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 1,810 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
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.”
BCCI became the largest revenue pool in global cricket by late 2005
“He's created the single biggest pool of money anywhere around the globe in cricket as a sport. I mean, this is Way more money that we're talking about here than England or Australia or the West Indies or Sri Lanka, New Zealand, you know, the other cricket play…”
Supreme Court Restructures BCCI and Suspends Two IPL Teams for Two Seasons
“They spend two years investigating and restructuring everything, and then in 2015, they announce all their verdicts. They force N. Srinivasan to step down for the BCCI. They restructure the BCCI. They suspend the two teams that had been spot fixing, the Royals…”
Chang: Replaced TSMC CEO kept same pay, grade, and successor status
“Well, as far as the CO is concerned, I didn't keep him. I had More than one nice talk with him. I intended to, and I told him that he was still a potential, ah, successor to me. So I kept him at the same job grade, we have job grades, and the same salary and b…”
Chang: Apple placed initial 16nm chip orders with Samsung over TSMC
“I mean, it was a real shock when I heard that Apple had placed their first orders of 16 with Samsung.”
Pet care generates 59% of Mars revenue and employs nearly 100,000 staff
“59% of revenue comes from the pet care segment, and of their 140,000 employees, almost a 100,000 work in pet care.”
Poland produced 50% of IKEA's furniture by late 1960s
“And by the end of the decade of the sixties, Poland is producing 50% of IKEA's furniture, including some of the first modern classics like the Billy Bookcase, the Ogla Cafe chair.”
Thirty percent of IKEA visitors go to the store solely to eat
“30% of people who visit IKEA do so just to eat.”
Zuckerberg Rejected Yahoo Acquisition After Terry Semel Lowered $1B Offer
“So Mark actually agrees to the Yahoo deal. Billion dollars. It's gonna be all in stock. Yahoo's gonna buy the company. In the interim between when they shake hands on the deal and while the docs are being drafted, Yahoo announces their quarterly earnings, and …”
Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down a $24 Billion Acquisition Offer From Microsoft
“Less than two years later, he turned down twenty four billion and that they were really good for the money. It's Microsoft.”
Zuckerberg Negotiated Facebook's $1B Instagram Acquisition Over a Single Weekend
“Not to mention, on top of it all, we're not gonna go into it here because we had a whole episode on Facebook and Instagram, but this was done over two days, over the course of a weekend. Mark didn't do a whole lot of socializing this before pulling the trigger…”
Facebook Avoided First-Day IPO Crash Only Due to Underwriting Bank Intervention
“Facebook shares end the day at 38 dollars and 23 cents, up 23 cents from the IPO price, but only because all of the underwriting banks in the IPO stepped in to buy shares and support the price, which was totally crashing throughout the day.”
WhatsApp Has Surpassed 100 Million Monthly Active Users in the US
“WhatsApp has a hundred million now in the US, which this is sort of a big narrative violation that WhatsApp will never catch on in the US, and iMessage is dominant, and even after that it's, you know, text message. This is crazy. A hundred million people a mon…”
Meta Built a Hyperscaler-Sized Data Center Footprint Exclusively for Internal Use
“They now last year spent twenty-eight billion dollars in capex, which you should mostly read as data centers. They operate a Hyper-scaler-sized data center footprint, give or take. You know, you think AWS, Azure, Microsoft, and Google Cloud. Meta is the fourth…”
Chang: Analysts Value Standalone YouTube at $500B, YouTube TV Leading Cable
“Today you have analysts saying if you pulled YouTube out of Google, it would be worth half a trillion dollars, which is almost double where Netflix is. It's on track, YouTube TV, to be the largest cable provider in the United States.”
Zuckerberg: Facebook paused feature development for a year during mobile rewrite
“We basically took, I think it must have been like a year or something, we were just like, look, we're gonna pause feature development of the company, Because it's hard enough to do a rewrite, right? So if you look at, like, the history of the tech industry, th…”
Rosenthal: Microsoft licensed Spyglass Mosaic code for $2M for Internet Explorer
“They license the source code for Marc Andreessen's original Mosaic browser from... Spyglass software for two million dollars, and that code base becomes the base upon which Microsoft builds Internet Explorer.”
Rosenthal: Majority of Microsoft leadership and Satya Nadella opposed Nokia acquisition
“At one point, as Satya talks about in the book, there's a straw poll taken of all the division heads, all the top leaders in the company, whether they're for or against the acquisition. The majority are against the acquisition. Satya is against the acquisition…”
Gilbert: Starbucks gift card deposits rival top 10% of US banks
“If Starbucks were a bank, and you treated the gift cards as deposits, it would be in the top 10% by deposits of banks in the United States.”
Apple's 1985 intellectual property license covered all future versions of Windows
“Apple does do a deal to license a lot of quote unquote their intellectual property, which of course came from Xerox, to Microsoft. Apple, I think, was under the impression that it was just for Windows one point oh, but the actual terms of the agreement are thi…”
Medallion generated higher 30-year returns than Berkshire Hathaway or George Soros
“Their thirty-year track record managing billions of dollars has better returns than anyone you have ever heard of, including Berkshire Hathaway, Bridgewater, George Soros, Peter Lynch, or anyone else.”
An estimated $150 billion to $200 billion has been distributed from Medallion
“I would estimate probably a 152 hundred billion dollars that have come out of Medallion over the last 35 years.”
Rosenthal: Medallion Fund achieved a 7.5 Sharpe ratio in 2004
“And I believe, if I have my research right, in 2004, they actually achieved a Sharpe ratio of 7.5.”
Renaissance raised Medallion carry to 44% before expelling all outside investors
“Okay, so, in 2001, they raised the carrier to 36%. 2002, they raised it to 44%. And then, in 2003, they actually say, hey, we can't incentivize you out of the fund, outside investors. We are gonna kick you out. So, starting in 2003, everybody who's an outside …”
Medallion generated 136% gross returns in 2007 and 152% in 2008
“2007 medallion does a 136% gross. 2008 medallion does a 152% gross.”
Medallion delivered 68% gross returns and $60 billion in carry over 34 years
“So during the entire lifetime so far of Medallion, from 1988 To twenty-twenty-two, that's 34 years. The total net annual return number is 40%. Four zero over 34 years after fees. It's 68% before fees. Which equates to total lifetime carry dollars for the whole…”
Renaissance Technologies employees have their 401(k) retirement accounts invested in Medallion
“If you work there, your four oh one K is the medallion fund.”
Jim Simons personally paid $670 million in Renaissance's IRS tax settlement
“Over time, eventually in 2021, the IRS said, no, you made all those trades. That was not a completely separate entity. And so you guys owed 6.8 billion dollars in taxes that you didn't pay. You're going to need to pay that with interest, with penalties. And by…”
Hermès empowers local store managers to personally select their own store inventory.
“Basically, they embrace this idea that every store is for the local clientele, and that store managers know their clients the best. So therefore, store managers should get to pick what is in each store. And headquarters does not dictate what every store stocks…”
Three pharmacy benefit managers control 80% of the United States market
“Despite there used to being hundreds of PBMs, there's now fewer than 30, and there's essentially three that cover about 80% of the market, and those are Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and OptumRx, which is actually owned by UnitedHealth Group.”
The Novo Nordisk Foundation blocked a proposed Serono merger in 2004
“Management comes in, they present in two board meetings, first in August, 2004, and then the second one in September where they get a do over and they fail to convince the foundation board. So they block the merger.”
Semaglutide is twice as effective as liraglutide for weight loss
“Two, and much more important for the near term, it is twice as effective as liraglutide for weight loss.”
Novo Nordisk's 84% gross margins surpass Microsoft and Google
“Gross margins are better than software. They run about 84%. Lilly is also a very high margin company, running about 80%. For context, Microsoft has a gross margin of 70% and Google is 56%.”
Research shows up to 68% of patients discontinue GLP-1s after a year
“There's some research that points out that as many as 68% of people roll off it after a year, and part of this is related to price, or changing insurance that doesn't cover it, or that it's hard to find since they're still supply constrained, or maybe there ar…”
United States officials alleged Novo increased insulin prices 600% since 2001
“In 2021, U.S. Officials alleged that Novo Nordisk increased prices more than 600% between 2001 and 2019 in lockstep with competitors to the detriment of diabetics.”
Novo Nordisk awards no stock options to executives or board members
“Executives and board members are not given stock options as a part of their compensation.”
Only 10% of clinical drugs reach market, with one driving profits
“If you look at the pipeline of a hundred drugs that enter clinical development, 10 actually make it to market, and one provides, get this, half the profits.”
The pharmaceutical industry ROIC is 13%, comparable to trucking and electronics
“When you actually look at their return on invested capital numbers, the ROIC, they are not through the roof. They're like 13% industry-wide, but hold for Novo for a second. It's totally in line with other industries, like trucking, broadcasting, electronics, w…”
Visa's $18B IPO proceeds provided a secondary selling lifeline to banks
“That eighteen billion dollars was secondary selling to the banks that owned the company, which I think for many of them proved to be a total lifeline through the financial crisis that helped them survive.”
Cash-paying households pay $149 annually subsidizing card costs, Fed finds
“The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, determined that on average each year, a household that uses cash to pay for things, pays a 149 dollars inflated prices, because all prices, no matter how you pay, have to go up in order to make it so that paying in cash and …”
Card-using households receive $1,100 per year in value on average
“A card using household receives 1100 dollars in value.”
Berkshire borrowed Japanese yen at 0.5% to buy 5%-yielding trading houses
“The interest rates in Japan were half a percent per year for 10 years. And these trading companies were really entrenched old companies, and they had all these cheap copper mines and rubber plantations, and so you could borrow for 10 years ahead all the money,…”
Nvidia bifurcated its architecture to monopolize TSMC's CoWoS packaging capacity
“And by NVIDIA bifurcating their chip architectures into a gaming segment that does not have this latest COWAS technology, this allows them to monopolize, like, a huge amount of TSMC's capacity to make the COWAS chips, specifically for these H-one hundreds, whi…”