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 174 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
Tudor accounts for less than 1% of Rolex's total production volume
“It is a shockingly low percent of Rolex's production. Less than one percent.”
Rosenthal: TSMC will likely be sole manufacturer at 3nm node
“So, very likely in the next process, it's just going to be TSMC.”
Mars first manufactured count-line candy mechanically at factory scale
“And effectively what they were doing was they were the first ones who said, wait a minute, if we're gonna make a count line, we should do it in a mechanical way. And so, even though all these other people are selling these one-offs locally to different stores …”
Uncle Ben's was the first branded rice product sold in America
“There were no brands in the rice category before Uncle Ben's.”
Ninety percent of all candy purchases are impulse buys
“90%, nine-zero, of all candy purchases are impulse purchases. Only 10% of candy purchases are planned purchases.”
IKEA sells nearly 20 million LACK tables each year
“Today, IKEA sells almost twenty million lakh tables every year and has been for decades.”
Rosenthal: Facebook was potentially the first startup with an open office plan
“I think Facebook was potentially maybe the first company, first startup, to have an open office plan.”
Microsoft's $240M Facebook Stake Became Worth $8 Billion Post-IPO
“That two hundred and forty million dollar investment, by the time they start selling it down years after Facebook is public, ends up being worth eight billion dollars.”
Gilbert: Microsoft gross margin on retail boxed Windows was 29% in the 1990s
“In the nineties, the box software that Microsoft would use to sell Windows Their gross margin on a copy of Windows was 29%.”
Gilbert: Microsoft achieved 75% gross margins selling Windows via OEM channels
“But when they're selling through an OEM channel, their gross margin was 75%, because you just ship the bits to the OS once, and then the PC manufacturer takes it from there.”
The Altair 8800 was the first commercially available microcomputer
“On whose cover is the Altair, 8800. The world's first real, honest to God, commercially available for sale microcomputer.”
Microsoft Excel was the world's first graphical spreadsheet program
“Excel is the world's first graphical spreadsheet program, and that's why it wins, and that's why it's so important.”
Hermès enforces a strict internal corporate policy against hiring management consultants.
“Hermes has a corporate policy of no consultants, and now I know where that came from.”
Wegovy matched Saxenda's lifetime United States doctor prescriptions in one month
“So when Wegevee finally launches in the U.S. In 2021 as the official FDA sanctioned weight loss version of semaglutide, it gets the same number of prescriptions written for it by doctors. In the first slightly over one month than Saxenda had in its entire drug…”
Sol Price intentionally designed warehouse clubs for wealthy shoppers saving money
“No, so price had that figured out to announce. Yes. He always wanted the rich man trying to save money.”
NVIDIA's programmable shaders were the first massively parallel processors
“And if you just looked at the pipeline of a programmable shader, it is a processor and is highly parallel, and it is massively threaded, and it is the only processor in the world that does that.”
Huang: GeForce NOW was NVIDIA's first data center product, preceding CUDA supercomputing
“GeForce Now was NVIDIA's first data center product. And our second data center product was remote graphics, putting our GPUs in, in the world's enterprise data centers, which then led us to our third product, which combined CUDA plus our GPU, which became a su…”
Costco sells 500 million rotisserie chickens globally every year
“They sell five hundred million chickens a year. Not pounds, chickens.”
Doug DeMuro Predicts a $2 Million All-Electric Porsche Supercar Soon
“I suspect, in the next couple years, they will come out with a, the next supercar, which will be, you know, look like this, and they'll only make a thousand, and it'll cost two million dollars, and it will be fully electric in two zero to 60 in one and a half …”
The US Government Saved Lockheed from Bankruptcy for the Kennen Satellite
“The government didn't let Lockheed go out of business in the 19 seventies. This was right as the Kennen satellite project was getting going. We could not let Lockheed go out of business because we needed that.”
Rosenthal: Historical IPO rule required over $100M revenue and profitability
“Well, the rule used to be you couldn't go public until you had over a hundred million dollars in revenue and you were profitable. Like, if you didn't hit both, check both of those boxes, you weren't gonna IPO.”
Only a Single-Digit Percentage of 2021 IPOs Were Profitable Companies
“And in 2021, of all the companies that went public, it had to be single digit percentage that were profitable.”
Gilbert: Video Game Market Has Historically Outsized TV and Movies Combined
“The video game market has basically always been larger than TV and movies combined, but has never gotten attention, or like, been thought of as a legitimate entertainment form.”
Arthur Andersen shredded one ton of Enron documents every day for weeks
“They are shredding one ton of paper every single day.
That's the maximum capacity.
This goes on for weeks.
Dozens of tons of paper that they shred of documents related to Enron.”
Rosenthal: Buying Enron stock at 61 cents yielded over a 10x return
“So if you had bought Enron equity in those days between the collapsing of the Dinergy merger And the bankruptcy, if you had bought for 61 cents, you would have had over a ten-x return if you were willing to hang on for seven years.”
Knight Ridder offered Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll $50 million for eBay
“The reason you would get acquired is they offer Pierre and Jeff Fifty million dollars. Five zero million dollars.”
Benchmark returned Fund VI entirely from Facebook's acquisition of Instagram
“I mean, they returned the fund on the investment, but, like, with the sale to Facebook.”
Marks: Holding the Nifty Fifty for five years from 1969 wiped out capital
“If you bought the nifty 50 the day I got to work, and if you held it tenaciously for five years, you lost almost all your money in the best companies in America for the main reason that they had been priced too high.”
Gilbert: Amazon spent zero marketing dollars in its first year post-launch
“In fact, I think there's a stat, the entire first year after the public launch, they spent zero marketing dollars, and it was all word of mouth at inbound media inquiries because what they were doing was so novel and so useful to the mass market consumer.”
Rosenthal: All of Costco's profits come from annual membership fees
“When you take out the cost of running both the backend logistics and the warehouses themselves, they are making no profits on the actual retail business, and all of the profits of the company come from the memberships, the annual memberships.”
Rosenthal: Grocery accounts for 55% and over $300B of Walmart revenue
“In the last most recent fiscal year, grocery accounted for 55% of Walmart's total revenue, which is over three hundred billion dollars alone just from grocery.”
Gokul: Solana has 18M monthly active accounts, surpassing all other chains
“Yeah, right now we're at two million daily six million weeklies, and then eighteen million monthlies, which is the highest of any blockchain and passed all the other ones about 60 days ago.”
Rosenthal: Brooks Running compounded 30% to 40% annually for 20 years
“They've been growing at 30 to 40% a year for like the last 20 years.”
Gilbert: Coinbase generated $10 billion in free cash flow over 12 months
“In the last 12 months, they've done ten billion dollars in free cash flow.”
Rosenthal: NVIDIA was first graphics card company to write in-house drivers
“All the other graphics cards companies at the time and most peripheral companies, they let the further downstream partners rate the drivers for what they were doing. NVIDIA was the first one that said, no, no, we want to control this. We want to make sure cons…”
Rosenthal: Nvidia Was the First Dedicated Graphics Card Company
“NVIDIA is the first. They are the first dedicated graphics card company.”
Gerstner: Only 30% of Americans belong to the ownership society
“We only have 30% of people who belong to the ownership society.”
CBS/Sony Records quickly became the most profitable division for both parent companies
“CBS Sony records. Which is the Japanese distribution arm of CBS's recorded music in Japan, becomes such a cash cow that within just a few years, it is the most profitable division for both Sony and CBS.”
Sony Financial Group drove 63% of Sony's operating profit in 2014
“In 2014, 63% of Sony's total operating profit was Sony financial group.”
Toby Keith Provided the Majority of Launch Capital for Big Machine
“So Toby invests the majority of the money to get it going and big machine does a distribution deal with universal with his former major label for distribution and they're up and running.”
Swift Is the Only Top-50 All-Time Best-Selling Artist to Debut Post-2000
“She's the only artist in the top 50 who started her career after the year 2000, and she started in 2006. Everybody else in the top 50 started at least one, if not multiple decades before Taylor.”
Most early global oil came from Titusville, Pennsylvania for 50 years
“For, like, 50, like, literally, I mean, there were some producers, some oil, oil mines oil rigs elsewhere, but, like, very small. Like, most of the oil in the world came from Titusville, Pennsylvania.”
1920s Americans averaged over 40 movie theater visits annually
“In the 19 twenties, the average American went over 40 times per year to the theater.”
Disneyland became ABC's first-ever top 25 television show
“So it quickly becomes the second most popular show on television after I Love Lucy, and it's the first ABC program to crack the top 25 shows Ever. Like, it was all NBC and CBS until Disneyland.”
'Formula 1: Drive to Survive' Hit Number One on Netflix in 93 Countries
“Eventually, it would become the number one Netflix show in 93 countries at peak”
Thirty Percent of All Formula 1 Fans Report Ferrari as Their Favorite Team
“Even today, 30% of all F-One fans, their favorite team is Ferrari.”
NFL TV revenue did not surpass stadium ticket sales until 1977
“And to your point that the business model is around the gate or ticket sales rather than TV, that actually stayed the case until 1977. That was the first year that the NFL made more money from television revenue than from ticket sales.”