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 1,841 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
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…”
OpenAI is reported to have exceeded a $1 billion annualized revenue run-rate
“ChatGPT made it so OpenAI is rumored to be doing over a billion dollar run rate now. Maybe multiple single digit billions, and still growing, meaningfully.”
Costco's Kirkland Signature generates more revenue than all of Nike
“Their store brand, Kirkland Signature, does more revenue alone, not including anything else in the store than all of Nike.”
Sam Walton launched Sam's Club after Sol Price shared his playbook
“Also in 1982, Saul gets a call from his old buddy Sam Walton... Saul tells him all about Price Club, how the model works, the cash flow dynamics, everything. Sam, of course, goes back to Bentonville, and within 12 months, guess what pops up? Ben Gilbert: Sam's…”
Costco was the first company to hit $3 billion revenue within six years
“And three billion in less than six years, which is the first company ever to hit that milestone, too.”
Kirkland Signature is America's largest consumer packaged goods brand
“It's America's largest consumer package brand.”
Early Nike Faced an FBI Fraud Investigation Over Bounced Payroll Checks
“Like, he got kicked out of multiple banks. The FBI got involved. They were playing it a little bit too fast and loose, where they were using every available penny to, you Buy inventory, and so there would be checks that bounced for payroll and things like that…”
Nike Hired Steve Prefontaine for $5,000 to Bypass Amateur Sports Rules
“So what Phil does is he decides to employ Pri as a corporate employee of Nike as the National Director of Public Affairs for 5000 dollars a year.”
Nike Improperly Used Nissho Inventory Financing to Secretly Purchase a Factory
“They use Nisho's money Which was supposed to be to buy inventory, instead to plow it into capex of buying and rehabbing a factory, and then they were secretly operating their own factory with money that was not supposed to be used for that purpose.”
Jordan Earned Royalties on All Incremental Nike Basketball Shoe Sales
“Also in the deal, the previous year, Nike had sold 400,000 pairs of Nike basketball shoes. They include a clause that Jordan gets a royalty on incremental sales in future years beyond the baseline of Everything in the Nike basketball line.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber eliminated all dual-class super-voting shares for SoftBank deal
“We literally had to, like, get everyone to agree to blow up the high vote shares. I think it's actually the only time when tech, a tech company like, they blew up all of the high votes.”
The Pentagon Ordered Defense Prime Contractors to Consolidate in 1993
“The then Deputy Defense Secretary William Perry calls the CEOs of all the major prime defense contractors to a dinner in Washington. At which he explicitly tells them defense spending is going to shrink massively. Duh, you know that. And he instructs the CEOs …”
Lasky: Roblox extracts a massive 60% aggregate gross tax on its developers
“I think the last time I calculated the total tax, the gross tax was somewhere close to 60%. It was like 57%.”
BYD's Founder Succeeded by Ignoring Munger and Li Lu's EV Advice
“That Charlie and Li Lu Lu Li Li Lu gave the founder advice and he ignored it. And he was right. He's like, don't go in electric cars or whatever it was that he did.”
Gilbert: Skilling deliberately avoided signing off on Fastow's LJM partnership documents
“There are documents that surface that have a variety of signatures on them, but not skillings. He very intentionally was like I'm not actually gonna sign off on this, but it's kind of good for Enron that it happens, so I'm gonna let it keep happening.”
Kenneth Lay concealed massive stock dumps by repaying Enron loans with equity
“But the way he repaid them was he took cash loans from Enron. So Enron loaned him cash. What a merry-go-round. And Ken backed his collateral for that cash that he ended up then repaying the loans to Enron with, Was the Enron stock that he originally had taken …”
Enron's CFO didn't track the company's total debt, cash, or maturity schedules
“McMahon learns that not only did Fastow not know how much debt Enron as an organization had, he also didn't know how much cash they had, and he also didn't know the maturity schedule of the debt, so he didn't know And thus, nobody in finance knew the company t…”
Gilbert: Dynegy Term Sheet Included a $60M Cash Bonus for Ken Lay
“As a part of the Dyna-G term sheet, upon completion of the deal, Ken Lay just got sixty million dollars in cash as, like, a bonus.”
Enron's audit committee chair was the dean of Stanford's business school
“The chair of the audit committee of Enron's board during all the years that all this was going on was the dean of Stanford Business School, who was an accounting professor.”
Jeff Skilling founded a new energy trading company in 2020 after prison
“And in twenty-twenty, Jeff Skilling founded a new energy trading company based in Texas called Veld LLC, rumored to be working on the venture with Lou Pie.”
Rosenthal: John Arnold got Enron's largest non-executive bonus of $8M
“Yeah, he got the largest cash bonus that Enron ever gave to anybody who wasn't a senior executive of, I think, eight million dollars.”
Enron left behind approximately $1 trillion in claims across 30,000 creditors
“Enron left behind a trillion dollars of claims to 30,000 creditors.”
In 1980, McKinsey Forecasted Only 900,000 US Cellular Subscribers by 2000
“AT&T, who has been the incumbent for a hundred years on all things telecommunications, commissioned McKinsey and company to predict cell phone. David Rosenthal: It all goes back to McKinsey always. Ben Gilbert: Always. Ben Gilbert: To predict the cell phone us…”
In 2022, Qualcomm Outranked Nvidia as the Largest Fabless Semiconductor Company
“Qualcomm today is the largest fabulous semiconductor company in the world... Bigger than NVIDIA.”
Qualcomm Earns Roughly $20 for Every Smartphone Sold Globally, Including iPhones
“And I, you know, to the point that I think today, Qualcomm makes on average about 20 dollars for every Smartphone sold in the world, including Apple iPhones.”
MediaTek Surpassed Qualcomm in Total Semiconductor Unit Shipments
“MediaTek systems are way cheaper than Qualcomm. And I think they actually just surpassed Qualcomm in terms of number of units shipped.”
Calacanis: Chamath Palihapitiya invented 'growth hacking' at Facebook
“There is no equivalent of growth. That was, the idea of growth hacking didn't exist as a term until Chamath did what he did.”
Benchmark GPs receive equal carry and free ownership of the management company
“It both means that each of the partners in a given fund have equal carry, but also all of the current GPs own the management company without paying for it. The management company is always just given to whoever the equal current GPs are.”
Benchmark launched its inaugural Fund I demanding a 30% premium carried interest
“Benchmark comes out, the new Benchmark Capital swinging right out of the gate with 30% carry. Premium carry.”
Gilbert: Migrating to Linux and HP servers saved Amazon from bankruptcy
“I mean, in 2000, they almost went out of business because they were so tight on cash and they were spending so much on infrastructure that this sort of moved to the open source ecosystem and doing a massive rewrite of all of Amazon.com to run on Linux and run …”
Gilbert: Massive AWS data center investments drove Amazon free cash flow negative
“They just invested so much in building out new data centers for AWS, they actually took Amazon cash flow negative. Their free cash flow is massively negative over the last 12 months because of these continued, unbelievably large investments.”
Amazon followed John Malone's playbook of maximizing cash while minimizing profit
“When you sort of look at their tax strategy, the fact that they're generating all this free cash flow, but somehow never reporting a gap profit, and they're never paying corporate income tax because they have no corporate income, and yet somehow they're a tril…”
Rep. Gonzalez: Congress is close to legislating on stablecoins
“We're getting to a point as a Congress, which is really nice, where I feel like we're getting close to finally legislating on it, specifically around stable coins. We'll see if we get there, but I think that's sort of the first bite of the apple coming off the…”
Gilbert: Walmart should win same-day grocery delivery via Supercenters
“In my bull case, there's, they kind of should win same-day grocery delivery since they have these super centers everywhere.”
Weber: Brooks reached number one US running shoe position with 21.5% share
“We became the number one running shoe brand in the United States in the last 12 months, last month. 21 and a half percent share in performance running.”
Rosenthal: Amazon will soon pass Walmart in total revenue
“The only larger one being Walmart, which Amazon will almost assuredly pass very soon.”
Only Nvidia and ATI Survived the 90s Graphics Startup Boom
“When all the VCs funded these 90, you know, Silicon Valley startups to go make graphics cards, three D graphics cards, the only two surviving ones were Nvidia, which went through this hellish journey, and then these Canadian guys that were, like, totally out o…”
Gilbert: AMD's acquisition of Nvidia failed over Huang's CEO demand
“AMD tried to buy Nvidia to make that their graphics line, and it was possible because it's not like the stock was blowing up at this point in time, and it had this sort of few years of reasonable stagnation before we get into late 2006, 2007, and certainly peo…”
Eich: Brave pays users 70% of ad revenue via Basic Attention Token
“It also involves something we talked about from the beginning and we prototyped in Bitcoin, and that's the basic attention token system for users who choose to participating in Private ads that are anonymous, but that pay them 70% of the revenue and that let t…”
Eich: DuckDuckGo's keyword search is pretty much still powered by Bing
“DuckDuckGo always had a more private sort of search front end on Bing. It's pretty much Bing still for the keyword search.”
Eich: Google only pays browsers for default search status
“Google only pays for default because they're king of the hill and they figure they'll get the traffic anyway.”
Peloton raised its original bike price to $2,245 to signal luxury
“People thought it was, the hardware couldn't be that great if it was 1200 dollars, and they realized that if they raised the price up to 2245 dollars, that then in people's minds, this becomes this, like, jewel, premium, expensive, aspirational, luxury product…”
Peloton simultaneously canceled its factory, laid off 2,800, and replaced its CEO
“They lower guidance significantly. They pull the plug on Peloton Output Park. They cancel the plans to build the manufacturing facility in Ohio. They lay off 2800 people. And Barry McCarthy is riding in as the new CEO.”
John Foley and his co-founders control over 57% of Peloton's voting power
“According to Peloton's proxy statement, he controls 39.6, so right around 40% of the voting power of Peloton's stock, and his co-founders own another 18%.”
One Million Spotify Streams Nets Just $400 for an Average Artist
“At least on Spotify and Spotify-like services, it's about .4 cents per stream, and then that cent, that, that, that .4 cents, Gets cut up between the label, rights organization, et cetera, before the artist. And so it's reasonable, this is a crazy thing, but i…”
Swift Forced UMG to Distribute Spotify Equity to Artists Non-Recoupably
“In Taylor's negotiation, as a sticking point in her contract with UMG, she forced their hand to do the best deal of any of the labels by far. It's not public, but people think it's at least the same thing that Warner did, 25%. But non-recoupable, and given the…”