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 2,685 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 35 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
Gilbert: Microsoft is the only Big Tech giant without federal antitrust probe
“The only one that's not under active antitrust investigation today by the federal government.”
Gilbert: Popular belief that Nadella originated Azure is historically inaccurate
“As the general public is concerned, Steve Ballmer was obsessed with Windows. He built the enterprise business. He left. Satya Nadella came in and launched Azure, and Azure has been great. Like, not exactly. That's not really what happened.”
Gilbert: Microsoft shelved finished Office for iPad project in 2013
“And absolutely, 100% something that happened is all 200 of us worked for multiple years to get these things ready. We had a ship date. Well, we had what we thought was a ship date. Actually, what happened was we were told that actually we're gonna shelve it. A…”
Schultz: Starbucks introduced the caffè latte to America without trademarking it
“The other thing I didn't do is we introduced cafe latte to the, to America. We didn't trademark it. You know, we trademarked Frappuccino later on, but we didn't trademark cafe latte.”
Schultz: Starbucks was seven months from insolvency in 2008
“I went up there, and I laid it out. Chapter and verse. I think we have seven months left. We are going to be insolvent.”
Schultz: Previous Starbucks leadership diluted coffee quality to maximize yield
“Because the previous administration had done things that diluted the integrity of coffee to maximize yield.”
Schultz: Starbucks Replaced Entire Executive Team Except General Counsel
“He was right, except for one, the general counsel. They were all gone.”
Schultz: Straight espresso is Starbucks' number one selling beverage in Italy
“Two, three years later, what do you think the number one beverage is? It's espresso. For Starbucks. Straight espresso. Espresso is the number one beverage.”
Microsoft's Altair BASIC was the first commercial software product ever sold
“This is the first time software has ever been sold. Other than the IBM accounting machinations to protect themselves from antitrust, which was just accounting, nobody had ever sold software before. This is the first time.”
No other major quant fund operates with a single unified model
“No other at scale investment firm period, and especially quant firm operates this way today with just one model.”
Rosenthal: Bob Mercer was primary funder of Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica
“Bob was the primary funder of Breitbart, And Cambridge Analytica, and one of the major financial backers of both the 2016 Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign in Great Britain.”
Bernard Arnault secretly accumulated Hermès shares using equity swaps over ten years.
“So in 2001, right after he lost Gucci, Bernard quietly buys an initial stake in Hermes of 4.9%.
Now I believe that was just under the threshold that they would have to disclose it under French securities regulations.
And then, here's what they do that the Herm…”
Hermès destroys imperfect manufactured products to prevent them from entering the market.
“Hermes cares so deeply about their brand that they burn imperfect products so they never see the light of day.”
Germany directed Novo to supply insulin across Nazi-occupied Europe
“They are now essentially the official Nazi-sanctioned insulin provider for all of Nazi-occupied Europe. So, the German government basically directs Novo To massively expand production and supply insulate, you know, not only to Germany, but to France, to Poland…”
Eli Lilly claimed rebates account for 75% of insulin's sticker price
“Eli Lilly has publicly claimed that the cost of these discounts and rebates accounted for 75% of the sticker price of insulin.”
Wegovy and Ozempic cost over $1,000 monthly in the United States
“The price of Ozempic to treat diabetes is north of a thousand dollars, and Wegovy for weight loss is north of 1300 dollars per month before insurance, and this is in the U.S.
So expensive, right?
That's a lot of money.
In Canada, of course, Ozempic is 147 doll…”
Early studies show GLP-1 weight loss causes 40% lean muscle loss
“When you're losing weight normally, you lose, like, 25% lean muscle, and these early studies are showing it's something like 40%.”
Munger claims quant firms achieve high returns through increasingly massive leverage
“And the way they get their returns year after year is taking the leverage, the midday leverage up higher and higher and higher and higher. So they're making smaller and smaller profits on more and more volume, which gives them this big peak leverage risk, whic…”
Endowments across America are slashing effective private fund fees by 50%
“The endowments have started to say to the, all these people that charged three and 30 or whatever they charge, they said, we'll pay your three and 30, but we're going to put in twice as much money, and then the next half you'll get nothing on it, or you're jus…”
Huang: NVIDIA is only accelerator maker with universal architectural compatibility
“We are the only accelerator on the planet where every single accelerator is architecturally compatible with the others. None has ever existed.”
Huang: NVIDIA's RIVA 128 chip design methodology became the industry standard
“The number of smart decisions we made, which are smart to this day, how we design chips is exactly the same to this day. Because, gosh, you know, nobody's ever done it back then, and we pulled every trick in the book in a desperation because we had no other ch…”
DeMuro: Porsche Digital's Online Car Auction Site Marqued Is Fledgling
“Porsche has a business right now an auction business called marked that they're running and as a, from Porsche digital, and it's fledgling to say the least.”
Nike Over-Supplied Retailers to Reach $126M in Air Jordan Sales
“Nike needed that first year of the Jordan deal to be a huge hit. So they stuffed the channel. They pushed so much product on retailers and through the futures program and whatnot that that's how they hit the hundred and twenty six million dollars in sales. The…”
Nike Scrapped Pre-Planned 2018 Campaigns to Run Colin Kaepernick Ads
“And in fact, I know that when they launched this, they actually scrapped their plans for the whole rest of the year for a whole bunch of ad campaigns that were already ready for a different way that they were gonna do the 30th anniversary relaunch of Just Do I…”
Ferdinand Porsche Was an SS Member and Hitler Associate
“Ferdinand himself not just was a Nazi, but was a very close personal associate of Adolf Hitler. He was a member of the SS”
In 1978, Porsche Launched the 928 Intending to Replace the 911
“So in 1978, Furman introduces the Porsche nine, 28 with the stated intention that this is going to eventually replace the nine, 11.”
Ferrari Refused Long-Term Battery Support for the Hybrid LaFerrari
“Ferrari has already said that the technology is old, all the plug-in stuff, we don't want to be any part of the LaFerrari.”
Khosrowshahi: Son threatened to invest billions in Lyft if Uber rejected SoftBank
“SoftBank wanted in, and in typical MASA fashion, it was like, hey, if you don't let us invest in you, we're going to invest in that pink company, right?”
Khosrowshahi: Uber Is the Largest Source of Work in the World
“I think we're the largest source of work anywhere by far, and growing pretty fast.”
Rosenthal: Million-view TikToks fail to convert podcast subscribers for Acquired
“We haven't acquired TikTok, we're on YouTube Shorts, we post on Twitter, and like, None of that drives the needle for us. Like, we've had videos on TikTok get a couple million views, and we don't know if it translated to a single new subscriber.”
Ek: The era of artists living solely off recorded music was short
“There was a point in time where the majority of the revenue could be derived from recording music. But the challenge to that, what I would say is that the time in history where that was true was actually very, very short, right?”
Lasky: Nintendo engineered artificial Black Friday scarcity to create retail panic
“They were very clever about only releasing a limited amount of inventory for Black Friday, and then the parents would go because that was on the kids Christmas list, and they would go to buy the disc and it, and they would be sold out and panic would ensue. An…”
Lasky: Early Riot Games acquired DotA community websites to redirect player demand
“We bought the websites that we bought the Defense of the Ancients websites and just turned their editorial to-”
Gilbert: Gaming revenue historically surpassed Hollywood and TV including arcade coin drops
“I was shocked to learn that the gaming industry has always been larger than TV and Hollywood, if you include the total coin drop in arcades, and I always just thought this was this new phenomenon of like, wow, video games have become so much a part of the fabr…”
The NFL Is the Single Largest Media Property in the World
“It's that the NFL is the single largest media property by value, and the funny thing is, if you go look at the, because we did this for the Nintendo episode, you go look at the largest media Media properties. They list Mario, they list Pokemon, and they, and t…”
Thompson: Apple University was driven by Tim Cook, not Steve Jobs
“What is interesting is it was written a lot about as this sort of Steve jobs initiative and, you know, I'm sure he okayed it, but he had basically no involvement at all. Tim cook was very heavily involved.”
The SEC let Enron recognize 20 years of future cash flows immediately
“The SEC allowed them to go out to 20 years that they could collapse into today revenue.”
Ken Lay's wife dumped 500,000 shares minutes before Enron's bailout deal collapsed
“At 10:20 a.m., 10 minutes before the news comes out, Ken Lay's wife sells 500,000 shares of Enron stock that the Kenan whatever her name is, that the Lay Family Foundation held.”
Gilbert: Enron's Rebecca Mark Sold $83M in Stock Without Charges
“She sold about eighty-three million dollars of stock. She actually got out early enough, and she was sort of cast out by the male executives at the top in a way where she was actually never accused of any wrongdoing and never really a part of the prosecution o…”
Fenton: Docker's valuation plummeted from $1.5B to zero, stranding Benchmark
“So last time I did an all hands meeting at Docker was three years ago, and there were 60 employees that, that we'd spun out of the prior company, and the valuation was zero. So we'd gone from over a 1,000,000,004, 1,000,005 to zero, and I was working with some…”
Calacanis: My syndicate is the world's largest, deploying $50M annually
“The angel syndicate is now the largest syndicate in the world. I've deployed, like, one hundred eighty-five million dollars in my career as an angel investor. I'm doing fifty million a year now.”
Rosenthal: The best venture GPs over two decades all trade public stocks
“If you look at the very best People, the best GPs in venture over the past two decades, they all trade public stocks.”
Benchmark refuses fund scaling, junior partners, platform teams, and CRM software
“Benchmark famously believes that venture capital doesn't scale. They have zigged when others have zagged. They have not grown their fun size. They haven't tried junior partners. They don't have a platform team. They are not multi-stage. And I've heard they don…”
Stanford's endowment blackballed Benchmark's Fund I over its 30% carry demand
“Literally almost all of these folks who are starting Benchmark, they get so angry that not only do they not invest in the fund, they start organizing against this young benchmark capital. They call up all of their peers, the other university endowments across …”
Benchmark structured $1.5 million in founder loans to win the eBay deal
“It was also reported by the Washington Post after the IPO of eBay that Benchmark had also structured Equity-backed loans to Pierre and Jeff in the amount of 750,000 dollars each as a way to, like, prevent them essentially, give them an incentive not to take th…”
Rosenthal: AWS was built to scale, not to monetize excess seasonal capacity
“The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity. Actually, within two months after launch, AWS would have already burned through the excess amazon.com capacity. Amazon Web Services was always considered a business by itsel…”