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 4,115 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 53 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: The BCCI banned IPL creator Lalit Modi for life in 2013
“And in 2013, the BCCI bars him from India cricket for life. I mean, this thing that he, like, willed into existence, that he created billions of dollars of value for all these other people, he has been barred from.”
Rosenthal: IPL could rival the NFL in size by age 30
“And in theory, by the time it is, call it 30 years old, could be as big as the NFL.”
Gilbert: IPL could not have existed without Lalit Modi
“You couldn't have the IPL without Lalit Modi, period.”
Rolex is not true luxury because it prioritizes high-volume revenue
“This is part of my argument that Rolex really isn't luxury at all. They have hit the sweet spot in the market. If you think about a curve, like an X, Y axis, they have found the sweet spot where you can maximize revenue, where you just sell an absolute ton of …”
Rolex is likely worth over $100 billion in enterprise value before assets
“There's no way that this business is worth 40. I don't know if it's worth 200, but it's worth a hundred plus. Zero doubt in my mind.”
Gilbert: Rolex's High Quality Stems Directly From Unmatched Scale Economies
“The reason why they truly are among the very highest quality watches in the world is because they throw their scale economies around. They do absolutely unreasonable things to engineer and build and test these watches that other people in the industry just can…”
The Apple Watch launch was highly beneficial for ultra-luxury mechanical watchmakers
“It was the best thing to ever happen to Rolex, Audemars Piguet, Patek, etc.”
Gilbert: Mechanical Watches Are a Distinct Industry From Timekeeping Devices
“Mechanical watches are an industry today that serves an entirely different job to be done than they ever served in the past. And this is a new industry that has nothing to do with telling the time, and is just goofy to compare to other quote-unquote parts of t…”
Chang: 2009 TSMC CEO retake was triggered by 600-700 performance layoffs
“Another problem was the immediate one that triggered me to retake the CO ship because the previous CO had laid off, except he didn't use the term laid off, you know. He used the bad performance review, the worst performance review people, and there were about …”
Chang: Layoffs based on supervisor performance reviews lack credibility
“People would not respect us if we lay off by performance ratings.
[1196] Ben Gilbert: And why is that?
[1198] Morris Chang: Because it's very subjective. Performance reviews, the performance ratings are done by everyone's own supervisor. So, the 700 was perf…”
Chang: Companies needing workers back within one year should not do layoffs
“If in a year you have to hire people back, you have to hire the laid off people back, then you shouldn't lay off, because the layoff, the separation expense is usually half a year, about half a year, and it takes at least half a year to train a person. So if y…”
Chang: TSMC's 2009 CEO circumvented board approval by framing layoffs as performance dismissals
“So I said to him, if you want to lay off, bring it to the board. I'll call a special board meeting. And I knew what I would ask the board to do, you know, which was not to grant the permission. That's right. But he decided to circumvent that, the CEO, you know…”
Morris Chang: China heavily subsidized and took control of solar manufacturing
“The solar business could have been pretty good. However, China ruined it. They subsidized the hell out of it. And they now control that business, solar cells.”
Chang: TSMC Offered NVIDIA Over $100M with 48-Hour Deadline
“Yes. More than a hundred million. And I also said, our offer is effective, 48 hours. If you do not, there is not going to be, we are not going to argue, we are not going to bargain. If you don't accept the offer within 48 hours, we will have to go to an arbitr…”
Chang: Previous TSMC CEO Offered NVIDIA Zero Dollars in Dispute
“The previous CEO did not even give him a number, you know. The previous CEO gave him zero.”
Morris Chang: Semiconductor foundries are unsuitable for divisional organizational structures
“I really did not think that the foundry business, TSMC's business Was suitable for the divisional structure. Because, you know, we have almost the same group of customers.”
Morris Chang: Non-executive chairmen should only intervene if the company risks collapse
“My principle, when I was, ah, The chairman and not the CEO, ah, was, well, sometimes you have to let the CEO make his own mistakes and learn from them, you know. Ah, of course, ah, not if the whole company is going down the drain, drain, so you have to interfe…”
Chang: TSMC matched Intel in technology and beat it in manufacturing in 2011
“Technology. At that time, we thought we were almost at par with Intel. Almost. In fact, I thought we were, I think I thought we were at par with Intel at that time. Manufacturing. I thought we were better than Intel. And customer trust. We thought that our cus…”
Chang: Co-developing tech with senior partners destroys internal R&D capability
“The company that co-developed something with them will send its engineers to IBM, you know. And when we do that, we lose our ability to develop our own process. We'll have to depend on this co-development thing.”
Chang: TSMC rejected IBM co-development deal that UMC accepted and regretted
“So we declined without having to think about it at all. We declined the IBM office. And IBM, in fact, was quite angry, you know. I mean, they thought we're still a small Taiwan backward place, you know. It's a Taiwan company, and they are going to pick IBM. So…”
Gilbert: $100B fab costs give semiconductor manufacturing natural monopoly characteristics
“Eventually it will cost 40,000,000,080 billion, a hundred billion. How many players are really going to be left standing with the ability to deploy a hundred billion dollars to build a building with some machines in it? This market has natural monopoly charact…”
Moore's Law and Rock's Law mathematically drive semiconductor foundries toward monopoly
“When you combine these two things, the Moore's Law and Moore's Second Law, it implies that the leading company, that most profitable company, will become a monopoly.”
Software lacks the immense moat defensibility of heavy semiconductor manufacturing CapEx
“Even better in the notion that gross margins of software can be 80 to 90%, not 50%, but I would back that down because it doesn't have the sort of moat defensibility characteristics that being able to plow your Capex into manufacturing capability does.”
Gilbert: Only a complete paradigm shift can unseat TSMC
“I think the only thing that will unseat TSMC is a complete paradigm shift.”
TSMC will soon create more value than the entire prior silicon industry
“So it is true that the value that TSMC will create in the world over the next year, two years, three years, is probably more than the entire silicon industry leading up to this point combined.”
TSMC has the strongest economic moat of any company in the world
“Other than that, I don't know that there is a stronger moat that any company has in the entire world than TSMC.”
Forrest Mars believed building wealth requires knowing how to manufacture a product
“You can hire lawyers. You can hire accountants. You can hire advertising men or financial types. But if you want to get rich, you got to know how to make a product. And you aren't going to hire anybody to make a product for you to make you rich. They'll only m…”
Mars has generated billions in profit from commodity trading operations
“Rumors are, these are rumors, but heard from multiple places, Mars has actually made Many billions of dollars of profit from commodity trading over the years.”
Mars is so private it does not produce financial statements for bankers
“No one knows what their balance sheet looks like, including their bankers. They don't produce financial statements for their bankers.”
Deep operational knowledge enables superior underwriting compared to blunt valuation multiples
“Multiples are kind of a blunt instrument used for valuation when you don't actually deeply know and understand the business, and when you do, you can just underwrite better than everyone else, and you have more margin of safety in the price that you are willin…”
Chocolate sales will not decline despite widespread adoption of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs
“Even if everyone starts taking Ozempic, I don't actually think chocolate sales are gonna fall.”
IKEA has no direct globally scaled furniture competitor in 2024
“IKEA does not have a direct competitor today in 2024. There is not a single other globally scaled furniture business in the world.”
Sean Parker Is Entirely Responsible for Mark Zuckerberg's Founder Control
“Mark having full control over the company as we are going to see time and time and time again as we go through the story here makes all the difference in the world, and that is 100% because of Sean Parker.”
Sandberg Bet on Mobile Because Zuckerberg's Control Prevented His Firing
“And when they sort of arrived at this plan of, we are going to forego a lot of desktop revenue to basically bet it all on figuring out mobile revenue, she said, well, Mark, nobody can fire you, and only you can fire me, so if you're in, I'm in.”
Turning Off Meta Ads Actually Reduces User Engagement in Some Markets
“There are markets in the world today where I think Meta has run this test, where if you turn off ads, In the, you know, meta family of apps products, engagement in those products actually goes down, which is just, like, freaking wild.”
Facebook Acquired Onavo to Track Competitor Network Traffic and App Usage
“Well, in 2013, Facebook acquired a small Israeli company called Onavo, and Onavo was exactly what you just said, Ben. A VPN, actually, I think it initially started as, like, a data compression tool, so if you were worried about your data plan, which was Really…”
ByteDance Is an AI Company Using TikTok Merely as a Deployment Vector
“ByteDance is an AI company. ByteDance is not a product company. And the core product that ByteDance makes is its AI, along with all sorts of other stuff. TikTok is like the product vector, one of many, and the biggest. By which they deploy their actual product…”
Meta Enjoys Guaranteed Profitable ROI on AI Hardware via Ad Optimization
“It's one of the fundamental advantages that Facebook has today relative to all other AI companies is that they are guaranteed profitable ROI on all of their AI spend. All of their research, all their infrastructure, all their GPUs, they have highly, highly pro…”
UK probe found Facebook told Cambridge Analytica to delete data in 2015
“The conclusion was that the quiz was taken by 320,000 people. Since those people had access to friends, the total surface area was the public profile data of eighty-seven million Facebook users. They also found that Facebook had requested that Cambridge Analyt…”
Gilbert: TikTok stealing users was a bigger existential threat than Apple's ATT
“The interesting thing is, at this time, the real threat wasn't actually ATT. The biggest of those three threats was TikTok stealing users. The whole ATT thing is about how much money can we make off of an ad because it is so well targeted? That's an optimizati…”
Gilbert: Apple's ATT was net value destructive rather than captured by Apple
“And what ended up actually happening from ATT? It's been value destructive. Overall, because I don't think the amount of money that has shifted away from Facebook has been captured by Apple.”
Zuckerberg Claims Meta Media Would Be Twice as Profitable on Owned Hardware
“And Mark made the comment on stage with us that they've run the analysis. They think they could be twice as profitable in their Core media products if they were on their own platform.”
Ek: Spotify's internal motto is 'talk is cheap' to prioritize deliberation
“So the internal saying that Spotify is talk is cheap. Because we want to be really deliberate about what it is we're doing and how we're doing it.”
Ek: Top-down initiatives fail; Spotify scales bottom-up organic user behavior
“What's so amazing with the platform is every time we try to do something deliberate sort of top down, it's sort of fail. And most of the time, actually, what we see is the inflings of something already existing on the platform and then growing from there.”
Zuckerberg: Holographic smart glasses will be the ultimate form of AI
“It's going to be, I think, the ultimate Digital social experience, and I think it's also going to be the ultimate incarnation of AI, because you're going to have conversations where it's like, alright, there's some people, it's like maybe like, I'm physically …”
Zuckerberg: Companies without enough engineers on staff and board aren't tech companies
“If you don't have enough of your, kind of, share of the company as engineers, then you're not a technology company, and I think that that also is important to the board”
Zuckerberg: Meta must build AI and hardware platforms to avoid mobile gatekeeper dependence
“We've just been, we've been through too much stuff with the other platforms to fully depend on, on anyone else, and we're a big enough company at this point that, like, we don't have to, right? We can build our own core technology platforms, whether that's gon…”