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 57 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
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.”
Sarandos notes Amazon paid 10x Twitter's price for non-exclusive NFL rights
“The cost of that Amazon NFL deal for basically games that are on two other networks at the same time, so completely non-exclusive programming, went up 10 times from Twitter to Amazon.”
Alex Rampell: Apple threatens Amazon with App Store removal over in-app purchases
“And Apple is saying, hey, you want to go buy this streaming video from Amazon? Uh-uh. Can't do it on an Apple phone. The Amazon app will not let you buy certain types of things because otherwise Apple would remove it from the app store.”
Overstock launched a partner drop-shipping marketplace years before Amazon
“And thus began our partner program. We were the first to the market with it. Amazon followed a couple years later.”
Markoff: Google acquired robotics startups to build an automated delivery network
“When Andy Rubin was going around the valley and buying and around the world and buying up, you know, the world's best roboticist, he was sketching out a vision which I would describe as a Google competing with Amazon. And you know, and if you can kind of see t…”
Jeff Jordan: Amazon and Yahoo's free auctions failed against eBay
“Amazon and Yahoo launch auction businesses early in eBay's life and they went for free. So every seller in the world said, I'll list, list my site there. It didn't work cause they hadn't, they couldn't get the buyers to show up there. So eBay, even though we w…”
Jordan: Amazon's e-commerce growth comes entirely from third-party sellers
“One of the secrets of it, dirty secrets of Amazon is they their first party business isn't growing very fast at all. Their third party business is exploding.”
Jordan: Amazon and eBay each represent 20% of US online spending
“I've done some back of the envelope calculations that Amazon, if you take their first party business and their third party business and normalize it for consumer sales, they represent about one in five dollars spent on the internet. Interestingly, eBay also re…”
Bezos reinvests hundreds of billions into Amazon's infrastructure over holding cash
“And for Amazon, you've got exactly the opposite story, that instead of taking, putting a hundred and fifty billion dollars in the bank, he's put a hundred and fifty billion dollars into building new warehouses, and AWS, and new countries, and new categories, a…”
Evans: Netflix and Amazon match top US media content budgets
“Netflix and Amazon are now top tier content producers. They have equivalent budgets to the other major US entertainment companies.”
Evans: Amazon is the fourth largest clothing retailer in the US
“Today, Amazon is the fourth largest clothes retailer in the USA, not the fourth largest online clothes retailer, the fourth largest clothes retailer.”
Amazon marketplace gross margins reach 80% to 90% compared to 25% retail
“So Amazon's gross margins as a retailer are just around 25%. Their gross margin as a marketplace are 80, 90%.”
Evans: Combined GAFA revenues remain smaller than TV and advertising
“Even Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon combined there, or GAFA, as the telecoms industry tends to call them add up to less than TV business or advertising and are much, much smaller than mobile or proper, proper industries like cars or clothes.”
Evans: Big Tech produces more profits than the entire telecoms industry
“You have a pretty safe bet that Google, Meta, Amazon Microsoft, Apple produce more profits than the entire telecoms industry.”
Ismail: Tech winners like Apple and Google succeeded by becoming platforms
“Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia all failed to become platforms, right? Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all successfully became platforms, and that business model basically carries you through because now you wire yourself into the infrastructure.”
Amazon sellers make virtually zero sales outside the Buy Box, notes Liu
“You basically get no sales if you're not in the buy box.”
de la Garza: AWS Employee Misconfiguration Caused Hosting Provider Data Breach
“There was a hosting provider that had a breach of their data that was caused by an, it was actually an AWS salesperson, had misconfigured the permissions on their S three bucket and had a bunch of customer confidential data inside this bucket, which then got d…”
Horowitz: Jeff Bezos will never build a $5 billion corporate campus
“Jeff Bezos will never build a five billion dollar campus because he doesn't care about what the doorknob looks like.”
Spisak: AWS image recognition service lacks support for custom enterprise data
“Because even today, you know, just being the self-deprecating Amazon guy, we have services that aren't, they're not very flexible. Like our image recognition service is really cool, and it does a lot of great things, but I can't actually bring my own data to i…”
Evans: Founders control all top tech giants except Apple
“And they all, except for Apple, the founders control the company.”
Hariharan: Indian e-commerce delivery costs reach 30 percent of net sales
“30% of net sales in India is delivery, versus Amazon in the U.S. Says it's about 10 or 11%.”
Amazon's equity compensation structure differs significantly from tech industry norms
“The compensation is massively loaded to stock, and it's massively loaded to people who stay there for three or four or five years, which is very different from the way it works in the rest of the world, in the rest of the tech industry.”
Evans: Amazon Has Kept Net Income at Zero for 15 to 20 Years
“And then the net income line has been zero effectively for 15 or 20 years.”
Evans: E-commerce represents roughly 10% of US retail revenue
“E-commerce is as it might be 10% of US retail right now by revenue, and Amazon has got maybe 15% of that.”
SmartFarm edge appliance runs AWS and Google Cloud workloads locally
“Anything that runs in Amazon and anything that runs in the Google Cloud platform will run on this appliance.”
Mo: Major chipmakers use vLLM as an internal benchmark
“And additionally, VLM also work closely with all the hardware vendors. So that means across like NVIDIA, AMD, Google, and Amazon, Intel, and a lot more, their newest chip will make sure VLM can run on them. And then a lot of cases they use VLM as a benchmark t…”
Amazon expanded to CDs before clothing because structured metadata simplified inventory integration
“So Amazon did books because there's ISBN. There's like, you know, there's all, it was very structured, very easy to look up categories were already there. But the next thing they did was CDs because music published by large publishers had a very similar catego…”
Amazon has deployed over 100,000 Kiva robots in distribution centers
“They bought a company called Kiva, and they are literally over the 100,000 robot mark.”
Amazon hired 235,000 new employees in a single year despite heavy automation
“They've hired 235,000 people. Just think about that for a second. 235,000 people in the last year are new Amazon employees.”
Evans: Big four tech platforms expanded headcount 10x in a decade
“Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, as being together about 10 times the size in terms of the number of people that they were 1012 years ago.”
Rampell: Amazon's initial recommendation algorithm relied on cosine similarity
“Amazon, their first collaborative filtering algorithm was called, it used cosine similarity, so it used actual math to figure out people that like this actually like that, and it was much more democratized in terms of the set of information that was available …”
Digikala is the largest online retailer in Iran
“Digicolor is basically the biggest online retail in Iran. It's like Amazon of Iran.”
40% of Amazon unit sales come from third-party merchants
“Now, the funny thing about this is it affects the financials is that 40% of the unit volume is going, being sold through third parties.”
Evans: Physical Media Accounts for Less Than 25% of Amazon's Revenue
“The whole of physical media, you know, the books and the DVDs and so on is less than a quarter of their revenue,”
Evans: Amazon's operating cash flow margin stayed around 6-8% for a decade
“If you look at the operating cash flow, which is basically the money coming out of the business before CapEx and a few other things, the operating cash flow margin has been really stable for the last decade at sort of six, seven, eight percent.”
Evans: Amazon's 1994 business plan specified no warehouses, stock, or shipping
“In fact, the original Amazon business plan from 1994 said no warehouses, no stock, no shipping.”