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 2,422 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
The NFL traded NFL Network to ESPN for a 10% equity stake
“So August, 20, 25, the NFL reached a deal with Disney and ESPN to essentially sell the NFL network, the NFL's cable network and the NFL's official fantasy app to ESPN for a 10% equity stake in all of ESPN in return for this swap.”
The NFL added 4M female fans in Taylor Swift's first year
“In the first year of the relationship, September of 23 to September of 24, the NFL added four million female fans. The Chiefs were 3.4 million of those.”
The NFL skims a share of private equity exit returns for all owners
“Upon any eventual sale or monetization of the ownership stake that private equity would have in an NFL franchise, A portion of the returns on that investment get skimmed off the top and go back to the NFL and then get distributed equally among all 32 NFL team …”
Rosenthal: Coca-Cola's Robert Woodruff backed segregationist politicians in the 1940s
“In fact, Robert Woodruff was openly supporting segregationist politicians during this time.”
Late 1950s McCann taste tests showed consumers preferred Pepsi over Coke
“Consumers, when presented with the two drinks, Coke and Pepsi, in a blind taste test, a statistically significant number of people prefer Pepsi. The taste of Pepsi.”
New Coke actually beat original Coke and Pepsi in blind taste tests
“They've done tons of taste tests. Not only does it beat Pepsi in taste tests, it beats original Coke. People prefer the taste of new Coke.”
Coca-Cola labeled the original formula 'Classic' to renegotiate its bottler contracts
“And Coke and their lawyers ultimately decide That if they keep new Coke on the market as the official Coke, and they call the old Coke, Coca-Cola classic. They can make an argument to all the bottlers. The Coca-Cola classic is a new drink.”
Gilbert: FOIA records reveal major CPG brands behind Trader Joe's private-label
“Eater, the website, submitted a FOIA request to the US government to the USDA and the FDA. To figure out, via food recalls, who makes Trader Joe's items. And by the Freedom of Information Act, they have to provide that information. And so there's a whole bunch…”
Gilbert: Trader Joe's pays its suppliers cash on delivery
“You just have cash as soon as you drop something off at their loading dock. This gives them a huge edge of being a preferred customer for these vendors. That those companies never have any cash flow issue or a waiting issue. As soon as they drop it off, Trader…”
Eric Schmidt Proposed Google Acquire Tesla for Self-Driving Tech
“There's what Eric Schmidt wanted, which is crazy. He proposed, oh, let's just go buy Tesla, and that'll be our starting place, and then we'll just put all of our self-driving equipment on all the cars.”
Astro Teller: Google Brain Gains More Than Funded All Google X Bets
“Astro Teller, who would take over running Google X after Sebastian Thrun left, he would get quoted in the New York Times in a profile of Google X that the gains to Google's core businesses in search and ads and YouTube from Google Brain Have way more than fund…”
Microsoft's $1B Deal Spurred OpenAI's Captive For-Profit Restructuring
“And while they're there, they hash out a deal for Microsoft to invest one billion dollars into OpenAI in a combination of both cash and Azure cloud credits. And in return, Microsoft will get access to OpenAI's technology, get an exclusive license to OpenAI's t…”
Google Cloud Exceeds $50B Run Rate at 30% Growth
“And today, they're over fifty billion dollars in annual revenue run rate. It's growing 30% year over year. They're the fastest growing of the major cloud providers, five X in five years.”
Elon Musk Offered to Buy DeepMind with Tesla Stock in 2013
“He immediately calls up Demis and says, I will buy the company right now with Tesla stock. This is late 2013, like, early 2014. Tesla's market cap is about twenty billion dollars.”
Google Doubled Its Offer to Keep Ilya Sutskever Before OpenAI
“Google came back with a big counter, something like double the offer, and I think it was delivered from Jeff Dean personally, and Ilya said, nope, I'm doing this.”
OpenAI Only Collected $130M of Its Initial $1B Pledge
“The funny thing is, it was later reported that a billion dollars was not actually collected. Only about a hundred and thirty million of it was actually collected to fund this nonprofit.”
Google Operates an Estimated 2 to 3 Million Custom TPUs
“But today, Google, it's estimated, has two to three million TPUs. For reference, Nvidia shipped, people don't know for sure, somewhere around four million GPUs last year.”
OpenAI Originally Planned to Be a B2B API Business Before ChatGPT
“They also just throw up a paywall randomly because they thought that the business was going to be an API business. They thought that the projections were all about how much revenue they were going to do through B to B licensing deals. And then they just realiz…”
Google Paid $2.7B to License Character.AI and Rehire Noam Shazeer
“Google ultimately in twenty-twenty-four, after ChatGPT launches, pays 2.7 billion dollars, I think, to do a licensing deal with Character AI, the net of which Gnome comes back to Google.”
Waymo Reportedly Surpassed Lyft in San Francisco Gross Bookings in January 2025
“This year, in January, they were reportedly doing more in gross bookings than Lyft in San Francisco.”
Waymo Study Shows 91% Reduction in Serious Injury Crashes vs Human Drivers
“The study that Waymo just released last month showed that they have 91% fewer crashes with serious injuries or worse compared to the average human driver, even controlled for the fact that Waymo's right now are only driving on city surface streets.”
Google Announced Gemini Reached 450M Monthly Active Users
“So they announced there are now four hundred and fifty million monthly users of Gemini.”
Neoclouds Will Offer Google TPUs in the Coming Months
“I think within a year it might happen. There are rumors already that some NeoClouds in the coming months are gonna have TPUs.”
The Motorola Droid Reached One Million Sales Faster Than the Original iPhone
“That original Droid, I think it sold a quarter million units the first weekend it was on sale, and then it sold a million units faster than the original iPhone had.”
Google Maps Generates an Estimated Five to Ten Billion Dollars Annually
“They don't break out revenue, but estimates are that Maps does well over five billion in revenue, maybe even ten billion in revenue.”
Google Owns Eight Distinct Products With Over One Billion Users
“It is wild that this one company has eight products with over a billion users and started this era with just one search that didn't even have a billion users yet, but search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Drive, Photos, and then if you count the Play …”
Dimon: JPMorgan merger required 75% board vote to deny him CEO role
“Inside the merge agreement, and this is almost unheard of, when we get the premium, is that to not have me become CEO 18 months later, 75% of the board would have to vote me out. And the board was eight Bank One people and eight J.P. Morgan people.”
Dimon: Big investment banks increased leverage from 12x to 35x before 2008
“The leverage, if you may not remember this, but the leverage, because of accounting rules in Basel III, Basel I, investment banks, particularly the banks, the big investment banks, went from 12 times leverage to 35 times leverage.”
Dimon: JPMorgan Wrote Off Bear Stearns' Entire $12B Tangible Book Value
“It was three hundred billion of assets and a twelve billion dollar book, tangible book value. We wrote off the whole tangible book value in the, when we bought the company to pay, we had to liquidate the loans.”
Dimon: JPMorgan bought WaMu at a $30B discount to book value
“We bought it for a thirty billion dollar discount to tangible book value. Because they had debt, and we left the debt behind. And so, and that thirty billion was approximately what the mortgage loss was gonna be.”
Google technically became the world's largest computer manufacturer
“Pretty quickly, maybe even while Google is still a private company, they technically become the world's largest computer manufacturer.”
Alphabet generates more net income than any other U.S. company
“Google, and I should say Alphabet today, generates more net income or profit than any other U.S. Company. More than Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway.”
Page and Brin told VCs only Steve Jobs met their CEO bar
“There's one person that we met in this whole process who we think meets our bar, who we would be willing to come in and hire as our CEO here at Google. Oh God, who is it? Steve Jobs.”
Ballmer: Microsoft was the first major company to replace options with RSUs
“And we transition then from stock options to stock awards. Which, if you notice, I think we were the first to make that as a major transition, but everybody's made the same transition.”
Ballmer: Microsoft's first antitrust inquiry came from FTC over IBM collusion
“This was our first antitrust problem. I don't know if you guys know this, is the FTC at the time thought we and IBM were working to divide the market because we had done some positioning. What's windows good for? What's always too good for? We and IBM had done…”
Ballmer: Neither Gates nor I ever attended a quarterly analyst call
“Bill never went to a quarterly analyst call and I never went to a quarterly analyst call.”
Epic sends annual 1-5 report cards to hospital client executives
“So they will send separate report cards.
Every year to your CEO, CIO, and CFO, and they will grade you one through five on a bunch of dimensions, and then they will show you benchmark data against other customers at your peer set of like relative similar size …”
Epic has zero customer churn among its major hospital clients
“They have the majority of the U.S.'s major hospital systems using their software and of their over 600 customers, they have never lost a single one.”
Epic's core differentiation is its single unified database
“It is true that Epic's core database, the core single database, and this is Epic's big differentiation. There's only one database that every application pulls from.”
Cerner merged 36 entities together before Oracle acquired it
“By the way, earlier when I said 24 different companies merged together to create Cerner, I forgot that this chart that I'm looking at predates when Cerner then bought Siemens. So then there's another 12 companies that had merged together to become Siemens that…”
Epic posts '10 Commandments' barring IPOs in every campus bathroom
“They have them posted in every bathroom and in every break room across the entire campus. And so any visitor who goes there and it's open to the public, you can just go in and see the 10 Commandments in the bathrooms there. The 10 Commandments are number one, …”
Epic operates with minimal middle management and zero divisional budgets
“So, because of that high level of trust, there's very few middle managers. You understand the system that everybody else works within, and you don't have to corral chaos. Most of the people they're hiring are right out of school, so they've been there for a lo…”
Epic screened candidates using a test written by the founder's 7th-grade son
“And for 18 years, listeners, that was how they tested to determine if someone should work at Epic.”
Epic Systems has no sales department and only eight inbound salespeople
“There's not a sales or marketing department. There are eight or so salespeople, quote unquote, in the company who only react to inbound requests and they all came from either project management or technical specialists.”
90% of US medical students currently train on Epic's software
“And I think now, 90% of med school students train on Epic.”
Epic's trust rules mandate its next CEO must be a software developer
“One, must be a longtime Epic employee, and two, must be a software developer.”
Rosenthal: Trackable foreign bets on IPL matches reach ~$750M per match
“The statistic is that just trackable bets placed through, Ben, like you said, foreign bookmakers in countries where gambling is legal,
On IPL matches, I believe, is something on the order of, like, seven hundred and fifty million dollars per match.”