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: Spotify lacks operating leverage in music due to record labels
“I think Spotify in their music business has gotten to scale and has no potential to create a high operating leverage business. They're always going to be giving the same percentage of the profits to the record labels who have an unbelievable amount of bargaini…”
Software engineers will consume extra time without strict deadlines
“Dee maintained that if you give computer people more time, they will just consume it. So he always insisted. So it's so true. So he always insisted On shorter projects with uncompromising deadlines.”
Visa's zero-risk information network may be history's best business model
“This information network that doesn't have to take on any of the risk of any of these transactions. It's purely about connecting buyers to sellers and moving information back and forth has proven to be maybe the best business model ever”
Visa's financial profile is superior to any major tech company
“The financial profile of Visa's business is more tech than any of the tech companies. It is what they all wish they could have.”
Munger claims quant firms achieve high returns through increasingly massive leverage
“And the way they get their returns year after year is taking the leverage, the midday leverage up higher and higher and higher and higher. So they're making smaller and smaller profits on more and more volume, which gives them this big peak leverage risk, whic…”
Munger says investors must bet heavily on their best ideas
“When you know you have an edge, you should bet heavily. You know you're right. And most people, they don't teach that in business school. It's insane. Of course, you got to bet heavily on your best bets.”
Munger says Berkshire Hathaway would be 3x larger with slightly more leverage
“If we used a little bit more leverage throughout, we'd have three times as much now. And it wouldn't have been that much more risk either.”
Endowments across America are slashing effective private fund fees by 50%
“The endowments have started to say to the, all these people that charged three and 30 or whatever they charge, they said, we'll pay your three and 30, but we're going to put in twice as much money, and then the next half you'll get nothing on it, or you're jus…”
Munger says Walmart made a terrible mistake letting Costco win wealthy suburbs
“So it offended them to go against the rich suburbs and to have to pay up for the good locations, and Costco just specialized in the good locations where the rich people live. And Walmart just let them do it year after year. It was a terrible mistake.”
Munger says operating with personal wealth beats managing outside capital
“Once I had enough money on my own, I'd rather just operate with my own money. That is a much better way of doing it.”
Munger reveals he does not carry fire insurance on any properties
“I carry no fire insurance anywhere.”
Investors need significant participation in a few top market leaders
“What everybody has learned is that everybody needs some significant participation in the 12 companies that do better than everybody else. And you need two or three of them at least.”
Munger reveals he holds roughly 18% China risk in his family portfolio
“So naturally, I'm willing to have some China risk in the Munger portfolio. How much China risk? Well, that's not a scientific subject, but I don't mind whatever it is, 18% or something, whatever, whatever's worked out in the Munger family, it's okay with me.”
Munger believes nearly all investment assets worldwide have become overpriced
“Damn near. Of course it could be possible. It's not only possible, it's likely, and it's actually happened.”
Munger warns modern democracies risk becoming dysfunctional like Europe after blow-ups
“Yes, an unpleasant blow up of some kind. And God knows what happens after an unpleasant blow up with our modern democracies. You would get to see a lot like Europe, which is quite dysfunctional.”
Berkshire Hathaway would have survived if Salomon Brothers went to zero
“If it all blown up and went to zero, we would have written it off and gone on and done pretty well.”
Huang: Causality matters less than outcome prediction for many problems
“And so causality for a lot of problems in the world doesn't matter. We just want to emulate the system and predict the outcome.”
Huang says almost all software will be programmed via machine learning
“Almost every piece of software in the world would eventually be programmed this way.”
Huang: LLM reasoning and emergent capabilities stem naturally from reading text
“Within the world's languages and text, there's a fair amount of reasoning that's encoded in it, and we describe a lot of reasoning things, and so if you were To say that a few step reasoning is somehow learnable from just reading things. I wouldn't be surprise…”
Huang: Company org charts should mirror the architecture of their products
“Your organization should be the architecture of the machinery of building the product. Right. That's what a company is.”
Huang says traditional managers rely on information asymmetry, unlike at NVIDIA
“In a command and control system, the person who you reports to has more power than you. And the reason why they have more power than you is because they're closer to the source of information than you are. In our company, the information is disseminated fairly…”
Huang: NVIDIA is only accelerator maker with universal architectural compatibility
“We are the only accelerator on the planet where every single accelerator is architecturally compatible with the others. None has ever existed.”
Huang: Founders can do everything right and fail, or make mistakes and succeed
“You could do all the right smart things and still fail. You could do a whole bunch of dumb things, and I did many of them, and still succeed.”
Huang: NVIDIA's RIVA 128 chip design methodology became the industry standard
“The number of smart decisions we made, which are smart to this day, how we design chips is exactly the same to this day. Because, gosh, you know, nobody's ever done it back then, and we pulled every trick in the book in a desperation because we had no other ch…”
Huang: Tech companies will become much larger as they manufacture intelligence
“Don't be surprised if technology companies become much larger in the future, because what you produce is something very different.”
DeMuro: Porsche Digital's Online Car Auction Site Marqued Is Fledgling
“Porsche has a business right now an auction business called marked that they're running and as a, from Porsche digital, and it's fledgling to say the least.”
DeMuro: Creator affinity converts marketplace traffic far better than ad spend
“You can't just throw money at trying to get an audience. It's not that easy. And having an audience where people love the dude who's at the top and are fans and want to be a part of his business, that makes it even easier to like convert them to real traffic a…”
DeMuro: Analog Exotic V12 Cars Will Appreciate Rapidly As EVs Dominate
“As cars start to become more electric, more, sort of, the all-electric cars sort of have a similar shape because of aerodynamics and fuel range Gas-powered, old-school, wedge-shaped, exotic V-twelves are gonna be, like, the cars that continue to go up.”
Nvidia's $7 billion acquisition of Mellanox is one of tech's best ever
“They made one of the best acquisitions of all time back in 2020, and nobody had any idea. They bought a quirky little networking company out of Israel called Mellanox.”
Nvidia's Q2 FY24 release was one of history's greatest corporate earnings reports
“I think this was one of, if not the most incredible earnings release by any scaled public company ever. Seriously, no matter what happens going forward, last week was a historic moment.”
Nvidia's gross margins will not erode significantly below 65% as shortages subside
“That's gonna go away, but I don't think this very high, you know, 65% plus margin is gonna erode too much.”
Nvidia is the only viable platform for training GPT-class frontier AI models
“If you want to train GPT or a GPT class model, there's one option. You're doing it on NVIDIA. There's one option.”
Competitive moats erode and margins compress as total addressable markets become massive
“Every moat only works if the castle is sufficiently small. If the prize at the end of the finish line becomes sufficiently large, you're gonna need a bigger moat, and you need to figure out a you know, how to defend the castle harder.”
The AI market faces an investor crisis of confidence within 18 months
“I think there's a pretty reasonable chance that there's some falter in the next 12 to 18 months where there's a crisis of confidence among investors where at some point something will come out Where we all observe, oh, maybe GPTs aren't as useful as we thought…”
Any challenger unseating Nvidia's AI dominance requires an unforeseen flank attack
“So I think the bottom line here is it nearly impossible to compete with them head on, and if anybody's gonna unseat NVIDIA in the future of AI and accelerated computing, it's either gonna be from some unknown flank attack that they don't see, or the future wil…”
Phil Knight Essentially Invented Modern Sports Marketing With Steve Prefontaine
“It's Phil, like, basically inventing sports marketing. I mean, there was a sort of nascent idea of athlete sponsorship at the time, but it really, this is the invention of it as we know it today. And all athletic brands are defined by athletes, and this is rea…”
Nike Over-Supplied Retailers to Reach $126M in Air Jordan Sales
“Nike needed that first year of the Jordan deal to be a huge hit. So they stuffed the channel. They pushed so much product on retailers and through the futures program and whatnot that that's how they hit the hundred and twenty six million dollars in sales. The…”
Nike Scrapped Pre-Planned 2018 Campaigns to Run Colin Kaepernick Ads
“And in fact, I know that when they launched this, they actually scrapped their plans for the whole rest of the year for a whole bunch of ad campaigns that were already ready for a different way that they were gonna do the 30th anniversary relaunch of Just Do I…”
Product Is Merely Nike's Monetization Method for Athlete Marketing
“I think the athletes are your most important marketing tool. I think the product is a monetization method for the marketing that you do through athletes.”
Ferdinand Porsche Was an SS Member and Hitler Associate
“Ferdinand himself not just was a Nazi, but was a very close personal associate of Adolf Hitler. He was a member of the SS”
In 1978, Porsche Launched the 928 Intending to Replace the 911
“So in 1978, Furman introduces the Porsche nine, 28 with the stated intention that this is going to eventually replace the nine, 11.”
Ferrari Refused Long-Term Battery Support for the Hybrid LaFerrari
“Ferrari has already said that the technology is old, all the plug-in stuff, we don't want to be any part of the LaFerrari.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber will never cap driver onboarding to protect earnings
“No because one of our core philosophies is this is an open platform, and if your background check comes in okay, et cetera, then you can have access to earnings opportunities.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber intends to wire up every single taxi globally
“There are four and a half million taxis in the world who would imagine that Uber will be working with taxis, but we're going to wire up every single taxi in the world.”
Khosrowshahi: Son threatened to invest billions in Lyft if Uber rejected SoftBank
“SoftBank wanted in, and in typical MASA fashion, it was like, hey, if you don't let us invest in you, we're going to invest in that pink company, right?”
Khosrowshahi: Autonomous vehicles will take 10 years to become material in transportation
“My instinct is that you will see small scale continued experiments kind of get bigger over the next five years, but it's going to take a good 10 years for it to be a material part of our network or transportation at large. But that's a guess.”
Khosrowshahi: High Take Rates Are Dangerous for Marketplaces
“So, I will answer somewhat seriously, which is high take rates are dangerous. So, our job as a company is to grow volume as much as we can, as fast as we can. And make your shareholders happy enough. Yep. Minimizing the take rate, which is taking as much of th…”