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 116 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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…”
Horowitz: Google and Microsoft push for centralized Chinese-style AI control
“Like we go to the China model that Google and Microsoft are advocating for this Chinese model of only a few can control AI. We're going to be in big trouble.”
Horowitz: Google and Microsoft use safety rhetoric to lobby against open-source AI
“And they do it like the really kind of nasty thing is they claim, oh, it's for safety. You know, we've created an alien that we can't control, but we're not going to stop working on it. We're going to keep building it as fast as we can. And we're going to buy …”
Microsoft Failed to Build Competitive In-House Frontier AI Models
“They clearly tried to make a frontier model. They failed. You know, Satya said, we're gonna have our own models that are very competitive. Like, I think he said that 18 months ago. They don't have their own models that are competitive.”
Garry Tan: AI startups will not replace incumbent giants like Microsoft
“There are real motes to these things. Like, there are structural reasons why a Microsoft isn't going anywhere. And then, I guess, This is sort of a little antithetical to what most, you know, most people in Silicon Valley would say, like, I want to start up to…”
George: Anthropic and OpenAI add more monthly revenue than tech giants
“Anthropic and OpenAI are adding more revenue per month than Meta, Google, or Microsoft.”
Truell: Microsoft will struggle to compete in AI code editing
“I think it's one of the things that makes it pretty tricky for a Microsoft to really compete in a big way.”
Baker: GPT-V is not evidence that AI scaling laws are ending
“GPT-V is a smaller model. It was not designed to be better. It was designed to be more economical for OpenAI and Microsoft to run. Any reference to GPT-V and scaling loss is crazy.”
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…”
Srinivasan: Tech platforms face market constraints, but Washington DC is a monopoly
“See the thing is these platforms are at least competing with other platforms, and if Apple or Microsoft or Google makes too bad decision, Then the people on those platforms have exit, they have choice, they can move between platforms, so there's ultimately a m…”
Holding LLM creators liable is like holding Microsoft liable for Windows misuse
“Let's make the LLM creators liable for every bad thing that happens with an LLM. To me, that is the exact equivalent of saying, let's make Microsoft Liable for every bad thing that someone does on a Windows computer, right? They're fully general, and so these …”
Stamos: Backward compatibility neutralized Microsoft's $1 billion security investment
“It's the reason why Microsoft has spent probably a billion dollars on security in the last decade, and they still haven't gone anywhere. It's because they're not willing to do a tax service minimization due to the way they do backwards compatibility.”
Thiel: Legacy tech giants like Microsoft and Oracle bet against innovation
“There's a whole set of companies in the Nasdaq 100 that are actually bets against technological innovation. So Microsoft is a bet that there will never be anything like Linux. It's a bet that there will be that the operating system won't shift to mobile platfo…”
Tan: Startups use AI to compress six-month product releases into days
“Like you could release something in a day or two that would have taken like six months. And if you could like multiply that out across, like the thing is like probably an org like Microsoft can't. But, like, a startup can. And every startup must.”
Keith Rabois says Vinod Khosla intervened to stop Sam Altman joining Microsoft
“Or like, yeah, for like, 24 hours until Vinod and some other friends intervened a fair amount.”
Horowitz: Big company partnerships fail without massive financial commitments
“Look, you got to get them to put enough, they're such a big company that they're going to lose interest many times. So if you don't have them write you such a big check that somebody in there is going to get fired if it doesn't go well, you're, it doesn't matt…”
Casado: Microsoft's initial Copilot product was actually created by OpenAI
“I learned recently it was created by OpenAI, so that kind of explains it.”
Sinofsky: Surface exists because PC makers refused to build aluminum laptops
“The reason Surface exists is because the PC makers wouldn't build, like, an aluminum computer, basically, or an all-in-one, for that matter.”
Sinofsky: Microsoft succeeds through enterprise bundling, not best-in-class products
“The strength of Microsoft is that you never have to be best. You just have to be included.”
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.”
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.”
Horowitz: 1990s Microsoft suppressed tech innovation far more than modern Big Tech
“If you compare it to the early nineties, when Microsoft was super strong, that was really actually a far bigger suppression of innovation.”
Schuler: Aside from tech giants, major corporations lack an AI strategy
“Pretty much everyone has missed the boat on an AI strat, like everybody. There's a handful of companies, Google, Microsoft, Facebook that are doing it, but Everybody, I mean, I talk to companies with 15, twenty billion in revenue, they go, we don't have an AI …”
Rampell: EU regulatory hostility toward US tech giants is driven by jealousy
“I think the EU is very jealous that Google's not a European company. I think they're jealous that Apple's not a European, like, Google is bad in Europe. In my personal opinion, I don't think they're nearly the monopolist that Microsoft was like in the late nin…”
Alex Rampell: Microsoft never restricted Windows software like Apple restricts iOS
“Microsoft, in my opinion, never really They never did the same amount of control. Like, they never said, hey, this software product cannot be downloaded onto your Windows PC.”
Horowitz: Apple undershot its enterprise market potential by 100x
“If you look at Apple's products and their product position, and you look at their success in the enterprise versus say Microsoft which is selling competing products, you would, I would argue Apple's undershot their potential with the products they have by prob…”
Butterfield: Microsoft is the only competitor Slack really worries about
“To be totally frank, it's the one company that I really worry about from a competitive angle.”
Evans: There are even odds Windows Phone disappears within a year
“It's, that, that, I would be, I think there's even odds that that product won't exist in a year.”
Evans: Android destroyed vast wealth for mobile hardware manufacturers
“Google were actually afraid of Microsoft rather than afraid of Apple, and so they created this mobile phone platform that's been Enormously successful for Google, vast destroyer of wealth for the entire manufacturing industry”
Thiel: Easy success or early failure teaches founders the wrong lessons
“Most of the time people are either in companies that fail, and then the lesson you learn is that it's impossible to build a great company, and so the next time around you try for something that's less ambitious, and so And then you certainly will not build a g…”
Evans: Google is the new Microsoft in its universal computing platform ambition
“I think there's a macro point here that Google is the new Microsoft, and this is the thing that came out really strongly last year, and indeed this year, is the sort of self-confidence and the ambition to do absolutely everything to become the global computing…”
Casado: Microsoft created multi-billion-dollar shelfware businesses through product bundling
“So Microsoft is notorious for making multiple billion-dollar businesses of basically shelfware because the consumption behavior didn't change and the consumer behavior didn't change.”
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…”
Horowitz: Microsoft beat Google in cloud productivity due to enterprise culture
“Google, like had, they built Google Apps, like what, like five years before Microsoft really got going with Office three 65, and Microsoft ran right by them. Why? Because there was no enterprise culture in Google, none.”
Casado: Cursor navigated Microsoft/Anthropic competition and M&A in two years
“I mean, imagine like starting competing with Microsoft, ending, ending up competing with say, Anthropic, you know, both of these kind of, you know, mega companies with tremendous amount of capital and power and distribution. In the meantime, you evolve like fu…”
Casado: AI gives startups competitive footing with incumbents by solving distribution
“And like, what's crazy is AI, A, solves the distribution problem. It just solves the demand problem. And B, these companies are able to raise so much money that they're actually on competitive footing with like the Microsofts and the medicine and the Microsoft…”
Tan: Turning down early Palantir offer was a $2B to $4B mistake
“Peter said, I'm so sure this is the right thing for you. Like, here's a check for 70 grand. That was how much I made at Microsoft at the time. And I said, thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year. Which I did, but I think …”
Horowitz: Microsoft created cyber theft opportunities by deploying Windows online prematurely
“When it went from vandalism to theft, the vandalism company, Microsoft, is one who created all the theft opportunities By putting windows on the internet when it wasn't ready to be on the internet because it wasn't built for that kind of idea.”
Evans: Microsoft, Meta, and Google spending over 50% of revenue on CapEx
“Microsoft, Meta, and Google are all on, in line to spend over 50% of revenue on CapEx this year.”
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.”
Epoch AI: Microsoft's Mount Pleasant data center will consume half NYC's power
“The one we found that's actually seriously underway and has permits and is, you know, setting up the electrical infrastructure for is one by Microsoft, which is going to be used by OpenAI, at least in part in Mount Pleasant. They're calling it Microsoft Fairwa…”
Rabois: Microsoft is losing its lead in AI coding to startups
“They started with an advantage in coding, Copilot, etc. They're losing that.”
Casado: Early AI coding tools reached $400M to $600M in ARR
“The first kind of monetized AI app was code, right? It was Copilot, and so Microsoft had invested a ton of money and matured the market with Copilot, with VS Code, and so everybody knew it. It's just, like, the models weren't quite ready then, and so you had, …”
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.”
Price-Wright: Microsoft contracted over a third of Georgia's electricians last year
“When Microsoft was building their new data center in Georgia last year, at one point, they had on staff at Microsoft, or on contract, more than a third of the electricians in the state of Georgia.”
Sinofsky: Microsoft will eventually develop much more first-party AI software
“I, it seems obvious that at some point, you know, Microsoft will have much more first party software.”
Sinofsky: Microsoft shut down Hotmail in China over server access demands
“Like, we had to shut down Hotmail for forever because, like, we wouldn't let them see the data center servers, which weren't even in China, and all sorts of complexities.”
Horowitz: Delayed browser creation would have enabled proprietary network monopolies
“If you had not had the idea when you had it, The internet as we know it probably doesn't happen in that the kind of Microsoft alternative, the Oracle alternative would have had an opportunity to gain a network effect. And so the chance of all this getting buil…”