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 2,685 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 35 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: MLB's lack of a salary cap drives large-market World Series dominance
“They've never successfully implemented a salary cap in baseball, and so, guess who's in the World Series? The New York team and the L.A. Team.”
Rosenthal: IPL viewership has reached 50-50 gender parity between men and women
“No other sports league in the world has done what IPL has done here. Today, IPL viewership is entirely fifty-fifty gender parity between men and women.”
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.”
Indian Police Bust Rajasthan Royals and Chennai Super Kings for 2013 Spot-Fixing
“Well, that very same season in 2013, the Indian police run a sting operation and bust members of two teams in the IPL, the Rajasthan Royals and the Chennai Super Kings owned by N. Srinivasan for spot fixing matches.”
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…”
Gilbert: IPL franchises operate at 60% to 65% EBITDA margins
“So I think the team net income right now is about fifty million dollars On a pre-tax basis. But there's no depreciation in other, I mean, they're not material anyway. So you got a business that is doing eighty million dollars top line and fifty-ish million on …”
Rolex possesses zero direct customer contact data due to its dealer model
“They, like, don't have their customer's email address or names or addresses because that data belongs to the authorized dealer. Rolex doesn't actually know who's buying their product or who likes their product, which is kind of crazy for a modern company of th…”
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: TSMC board questioned suddenly tripling CapEx for 28nm
“Setting the R&D at eight percent of did not, Invite any opposition from the board, but suddenly increasing capital spending, threefold, I think, did invite a lot of questions from the board.”
Chang: Apple's initial TSMC pitch proposed a 40% gross margin
“He did say that we will let you have a 40% gross margin, and I think, well, I didn't say anything. I didn't answer him. I didn't respond to that, but our margin at that time was already 45%, and I was trying to put it up to 50%.”
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.”
David Rosenthal: TSMC outspends all competitors on ASML equipment
“It's TSMC's insane capital operating cash flow production that enables them to spend capex above anybody else that allows them to buy more ASML equipment than anyone else.”
Hershey rationed WWII chocolate to all wholesale customers except M&M Limited
“They limit their chocolate supply to all of their wholesale enterprise customers except for one. M&M Limited Partnership. Because of course, it's Bruce Murray's company.”
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.”
A 1938 500-kronor bank loan was IKEA's only outside capital
“And that, listeners, is the only capital that ever goes into Ikea. That is the only money that Ingvar would ever raise.”
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.”
Gilbert: No Entity in History Has Addressed as Much of Humanity as Meta
“So no government, tech company, utility, et cetera, has ever addressed so much of the world.”
Facebook Was the First Post-Dot-Com Deal With Founder Control
“It was the very first post.com institutional venture capital deal where the founder maintained control.”
Facebook Became Consistently Profitable Roughly 18 Months After Founding
“They lost money and not that much money for like a year and a half, and then from that point on, they were just profitable.”
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 …”
Rosenthal: Zuckerberg told Acquired he optimizes for impact over money
“And Mark has said so much in so many words to you and me personally that he's not optimizing for financial outcome here. He's optimizing for impact.”
Rosenthal: Facebook's Newsfeed was the invention of the web feed
“They didn't exist. This was the first one. This was the invention of the feed.”
Rosenthal: News Feed initially hurt Facebook revenue by reducing page views
“Newsfeed actually
Significantly hurt Facebook's revenue because where do you think all the page views were coming from and all the refreshes?”
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.”
Zuckerberg Pitched Steve Jobs on Integrating Facebook's Platform Directly Into iOS
“The next year, in 2008, when the iPhone SDK was launching and people were building apps, Mark and Facebook actually go to Apple and meet with Steve, and they pitch Steve on exactly what you were just talking about, Ben. Like, hey, how about you let us bring ou…”
Matching iPhone Cash Flows Would Leave Reality Labs Net Negative Until 2035
“Well, I did that napkin math, and if twenty-twenty-four, This year was Apple's 2007, so you just take all the iPhone's cash flows and you start the clock right now. Meta's cumulative cash flows from Reality Labs would be net negative until at least 2035.”
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…”
Excluding China, Less Than Six Percent of Internet Users Escape Meta
“That leaves about four hundred and fifty million people, or six percent of the human population, Who have access to the internet, but are not yet meta monthly actives. That doesn't mean they're not meta users. That just means they weren't monthly active users …”
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.”
Farooq: JPMorgan's Onyx processes larger transactions than crypto blockchains
“We, within our Onyx business unit, have the largest financial blockchain life ecosystem on the planet. We do bigger transactions than any blockchain, including the crypto blockchains.”
Zuckerberg: Facebook board tried firing him over $1B Yahoo 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: 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: Ballmer-era server products all became multi-billion-dollar revenue businesses
“These are All, every single one of those names I just mentioned become multi-billion dollar revenue enterprise IT server products that are built and sold during the Steve Ballmer era of Microsoft.”
Gilbert: Windows 8 touch interface was originally planned only for tablets
“What ended up happening was the original vision for the Windows eight touch thing that we're all talking about, these live tiles, that was supposed to only ship for tablets as it was originally dreamed up, and there was a version of Windows eight that did not …”
Rosenthal: Ballmer replaced Muglia despite Server & Tools making $12B and growing fast
“Bob was crushing it as Head of server and tools. Revenue was growing, I don't know, 30, 40% a year. It's a twelve billion dollar business. But the reason that Steve made the change was he said, we need a new leader who's going to come in and change this organi…”
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…”
Schultz: Faema and Lavazza both rejected investing in Il Giornale
“One is the espresso company, Faima. And one is the large Italian coffee company Lavazza. And I asked them both to invest in my idea. And both of them turned me down.”
Schultz: Selling in Costco Directly Increased Starbucks Retail Store Sales
“In fact, putting Starbucks in Costco, we were able to measure directly
The increase in volume in the stores on the east side as a result of the proximity to the Costco store.”
Schultz: Coca-Cola dismissed Starbucks ready-to-drink pitch in under 30 minutes
“The Coke meeting was a meeting lasted less than 30 minutes. I can't remember who I met with. They dismissed me didn't view Starbucks or, didn't understand what I was trying to do and didn't give me much time to even explain it.”
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.”
Schultz: Starbucks suspended buybacks to invest over $2B into partners
“The day I came back, and I knew what the market would do, is I announced that we were suspending the stock buybacks, and stock went down. I expected it, and I announced that we were going to take basically the money we were using to stock buybacks for the year…”