.

Having the world hegemon bail you out is, it turns out, good politics: Less than two months after the bad Buenos Aires results, Milei won national midterms in a landslide, giving him much firmer support in Argentina’s National Congress for his reforms.

That’s all background to the question here: inflation. I predicted that inflation would continue to fall but not below 30 percent; I relied in part on an IMF forecast of 45 percent inflation. The most recent data as I write this comes from October, where prices were 31.3 percent higher than October 2024. That implies an annual inflation rate just above our 30 percent cutoff. We’ll have to see what the January numbers say, but there’s a very good chance I was wrong here and underestimated Milei and the Argentinian economy. Regardless of which side of 30 percent we land on, I was much too confident. —DM

There will be a ceasefire in Ukraine (75 percent) — INCORRECT CALL

When I made this call, I thought the logic was straightforward. The war was grinding into its third year, both sides had taken appalling losses, and Trump was about to take office with little interest in writing Ukraine a blank check. It seemed reasonable that Moscow and Kyiv would fight hard for marginal gains in early 2025, then accept a ceasefire that froze the lines.

That is not the world we’re in. As 2025 ends, the conflict in Ukraine remains the largest war in Europe since World War II, with well over a million people killed or wounded and Russia still occupying roughly a fifth of Ukrainian territory. There have been brief truces — measured in dozens of hours or a few days at most — but nothing that qualifies as the “durable pause in the fighting” I had in mind.

Instead, we have diplomacy without peace. The Trump administration is pushing a plan that would freeze the front lines and lift some sanctions; Russian and American officials are shuttling between European capitals and Miami hotel conference rooms; and Ukraine, Europe, and the US have reportedly agreed on most of a peace framework. The sticking point is exactly what you’d expect: territory and legitimacy. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy still refuses to recognize Russia’s land grab in the east and south, while Putin insists that any ceasefire ratify his conquests.

In retrospect, I overweighted “war-weariness” and underweighted how much the key actors care about not losing. I implicitly assumed a Korean War-style ending: a bloody stalemate capped by an ugly armistice. What we actually got was the stalemate without the armistice, and one that is set to continue into the new year. —BW

Iran gets nuclear weapons (30 percent) — CORRECT CALL

This was the prediction where I tried to be precise about definitions. I wrote that “getting nuclear weapons” didn’t mean a test or a declared arsenal, but Iran producing enough fissile material to fuel at least one bomb. Building and deploying an actual warhead, I argued, could take months or years beyond that. So instead, I staked this prediction on a key nuclear benchmark: Iran enriching uranium to weapons-grade (~90% U-235) in sufficient quantity for at least one device.

Not long after I made the prediction, Iran was already enriching uranium to 60 percent at its Natanz and Fordow facilities, and outside experts thought its “breakout time” — how long it would take to produce weapons-grade uranium for one device — was down to perhaps a week.

In 2025, the enrichment problem got dramatically worse. A February International Atomic Energy Agency report found that Iran’s stockpile of 60 percent-enriched uranium had jumped to about 275 kilograms, up roughly 50 percent from late 2024. By May, the agency was estimating some 408.6 kilograms of 60-percent material — and a June update put the figure at around 440.9 kilograms, which its own yardstick says is enough, if further enriched, for roughly nine or 10 simple fission weapons. Then came a 12-day US-Israeli air and covert campaign that killed senior Iranian nuclear scientists and wrecked parts of the program, but even Israeli and US officials concede it did not eliminate Iran’s ability to rebuild.

While all highly enriched uranium — anything above about 20 percent enriched — is in principle weapon-usable, watchdogs note that Iran has not been publicly observed enriching to the classic weapons-grade threshold of 90 percent, nor is there evidence of an actual tested device.

So did Iran “get nuclear weapons” in 2025? The answer remains no, although it comes with the additional confounding factor that, with international inspections suspended, the true state of Iran’s nuclear program may be murkier than ever. Which is why you can expect this question to continue to haunt international politics in 2026 and beyond. —BW

The World Health Organization (WHO) will declare H5N1 a pandemic in 2025 (25 percent) — CORRECT CALL

I’ve been covering the H5N1 bird flu virus since the spring of 2003 in Hong Kong, when there was some suspicion that the unknown illness spreading in southern China at the time might be bird flu finally transmitting human to human. It wasn’t — it was something entirely new called SARS-CoV-1, though back in those pre-Covid days we didn’t have the “1.”

Every January since, I’ve been wondering if this is the year we finally get our dreaded bird flu pandemic. And every year, including 2025, it hasn’t been.

Instead, we got a year that underlined the basic tension of H5N1: It keeps looking terrifying on paper, while acting more like a slow-burn animal disaster than a human pandemic. H5 bird flu is now entrenched in wild birds, poultry, and US dairy cattle. The US experienced its first US H5N1 death early in the year and nearly 70 US infections since April 2024, mostly among workers around infected herds and flocks.

On the animal side, the picture is much worse. A major Nature perspective described a true H5N1 “panzootic” across bird and mammal species, including mink, marine mammals, and cattle, with clear evidence of mammal-to-mammal spread in some settings and worrying adaptive mutations. What we’re seeing adds up to an unprecedented number of mammalian infections, severe neurological disease in animals, and growing uncertainty about how close this virus is to efficient human transmission.

There is some good news on preparedness. Health agencies still classify the overall public health risk from current H5 viruses as low, and vaccine work is accelerating. In December, Moderna and CEPI announced funding for a late-stage trial of an mRNA bird flu vaccine.

So, once again, no H5N1 bird flu pandemic in humans. After 22 years of covering this virus I’m tempted to just say that pandemic will never happen, but I’m not quite that foolhardy. When it comes to H5N1, we’ve been more lucky than we’ve been good. —BW

A major lab will formally claim it has achieved AGI (30 percent) — CORRECT CALL

There is a lot of hype and boosterism in the world of AI. The firm Anthropic has publicly predicted they’ll get to artificial intelligence systems “matching or exceeding that of Nobel Prize winners across most disciplines” by 2027. Elon Musk, meanwhile, has tweeted, “My estimate of the probability of Grok 5 [his firm xAI’s next model] achieving AGI is now 10 percent and rising.”

But Grok 5 isn’t out yet, and it’s 2025, not 2027. I made a very long list of Western companies that could even theoretically be in the running to build AGI (including, like, Netflix, which is not trying to do this at all). Foolishly, I didn’t include Chinese firms, failing to anticipate the “DeepSeek shock” at the start of 2025.

In any case, nobody claimed AGI this past year, whether in the US or China. I’d be surprised if anyone does in 2026, either. Then again, AI as a field is always able to surprise me. —DM

EVs will make up more than 10 percent of new car sales in the US by the end of Q3 2025 (65 percent) — CORRECT CALL

So, I was right here, but I may be wrong in spirit. Electric cars made up 10.5 percent of new car sales in the third quarter of 2025 — but that was probably only because people who wanted an EV anyway were rushing to buy one before the federal government’s $7,500 tax credits for new EVs, which were killed by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill expired at the end of September. US electric car sales are expected to dip significantly as a result.

Beyond ending that subsidy, which was critical for EV adoption, the Trump administration is trying to go after every other pillar that makes electric cars viable. They’ve proposed significantly weakening Biden-era fuel economy rules and hamstrung the buildout of EV charging stations. Oh, and half the country hates Elon Musk now, so Tesla sales, which once made up the overwhelming majority of the US electric car market, have taken a big hit. Americans also just seem wary of electric cars because of vague cultural vibes and societal malaise. The US is way behind the rest of the world in EV adoption — a lag that Trump seems determined to turn into a permanent technological deficit. —MB

Bitcoin’s price will at some point in 2025 breach $200,000 (70 percent) — INCORRECT CALL

Funny enough, as a bit of a bitcoin skeptic, I bought into the bitcoin hype — only to be disappointed. I thought for certain after crypto bros helped put Trump into office, he’d reward the best-known cryptocurrency around with astronomical growth. When Trump was sworn in, bitcoin was already hovering near its all-time high value, a little over $100,000. The sky was the limit.

But then, uh, Trump happened. Rather than building on the record 2024 gains that made me so optimistic, bitcoin endured a turbulent year. Uncertainty around Trump’s tariffs, the AI boom and its own unpredictable economic impact, and other economic variables (interest rates) sent the bitcoin price plummeting, then soaring, and back again. Bitcoin did reach a new record high briefly back in October, at more than $125,000, but it fell far short of my projection — and as of this writing on December 29, it’s back well below where it was at Trump’s inauguration. Whoops. —Dylan Scott

Elon Musk is still the richest person in the world (55 percent) — CORRECT CALL

The Bloomberg Billionaire’s Index has seen some fascinating shifts over the past year. There are now 18 billionaires worth at least $100 billion each, including three members of the Walton family. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google each added about $100 billion to their tally as Alphabet stock rallied. But the same guy remained at the top, buoyed by the persistently high price of Tesla stock: Elon Musk. As of December 29, he’s worth $638 billion, or more than twice Page, who’s currently in second with $270 billion.

But you know what’s cooler than half a trillion dollars? A trillion dollars, which Musk got Tesla stockholders to agree to pay him if the firm hits key targets over the next 10 years. I guess one of these years we’ll have to add a “the world gets a trillionaire” prediction. —DM

A new application for psychedelic therapy drugs is submitted to the FDA (20 percent) — CORRECT CALL

After last year’s brouhaha with Lykos Therapeutics — the organization that tried (and failed) getting MDMA-assisted therapy approved by the FDA — we didn’t have the highest confidence here. In order to have an application ready for review, you need Phase 3 trials. And those take years to accomplish — and neither Compass Pathways nor the Usona Institute, the two companies mayhaps the furthest along in psilocybin depression treatment, submitted.

But! Oshan Jarow’s initial prediction also accounted for the possibility of the FDA using emergency use authorization to temporarily reschedule certain psychedelics. That didn’t happen either. Fingers crossed for 2027? —Izzie Ramirez

The 2025–2030 federal dietary guidelines advise Americans to avoid ultra-processed foods (30 percent) — UNDECIDED

If this were a normal year, the new dietary guidelines that will shape the next five years of food policy would have already been released. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had even promised to release them ahead of schedule, well before August, and with everything we need to know to guide nutritional choices condensed into just four pages!

Of course, that didn’t happen, and the new guidelines have now been delayed until January. It turns out that nutrition science is actually quite complicated and can’t just be reduced to aphorisms like, as Kennedy puts it, “eat whole foods.”

My prediction had totally underestimated how incompetent and unmoored from expert consensus the second Trump administration would turn out to be. Once the guidelines come out, I now do expect that they’ll probably make confusing and misleading claims about so-called ultra-processed foods, along with other bad advice, which I thought unlikely a year ago. And, lesson learned, I’m going to avoid making predictions that rely on the timely release of federal government information for the foreseeable future. —MB

Antibiotic sales for use in livestock production will have increased by at least 0.5 percent in 2024 (55 percent) — CORRECT CALL

Sometimes you can be “right,” and yet still miss the mark. I really underestimated how dramatically antibiotic sales for use in livestock production would increase in 2024. I predicted, with a timid 55 percent probability, that sales would increase by at least 0.5 percent. But in 2024, they shot up by an astonishing 15.8 percent.

That should worry you because antibiotics use in livestock production is a pressing public health problem. Here’s why, from my prediction last year:

Most of the antibiotics used in human medicine are actually sold to meat companies, which put them in animals’ feed to make them grow faster and prevent disease outbreaks in factory farms. But some bacteria on farms are becoming resistant to these antibiotics, giving way to new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that make the drugs less effective in treating humans.

For years, US meat companies and trade groups — along with the US Food and Drug Administration — pledged to be better “stewards” of these precious drugs, namely by reducing their use. It appears that it was mostly hot air. There were steep declines of antibiotic use in the mid-2010s, thanks to FDA rules, but sales have since stabilized and are now increasing. The vibes are shifting on antibiotics in meat production, and that’s bad news for the future of these lifesaving medicines. —Kenny Torrella

Bird flu results in the deaths of at least 30 million farmed birds by the end of 2025 (60 percent) — CORRECT CALL

This current bird flu outbreak has been dragging on for nearly four years, and 2025 was one of the worst yet, with nearly 54 million birds culled as of December 12.

The virus hit egg farms particularly hard in late 2024 and early 2025, resulting in egg shortages and massive price spikes. Some grocery stores even restricted the number of cartons each customer could purchase.

The egg industry, which has been damaged the most by the bird flu, is ready to start vaccinating its birds. But the US Department of Agriculture won’t let it, for fear it’ll severely disrupt the trade of chicken meat — an entirely different sector of the animal agriculture sector. It’s a long and complicated story, which I went into detail on a couple of months ago; check out the story here.

I have little hope common sense will prevail in 2026, so we’re likely in for another bad year of dead birds, higher food prices, and unused vaccines. —KT

California’s animal agriculture law Proposition 12 will not be overturned by Congress (65 percent) — CORRECT CALL

I should, if anything, have predicted this with higher probability. The only somewhat surprising part is that Congress still hasn’t passed a new Farm Bill to replace the one that expired more than two years ago, which is really behind schedule even by today’s chronically late legislative standards. (The coalition that made the last century of farm bills possible is breaking down, as Republicans demand steep cuts to SNAP and an end to “climate-smart” provisions in ag funding.)

In theory, that still gives them the chance to kill Prop 12 in the Farm Bill that eventually passes, but the longer that the animal welfare law remains in place, the less likely the pork industry is to continue campaigning against it, and the less likely it is to be nullified — and thank God for that. —MB

At least one additional state bans lab-grown meat in 2025 (80 percent) — CORRECT CALL

This is another case of being technically right while far underestimating reality. I predicted at least one state would ban the production and sale of lab-grown, or cell-cultivated, meat in 2025, but three to five did, depending on how you look at it: Mississippi, Montana, and Nebraska passed indefinite bans, while Texas and Indiana passed two-year bans.

Prior to 2025, only Florida and Alabama had banned it.

The movement is primarily driven by Republican state lawmakers, including some who are ranchers and farmers themselves, which represents a form of “government protectionism” for the meat industry, according to one Nebraska cattle rancher who opposed the bans (so too did several state-level Nebraska farm groups, along with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association).

In the short term, the bans have little impact, as no cell-cultivated meat company has scaled up their production enough to sell large amounts of the product. Several companies now have government approval to do so, but Wildtype — the San Francisco-based startup that makes cell-cultivated salmon — is the only one that’s managed to get into numerous restaurants; two in California, one in Oregon, and one in Washington state, which are unlikely to pass bans. If you have the chance to try them, I recommend it — I did a few years ago and thought it was delicious. —KT

A major sports gambling scandal leads at least one All-Star in the four major professional sports to be suspended (30 percent) — INCORRECT CALL

Okay, technically, Emmanuel Clase, the Cleveland Guardians star closer and three-time All-Star, is on “nondisciplinary paid leave” but for the purposes of this prediction, we’re going to call it suspension by another name. Clase and his teammate Luis Ortiz were arrested in November on charges of illegally conspiring in a scheme to rig their pitches in order to pay out prop bets made by their associates. You can now find all kinds of videos detailing how Clase would throw his first pitch in the dirt after entering a game; as it turns out, his co-conspirators were allegedly betting that first pitch would be a ball.

However, based on the rules of our prediction contest, since I put less than 30 percent probability, this technically comes up “wrong.” But I was onto something. Legal gambling continues to creep into every facet of professional sports, with the happy collaboration of the leagues, and the scandals have followed. Clase wasn’t alone this year: Former NBA All-Star, current Portland head coach, and once-presumed future Hall of Famer Chauncey Billups was implicated in a separate sports betting scandal this year. Unless something changes, I suspect neither of them will be the last. —DS

Max Verstappen wins the Formula 1 World Drivers’ Championship (60 percent) — INCORRECT CALL

Sigh. Okay, so in any ordinary year, I would have put Verstappen, the four-time champion driver for Red Bull, at an 80 percent likelihood of winning. He’s a menace. Can drive from the back of the grid all the way to first. But things were rocky at Red Bull, from second driver woes to full-on company culture shifts. The 2025 Red Bull car was — and this is as nicely as I’ll put it — underperformed. All the while, McLaren’s Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were gaining points weekend after weekend.

For most of the year, I was thinking about this prediction. Was I too generous? He wasn’t a contender for the first half of the season. But it’s Verstappen we’re talking about — he made a legendary 104-point comeback, essentially unheard of in F1. Then the last few races were total nail-biters, with the three drivers so close to each other in points. I was even thinking about hiring an Etsy witch so I could say I was right for this silly little article.

Anyway, Verstappen ended up winning the season closer in Abu Dhabi, but Lando Norris took the championship title by 2 measly points. Yes, I’m upset about it. —IR

Charli XCX wins a Grammy for Brat (90 percent) — CORRECT CALL

And…water is wet. Last year, I kept my prediction intentionally open, hence the high percentage confidence here. Out of the eight nominations she received, she won three Grammys: Best Dance Pop Recording for “Von Dutch,” Best Recording Package, and Best Electronic Dance/Electronic Album. While I hoped she would have won for Best Album, she’ll always be No. 1 to me. —IR