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
Zuckerberg: Strategy is harder when winning than when losing
“I think strategically, a lot of the time, it's somewhat harder to know what to do when you're winning. Like, when stuff is going well, it's like, what is the next move to, like, go from winning to winning more? But when you're losing, it's usually pretty clear…”
Zuckerberg: Meta brand will take another 10 years to recover
“I think it's going to take another 10 years or so for us to kind of fully work through that cycle before our brand and all of that is back to kind of the place that it maybe could have been if I hadn't messed that up in the first place.”
Zuckerberg: AR and AI smart glasses will become completely ubiquitous
“I'm pretty sure glasses and kind of, like, holographic presence and AR is going to be a completely ubiquitous Product, right? It's just like everyone who had a phone before replaced it with a smartphone, and then a lot of more people got smartphones. If all we…”
Zuckerberg: Meta might be twice as profitable if it owned mobile platforms
“You know, we did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various, like, taxes that the platforms have to, like, when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we thi…”
Zuckerberg: Meta scaled AI and Reality Labs knowing investors would hate it
“What we knew was gonna be really painful, you know, to go double down on those things, and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to, and scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff. And I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it. At least in the shor…”
Zuckerberg: Facebook rebrand to Meta was running toward future, not escaping controversy
“I'm only going to do this when we come up with a brand that is going to be evocative of the future that we're trying to build because we run towards something. We don't run away from things.”
Zuckerberg: Goal for next 10-15 years is building winning open platforms
“Part of my goal for the next 1015 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win. And I think that that's going to lead to a much more vibrant tech industry.”
Zuckerberg: Apple is Meta's primary competitor in ideological open-vs-closed race
“I expect them to be our primary competitor, and I think it will not be Just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the tech industry should be”
Zuckerberg: Full-scale AI will arrive before AR holograms
“A few years ago, I would have predicted that AR holograms would have been available before kind of, like, full-scale AI. And now I think it's probably gonna be the other order.”
Zuckerberg: Meta's shipping culture is the opposite of Apple's polished approach
“I think in a lot of ways we're like the opposite of Apple, and clearly their stuff has worked really well too, right? But I mean, they take this approach, it's like, we're gonna take a, like, a long time, we're gonna polish it, we're gonna put it out and maybe…”
Zuckerberg: Meta is not embarrassed to copy successful products from competitors
“We're not embarrassed about learning from things that other people, like, discovered that were good first, and then we build a better version of it, and I mean, I think that that's, You know, no one company is going to invent everything, right? I think if you …”
Zuckerberg: Facebook board tried to fire him after rejecting Yahoo's $1B offer
“In 2006, Yahoo wanted to buy the company for a billion dollars, and everyone on our management team wanted to sell it, and the board tried to fire me, and everyone, and basically in the next year, everyone else on the management team left because they, I hadn'…”
Zuckerberg: Meta might be twice as profitable if it owned the platform
“I, it's hard to exactly estimate it, but I think we might be, like, twice as profitable if we own the platform or something.”
Zuckerberg scaled AI and Reality Labs knowing investors would hate it
“Go double down on those things, and build out the AI infrastructure that we needed to, and scale up some of the Reality Lab stuff, and I knew that a lot of the investors would hate it, at least in the short term, before it's clearly the right thing to do.”
Zuckerberg: Meta aims to build and win open computing platforms
“Part of my goal for the next 1015 years, the next generation of platforms, is to build the next generation of open platforms and have the open platforms win.”
Zuckerberg: Apple will be Meta's primary rival in ideological platform war
“I think Apple will have a place for sure. I expect them to be our primary competitor, and I think it will not be Just a product competition. I think it's like a, in some ways, very deeply values driven and ideological competition around what the future of the …”
Gilbert: Microsoft's 1997 Office commitment and investment saved Apple from bankruptcy
“Which, by the way, saved Apple. The company would have been completely out of business because it was so existentially important to anyone using an Apple computer to use Office that if Office, you know, Microsoft decides, oh, we're gonna stop developing Office…”
Gilbert: Microsoft is the only Big Tech giant without federal antitrust probe
“The only one that's not under active antitrust investigation today by the federal government.”
Gilbert: Xbox is culturally significant but insignificant to Microsoft's business
“Xbox has become an important part of our world. But not an important part of Microsoft's business.”
Gilbert: Popular belief that Nadella originated Azure is historically inaccurate
“As the general public is concerned, Steve Ballmer was obsessed with Windows. He built the enterprise business. He left. Satya Nadella came in and launched Azure, and Azure has been great. Like, not exactly. That's not really what happened.”
Gilbert: Microsoft shelved finished Office for iPad project in 2013
“And absolutely, 100% something that happened is all 200 of us worked for multiple years to get these things ready. We had a ship date. Well, we had what we thought was a ship date. Actually, what happened was we were told that actually we're gonna shelve it. A…”
Gilbert: Microsoft would have missed mobile regardless of the DOJ antitrust case
“Even without the whole DOJ thing, Microsoft probably would have visted themselves. Microsoft almost certainly would have missed mobile because there's no chance they would have realized that the business model that Google had Meant that they were gonna win in …”
Schultz: Starbucks introduced the caffè latte to America without trademarking it
“The other thing I didn't do is we introduced cafe latte to the, to America. We didn't trademark it. You know, we trademarked Frappuccino later on, but we didn't trademark cafe latte.”
Schultz: Starbucks Pricing Has Become a Problem Amid Recent Inflation
“There certainly was a fair amount of discussion all the time about the sensitivity of the price points, and I think in later years, maybe in the last couple years, given the consumer inflationary time, I think it's become a bit of a problem.”
Schultz: Starbucks was seven months from insolvency in 2008
“I went up there, and I laid it out. Chapter and verse. I think we have seven months left. We are going to be insolvent.”
Schultz: Previous Starbucks leadership diluted coffee quality to maximize yield
“Because the previous administration had done things that diluted the integrity of coffee to maximize yield.”
Schultz: Starbucks Asia delivers higher brand experience than US stores
“The interesting thing to me today is that the Asian business is operating at a much higher level
Of the soft side of Starbucks than we are in the U S”
Schultz: Starbucks Replaced Entire Executive Team Except General Counsel
“He was right, except for one, the general counsel. They were all gone.”
Schultz: Starbucks should not have launched 24/7 on-demand mobile ordering
“I don't think I would have allowed the mobile app to be on demand, 24 hours a day. I would have slow rolled the availability of it, and then understood how it was being used, and whether or not it was going to disrupt the experience.”
Schultz: Starbucks would not have succeeded under a franchise model
“I never believed that we could build, maintain, and elevate the culture of the company, which I viewed as the thing in a franchise system, where we had individual franchisees who had their own subculture. And so even though there was pressure early on because …”
Schultz: Starbucks underestimated the public groundswell for unionization after COVID missteps
“And I think the company made some early mistakes. Some of which were COVID related. Again, no textbook had to deal with COVID issues, health issues, safety issues. And then I think underestimated the groundswell of public sentiment for this movement in America…”
Schultz: Straight espresso is Starbucks' number one selling beverage in Italy
“Two, three years later, what do you think the number one beverage is? It's espresso. For Starbucks. Straight espresso. Espresso is the number one beverage.”
Schultz: Post-founder companies lose entrepreneurial DNA and play defense out of fear
“Founder leaves, I'm not talking about me, it's you, historically, and companies lose not only the extent of the entrepreneurial DNA, but they lose the ability to be on offense. And the worst thing that a company can do, like a sports team, is start playing def…”
Microsoft's Altair BASIC was the first commercial software product ever sold
“This is the first time software has ever been sold. Other than the IBM accounting machinations to protect themselves from antitrust, which was just accounting, nobody had ever sold software before. This is the first time.”
The Microsoft-IBM PC partnership was tech history's most important deal
“I think you can make a very strong argument, the single most important deal ever done in the history of technology.”
Microsoft pioneered product-led enterprise growth decades before SaaS startups
“Everyone loves to talk about product-led growth, and how it's this new thing in the late twenty-tens, and how Slack, and Atlassian, and Trello, everyone figured out PLG in this bottoms-up, workforce-adopted way, rather than selling to procurement, or IT, or th…”
Copying proven products delivers better risk-adjusted returns than being first
“So fundamentally what this does for you as a business is it just leads to better risk-adjusted returns. You already know what's going to work before you ship it. Like, you don't really take market risk. So you're not gonna be the first to the market with early…”
Microsoft's copycat apps could not win without major platform shifts
“The Microsoft versions never actually won until there was a platform shift that they could take advantage of to beat the incumbent. Like, Microsoft wasn't gonna beat Lotus one, two, three until the graphical paradigm came along, and then Excel being graphical …”
No other major quant fund operates with a single unified model
“No other at scale investment firm period, and especially quant firm operates this way today with just one model.”
Rosenthal: Bob Mercer was primary funder of Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica
“Bob was the primary funder of Breitbart, And Cambridge Analytica, and one of the major financial backers of both the 2016 Trump campaign and the Brexit campaign in Great Britain.”
Gilbert: Renaissance Technologies operates as a casino house, not an investment firm
“Renaissance Technologies is actually not in the investment business. They are in the gambling business, and in particular, they're the house.”
Bernard Arnault secretly accumulated Hermès shares using equity swaps over ten years.
“So in 2001, right after he lost Gucci, Bernard quietly buys an initial stake in Hermes of 4.9%.
Now I believe that was just under the threshold that they would have to disclose it under French securities regulations.
And then, here's what they do that the Herm…”
Hermès destroys imperfect manufactured products to prevent them from entering the market.
“Hermes cares so deeply about their brand that they burn imperfect products so they never see the light of day.”
Germany directed Novo to supply insulin across Nazi-occupied Europe
“They are now essentially the official Nazi-sanctioned insulin provider for all of Nazi-occupied Europe. So, the German government basically directs Novo To massively expand production and supply insulate, you know, not only to Germany, but to France, to Poland…”
Eli Lilly claimed rebates account for 75% of insulin's sticker price
“Eli Lilly has publicly claimed that the cost of these discounts and rebates accounted for 75% of the sticker price of insulin.”
Wegovy and Ozempic cost over $1,000 monthly in the United States
“The price of Ozempic to treat diabetes is north of a thousand dollars, and Wegovy for weight loss is north of 1300 dollars per month before insurance, and this is in the U.S.
So expensive, right?
That's a lot of money.
In Canada, of course, Ozempic is 147 doll…”