The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 161 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Horowitz: Big Tech's startup cloud deals involve illegal roundtripping accounting
“The big tech companies have done this thing which we thought was illegal because we observed it occur at AOL and people went to jail, but what they've done is they invest in startups, you know, huge amounts of money. Microsoft and Amazon and Google are all doi…”
Mark Cuban says Pharmacy Benefit Managers are the core problem in healthcare
“You know, everybody, Amazon, everybody else. Okay. We're going to work with the big PBMs. Cause that's where the money is. And I'm like, no, they're the problem.”
Patel: Microsoft's custom AI silicon lags behind Amazon, Google, and Meta
“Microsoft, their custom silicon kind of sucks but the other three, they're really upping their orders massively over the last year. You know, Amazon is making millions of Tranium. Google's making millions of TPUs. TPUs clearly are like a hundred percent utiliz…”
Andreessen: Anthropic is aggressively lobbying for regulatory capture in D.C.
“Anthropic is very much in the group of kind of big tech, you know, kind of new incumbent big tech, you know, lobbying very aggressively for regulation and regulatory capture. In D.C., and so I think it's sort of an open question whether Amazon is going to pick…”
Jordan: The best outcome for USPS is privatization by Amazon or UPS
“USPS is, you know, been having, you know, been running a massive loss for many, many, many years. I mean, for me, the best outcome is either one of two people buys it and basically privatizes it, UPS or Amazon.”
Levine: Google and Facebook infrastructure is more advanced than AWS
“I think that the Google and Facebook infrastructure is now moving in my opinion, more advanced than what Amazon is. Amazon was created several, many, sort of, already generations ago, relative to this commoditization curve.”
Epoch AI: Anthropic and Amazon are building the first gigawatt data center
“For instance, we learned that the most likely candidate to have the first gigawatt scale data center is Anthropic, which would not have been my pick but Anthropic Amazon's New Carlisle Project Rainier development seems on track to come online in January follow…”
Nejatian: Three structural flaws have killed every real estate tech attempt
“So I think like there's been three like structural flaws that have basically killed every attempt to solve this. The first one is like, let me solve a part of it. Let me solve the tiniest, like most profitable part of it first, which I objectively has failed l…”
Levie: Pricing H-1B visas allows big tech to capture most talent
“I think that you'd have a situation where the Amazons and Googles would probably actually capture the vast portion of the talent in this situation. So it's not clear to me that, like, startups sort of are come out ahead or better off from this particular imple…”
Patel: Amazon will lose its position as largest data center operator within two years
“The company with the most data center capacity in the world, that, and still today, although they may get passed up in the next two years is Amazon. Actually, they will get passed up based on what we see is Amazon, but incrementally, Amazon still has the most …”
Li: Amazon Go relied on human data labelers despite automated computer vision claims
“There's an Amazon Go supermarket a while back in Soma. So like they, I think they were advertising that it's computer vision models behind the scenes. Identifying what you took from the supermarket. But then people found that they hire a lot of people behind t…”
Immerman: Apple could gain 1 billion search users overnight
“They are not investing the capex like Meta and Google and Microsoft and Amazon, but they control a central node to the consumer, and if they wanted to build a search application, the next day they could have a billion users.”
Horowitz: Amazon achieved strong employee retention despite below-market tech pay
“People at Amazon were very cohesive culturally and they had great retention with not the best pay.”
Ismail: Amazon penalizes employee bonuses if their experiments do not fail enough
“We saw, for example, an Amazon that every team is measured on how many experiments they ran this quarter, how many succeeded, how many failed. If you're not running enough experiments and not enough for failing, you're actually, your bonus gets dinged, right?”
Wilson: Cloud market will split to Amazon 60%, Google 30%, Microsoft 10%
“But I think it could be like Amazon has 60% of the market, Google has 30% of the market, and Microsoft has 10% of the market. I think it's gonna be a three player game in that business, and that's good.”
Evans: Expecting voice assistants to become universal platforms is a blind alley
“Each one of the things that Alexa can do, somebody had to build, and that doesn't scale, and so the idea this becomes like a universal platform, or it's like it's the next smartphone, is a complete blind alley.”
Evans: Machine learning strengthens tech incumbents rather than shifting market power
“Machine learning is like this new foundational technology that, in a sense, will enable a bunch of new stuff and new companies, but it makes Google better Google, and it makes Facebook stronger, Facebook and Amazon maybe stronger Amazon. It doesn't unlock, it …”
Evans: Tech dominance cycle will eventually turn for Big Tech
“It's not apparent how that cycle would turn for Google or Apple or Facebook or Amazon, but it will turn.”
Horowitz: Multi-business expansion should only happen after the core business is profitable
“What Amazon is doing, I think, is a lot the right approach, which is, you get, you have one business. And you get it working, and it generates money, and then it can generate enough money for you to add another business, but you don't, like, have one business,…”
Harari: Algorithmic authority's major breakthrough will rely on biometric data
“I think the big breakthrough will come with biometric data. So far, most of these algorithms, whether it's Amazon or Netflix or whatever, they work mainly on the basis of data external to my body. They follow me around in space, see where I go, which places I …”
Andreessen: Lacking a Smartphone Allowed Amazon to Lead in Voice AI
“And so it's sort of this ironic twist of fate that Amazon has all of a sudden taken the lead from Google and Apple Even though Amazon, you know, famously flopped with their phone, right? Which is sort of the obvious place where you would have a voice interface…”
Alex Rampell: Amazon should root for Apple Pay to fail
“They probably don't need Apple Pay as much, but they should be internally rooting for it to fail. Because if it fails, it actually helps Amazon sell more things at a higher markup vis-a-vis the competition.”
Bahl: Local Indian startups will out-execute distracted global players like Amazon
“Any big multinational company can't focus all their energy, all their resources, however vast those may be, only on one market. Our speed of execution is materially going to be higher and faster than any market player which has a very large global mandate.”
Andreessen: Tech leaders fix crises with new breakthrough products, not corporate turnarounds
“So Jeff Bezos never does a turnaround at Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg never does a turnaround at Facebook. If the company gets in trouble, the answer is, what's the next big new breakthrough product?”
Chen: Insurance sales will move to Amazon, Costco, and Facebook Messenger
“Why aren't I buying more insurance products at Costco or Amazon or through Facebook Messenger? And so, like, that will come.”
Stanek: Most companies lack sufficient data scale for in-house machine learning
“Most companies are not big enough to have big enough sample for machine learning. You know, big banks. What makes Google Google? What makes Amazon Amazon is that the data sample is so big that you can actually really learn from it. Typical company would look a…”
Byrne: Overstock is 10% cheaper on average than Amazon
“In many ways, we're like Amazon, except I like to say about 10% cheaper on average, and with better customer service, as several industry groups have certified.”
Evans: Apple Pay neutralizes Amazon's primary mobile checkout advantage
“One of the key reasons to buy something on Amazon particularly on mobile as it's already set up with your account, so you don't need to enter a credit card in. Well, if you've got Apple Pay, then you don't need that, that, all of that aggregation goes away.”
Jordan: Amazon will handle low-cost shipments, leaving high-cost deliveries to UPS
“I've got a thesis that they will soon be, I think they are already entering the shipping market cherry picking the best the, low, the lowest cost shipments they are starting to do themselves. Increasingly and just leave UPS with the higher cost shipments, whic…”
Smith: Amazon will restrict same-day delivery to groceries and next-day elsewhere
“I don't buy that there's a lot of product demand for same day. I think that Amazon will do same day for grocery because it makes sense on fresh. I don't, I believe they'll do next day on everything else.”
Evans: Google Views Apple as a Channel, Not an Existential Competitor
“Google is not in a one-to-one fight to the death with Apple. You could argue it's in a one-to-one fight to the death with Facebook. Or even potentially with Amazon. But Apple is a channel.”
Evans: Online groceries fundamentally break Amazon's commodity e-commerce model
“The interesting thing about groceries is that it breaks the Amazon model. In fact, it breaks the whole e-commerce model, because the whole point of Amazon is that everything is a commodity.”
Paul Krugman predicts blockchain will not undermine Amazon or tech incumbents
“I don't believe that blockchain is going to undermine Amazon or any of these people, because The reason I use Amazon is not because of power, or the, not the power of Amazon, but the power of laziness.”
Evans: Dominant Tech Giants Always Look Invulnerable Right Before They Fall
“The winners always look invulnerable until they don't. So, IBM looked invulnerable, then Microsoft, Intel, Nokia did, then the internet giants of the last bubble, now Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon look invulnerable, but all the previous ones fell, and it was…”
Jessie Genet uses custom AI agents to automate Amazon and Instacart purchasing
“I've got agents ordering on Amazon, ordering on Instacart, yeah, dealing with or like, you know, if there's, like, an activity your kid has, and there's this laundry list of things you're supposed to have ready, I'll, like, send that to the agent and be like, …”
David George: Big tech can easily absorb potential AI capex overbuild
“It turns out they're the best companies, you know, probably ever created you know, companies like Google, Facebook you know, Amazon and Microsoft, and they can bear you know, potential capacity overbuild and things like that.”
Nejatian: Opendoor built home return guarantee in 12 days
“It's like the honest, like from the time someone asked that question to the time we launched the product was maybe, I think, 12 days.”
Patel: AI labs are buying RL environments for Amazon and Shopify
“Everyone knows that, like, Anthropic and OpenAI and all the other labs are buying RL environments of Amazon and of, like, Shopify and of Etsy and of all the different ways to shop on the internet. Of airline websites, right?”
Andreessen: Seattle tech executives elected a candidate wanting to nationalize Amazon
“Seattle, to give you a sense how crazy things are, the district in Seattle, the city council district where the most Microsoft and Amazon executives lived, live, elected a city council woman who's, who ran a platform of nationalizing Microsoft and Amazon.”
Pande: Big Tech's healthcare initiatives will remain minor side experiments
“I suspect that for those reasons, it's something that The big tech companies will try, and we've seen Apple and Amazon and Google all dabble, but I think those experiments probably won't fit the way they want to build their company, and so I think they'll stay…”
Casey regrets not trimming Meta at $380 before it fell to $90
“The twenty-twenty-two period was rough and, you know, I kinda, my big mistake in twenty-twenty-two was not trimming a lot of stocks at the end of twenty-twenty-one. You know, I looked at Netflix at 6:30 then, and Amazon at one 80, and Facebook at three 80, Fac…”
Pande: DIY CRISPR gene-editing kits are commercially available on Amazon
“You could get kits off of Amazon to do DIY CRISPR and that she could make our dog glow in the dark.”
Fish: Decentralized networks give anonymous devices Amazon-level cryptographic trust
“You don't have to spend, you know, millions of dollars on PR to you know, to garner a name like Amazon. Right. You just have a device. You join the network. Nobody knows who you are. But yet everybody should be able to have the same trust in you that they have…”
Sinofsky: Voice assistant divergence will end easy dual-platform hardware integration
“Google is going to have a different set of ideas for what you can do with this device than Amazon does. And once the platforms start diverging, the idea of it being five lines of code and you get both for sort of for free is going to really change.”
Chen: Amazon Has No Incentive to Stop Echo Accidental Triggers
“They have no incentive to fix that. Because, like, it reminds you that it's there and reminds you to talk to it.”
Horowitz: Tech approval ratings reach 80 percent, dwarfing Congress and media
“So if you look at approval ratings of tech. They're incredibly high. Like they're the highest of any industry and like Amazon's approval raising, which is one of the biggest targets is like 80. Whereas Congress is like 20 and the press is like 20.”